About Me

My name is Nico Echols, and being a "new" college student for the first time in just about two years has been full of challenges. Having a vast disability history has amounted to these challenges. . . . challenges that I am just now beginning to learn how to deal with, while trying to be as independent as I possibly can, a world that hasn't been easy for me.Living in Chicago all my life, I have previously had trouble getting my disability-related needs met. However, that just DIDN'T stop me from making the milestone of going to college. For the first year or so that I was a college student, I lived at home because the dorms at the university I attended weren't accessible, and my mom and dad just felt that I wasn't quite ready to be on my own. I think they were just afraid of letting me try something new- afraid of their little girl being away from them.
The strangeness to this is that I have a younger brother- who doesn't even have any special needs. My parents actually gave him the option of going to school close to home or out of state. He visited two or three different schools, all of which were fairly large- before he finally decided that he really wanted to go to school out of state. I'm really surprised my parents actually let him do that, considering that he's the youngest of us two kids- as well as not having any physical limitations. Why can't my parents be overprotective of him instead of me?