026 Breaking the Disclosure Dam with Ana Nosal

In this episode of inSight Out, host Matthew Reeves talks with Ana Nosal, a 30-year-old marathon runner from the Washington, D.C. area who was diagnosed with Stargardt disease at fourteen. Ana describes the early denial that came with starting high school just as her vision loss was confirmed, the accommodations she quietly refused to use, and the moment in college when giving up driving forced a new kind of acceptance. She also traces how her competitive life shifted, from soccer and softball, where her declining hand-eye coordination became too hard to ignore, to cross country and track, sports she could still control on her own terms.

Much of the conversation centers on disclosure: why Ana told professors and friends only on a strict need-to-know basis for over a decade, how therapy, originally sought for grief after her father's death, eventually surfaced how much of her anxiety and self-esteem was tangled up in her vision loss, and how she and her therapist worked through worst-case and best-case scenarios before she told her boyfriend just two dates in. That practice run set the stage for the leap that followed: posting her story to social media all at once, rather than telling people one at a time.

Ana and Matthew talk about what it's like to receive an outpouring of support you spent years bracing against, the guilt of wondering why you didn't trust people sooner, and the unexpected reward of helping other people, including partners, parents, and teachers, recognize vision loss they hadn't known how to see before.

Topics Covered: Stargardt disease, disclosure and self-advocacy, adaptive sports, marathon running, grief counseling, generalized anxiety, self-esteem work, social media visibility, dating and disclosure, worst-case versus best-case thinking.

Contact Ana at [email protected] and follow her on IG or TicTok: @Ana_Nosal

ABOUT THE PODCAST

inSight Out is your podcast home for living well with vision loss. Host Matthew Reeves (LPC CRC NCC) is a legally-blind psychotherapist and rehabilitation counselor specializing in helping people thrive while living with disability. Matthew is licensed in Georgia and is a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor.

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