The Onion Project: Week 9 ~ From Surviving to Growth

Week 9  The Layer of Thriving: From Surviving to Growth

At this layer, the onion no longer feels sharp or heavy. The tears have already been shed. The lessons have already been learned. We are close to the center now, the heart of life revealing itself. Here, the question changes. We move past how do we survive? and begin to ask: what does it mean to thrive?

Survival is where many of us begin. It’s the quiet strength of navigating schools without language access, of working in environments that misunderstand our pace, our silence, or our way of thinking. It’s the daily effort of existing in spaces designed for someone else’s rhythm. For Deaf people, survival may mean relying on captions that don’t keep up, or interpreters stretched too thin. For autistic and ADHD people, it can mean masking, translating yourself into forms others will accept, even when it costs energy and authenticity. Survival is about getting through the day. It matters deeply. But it is not enough.

Because survival is not the end of the story. It’s the preface to something far more luminous.

Thriving looks different. For Deaf people, thriving is living in ASL without apology, hands moving freely in the language of their hearts, laughter that doesn’t need translation, access that is assumed rather than negotiated. It’s walking into spaces where communication flows naturally, where Deaf culture is celebrated rather than explained.

For autistic and ADHD people, thriving is finding or creating environments that fit their rhythm, spaces that welcome movement, pacing, stimming, hyperfocus, and bursts of creativity as natural forms of expression. In these spaces, what was once labeled “too much” becomes artistry. What was once “unfocused” becomes innovation. Thriving is not endurance, it is joy.

Thriving is also freedom.

Freedom to engage or rest without guilt.

Freedom to create without permission.

Freedom to lead without having to prove that you belong.

When we thrive, the energy once spent masking or fighting for access can finally be redirected toward growth, connection, and creation. The noise of self-defense fades, replaced by the hum of purpose. Thriving is not about constant motion; it’s about having the space to breathe without fear of losing your place.

This layer teaches us something radical: difference does not need to be overcome; it needs to be honored.

For too long, society has treated difference as a barrier to participation, something to be accommodated rather than celebrated. But when we honor difference, the world expands. Deafness becomes a lens through which communication is reimagined. Neurodivergence becomes a compass guiding new ways of thinking, learning, and creating. The shift is subtle but profound, we stop being “stories of accommodation” and start being “stories of innovation.”

Thriving is not a distant dream or a utopian fantasy. It is already happening. It happens in Deaf spaces where hands fly fast and faces light with shared language. It happens in classrooms that center neurodivergent learners where pacing, stimming, and rest are not interruptions but integral parts of learning. It happens in workplaces that value results born of creativity, not conformity. It happens every time a Deaf leader, autistic advocate, or ADHD creator builds something that could only have been imagined through their unique way of seeing the world.

Thriving is what occurs when survival stops being the goal and becomes the foundation. It is what happens when access, acceptance, and authenticity align when the world finally meets you where you are, and you are allowed to meet it in return.

To thrive is to step out of survival’s shadow and into identity’s light. It is to take the energy that once kept you safe and turn it toward what keeps you alive. Thriving is choosing joy over exhaustion, creation over compliance, self-trust over self-doubt.

And thriving, perhaps most beautifully, is contagious. One person living fully gives permission for another to do the same. Communities that thrive together create ripples of possibility, proof that inclusion is not about making space, but about sharing it.

At this near-center of the onion, we can finally see that thriving is not the opposite of struggle, it is what grows through it. It is the bloom that emerges after all the peeling, the laughter that returns after the tears.

Next week, we reach the core, the soul of the onion where identity itself becomes liberation. Where living as you are, unapologetically and wholly, is not a statement of defiance but an act of freedom.

~ A. Bret Cummens, M.Ed.