🎙️ In this episode of the Landmark Difference Makers Podcast, we sit down with Zully Alvarado, entrepreneur, humanitarian, author, and longtime advocate for people with disabilities. Born in Ecuador and contracting polio at just two years old, Zully has spent a lifetime confronting assumptions about what she could—and could not—do.
Her story isn’t simply one of overcoming physical challenges. It’s about something much more universal: what happens when we stop seeing ourselves through the limitations and labels we’ve inherited and begin creating life on our own terms.
A Remarkable Journey from Ecuador to Chicago
Zully grew up in a small village in Ecuador, where polio left her largely paralyzed. Her family had few resources, and medical treatment was extremely limited.
Then an extraordinary series of events changed the direction of her life.
A missionary priest from Chicago noticed the smiling little girl who sat watching while the other children played. Around the same time, the medical ship Hope arrived in Ecuador. Doctors determined that Zully was severely malnourished and needed medical care if she was going to survive.
With her parents’ permission, the priest eventually brought nine-year-old Zully to Chicago.
It was the beginning of a very different life—but not necessarily an easy one.
“Let Me Try”
One story from Zully’s childhood captures the spirit that would come to define her life.
At a church carnival, she won a skateboard.
The adults immediately assumed she should exchange it for something she could actually use. Zully, wearing braces and unable to stand normally, had another idea.
She wanted the skateboard.
So she figured out how to use it.
She started by sitting on it and maneuvering with her arms. Gradually, she experimented with other ways to get on it. She fell. She got hurt. And she kept trying.
“Even if other people say you can’t do it… you do not give up on what it is that you want.”
It was an early lesson in something Zully has practiced throughout her life: don’t decide for someone else what is possible for them.
Seeing the Person, Not the Disability
Throughout the interview, Zully describes experiences that reveal something many able-bodied people may never have considered.
As a child, people saw the braces.
Later, they saw the crutches.
Then the cane.
Then the wheelchair.
Too often, she says, the adaptive equipment becomes the first thing people see—and sometimes it prevents them from seeing the human being using it.
Zully recalls attending a professional event where another accomplished professional greeted her by patting her on the head and calling her “cute.” She remembers a similar experience with a nurse at a hospital.
She was an educated, accomplished adult.
Yet the wheelchair changed how people related to her.
Her message is straightforward: people living with disabilities want what everyone else wants—to be seen, respected, listened to, and related to as whole human beings.
The Mirror That Changed Everything
Perhaps the most powerful moment in Zully’s story came when she began wheelchair dancing.
Her instructor asked her to get in front of a mirror.
Zully didn’t want to.
For years, she had related to her body in terms of what she called her “defective body parts.” Looking directly at herself brought her face-to-face with that story.
And she began to cry.
“That’s when I recognized it wasn’t my physical disability. It was the story that I was telling about myself.”
She began seeing her body differently—not as defective, but as the body that had carried her through her entire life.
That moment opened a much bigger question for her:
How many other people aren’t looking in the mirror because of what they’ve been told about themselves?
For Zully, it was time to bring the mirror out.
From Silence to Advocacy
Zully describes many people with disabilities as living in what she calls “silent survival mode.”
They learn not to complain.
They don’t want to appear weak.
They don’t want to be perceived as dependent.
And sometimes that silence becomes its own kind of cage.
Through her advocacy, coaching, writing, and emerging platform The Z Life, Zully wants to create a different conversation—one in which people with disabilities can speak openly about the emotional as well as physical realities they encounter.
Her recently written book, From Where I Sit: Anything and Everything Is Possible, is part memoir and part guide. She hopes it will help not only people living with disabilities, but also educators, healthcare professionals and caregivers better understand the person behind the diagnosis or adaptive equipment.
Creating a New Future
Zully also works with people whose disabilities came later in life.
She describes coaching a woman who became quadriplegic after an accident. Suddenly, nearly every expectation that woman had about her future—her marriage, family, independence and work—had changed.
Zully doesn’t pretend those losses aren’t real. She acknowledges the anger, grief and mourning that can accompany them.
But then she asks another question:
What did you want for your life before this happened?
From there, she begins helping people imagine again.
Zully knows something about that process herself. At one difficult point in her life, she says she had reached a place where she was ready to die. Instead, she chose life—and began asking what she wanted to do with the life she still had.
One answer was fashion.
She returned to school and became a fashion designer, immersing herself in color, texture, beauty and creativity.
“I imagined it, and then I created it.”
The Impact of Landmark
Zully describes her participation in Landmark’s programs as an important part of changing how she saw herself and her circumstances.
One idea initially made her angry: that life itself has no inherent meaning and that human beings are constantly giving meaning to what happens.
Over time, she began to see freedom in that idea.
If the meaning attached to disability—defective, incapable, dependent, less than—wasn’t an absolute truth, then something else could be created.
That discovery helped fuel the transition from someone who wanted to escape being identified with disability to someone willing to use her experience and her voice to advocate for others.
Living Life Her Way
Near the end of the interview, Zully shares something she once asked of her husband.
She didn’t want her disability to become his priority.
“Let my disability or my health be my priority. You take care and make sure that you are your own priority.”
It captures something essential about how she wants people with disabilities to be seen: not as burdens to be managed or people whose lives must be organized by others, but as individuals with agency, preferences, dreams, relationships, humor, style, sexuality, ambitions—and the right to determine their own lives.
And when asked what she hopes people will say about her 100 years from now, Zully’s answer couldn’t be more fitting:
“She just did it. She did it. She lived her life her way.”
✨ Listen to the full episode to hear Zully Alvarado share her remarkable journey and a powerful perspective on disability, dignity, self-expression, and creating a future beyond the limitations others—or we ourselves—may have imagined.
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