Beyond Gray-Tinted Glasses: A Conversation with Ifetayo Harvey on Disability, Identity, and Healing

No matter how long you know someone, there are always stories waiting to be unveiled. (If you think that opening line sounded a bit cheesy, work with me here. I’m fighting off a flare-up and on a deadline.)

Chronic conditions live in the body, but they echo through identity, labor, expectation, and culture in ways that are both subtle and impossible to ignore. As a writer, speaker, activist, and founder of the People of Color Psychedelic Collective, Ifetayo Harvey has spent years navigating those intersections while both studying and challenging the systems around her.

It goes without saying, but some experiences resist explanation until someone says them out loud. In this month’s post, my good friend Ife does just that.

I first had the pleasure of meeting Ife all the way back in our college days (#AlbrightHouse). Over the years, I have seen some aspects of her health journey from the outside and heard about them as well. Sure, we’ve discussed our mutual health challenges at various points in our friendship (holy smokes…it’s been 15 years? 16?), but even if you think you really know someone, there may be things you haven’t had the chance to really dig into. 

So it’s time to make space for that to be explored.

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Q: First things first. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey with chronic conditions, as much or as little as you want to share.

“Yes, so my name is Ifetayo Harvey. I am the founder and executive director of People of Color Psychedelic Collective. We provide education and community-building for people of color interested in psychedelics and advocate for ending the war on drugs.

So I got into this work 12 years ago by sharing my story about what it’s like growing up with my father in prison, and was ultimately deported. And how mass incarceration impacts families, children, communities.

At the time, I was an intern at the Drug Policy Alliance. They invited me to speak at their conference in 2013 in front of a crowd of 1,100 people…”

After that talk, Ife checked out a panel on psychedelics and end-of-life care. At the time, she’d just been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.

“I was kind of at a crossroads in terms of what to do, or how to manage it. And one of my options was to try SSRIs, like Wellbutrin..

I was a little hesitant, unsure. Just because of side effects, and I think I grew up with a lot of notions that pharmaceuticals are bad.”

Hearing people share about psychedelics helping reduce existential anxiety sparked something.

“So I gave mushrooms a try. I went through an 8-hour cycle of shrooms and it was great! Threw up, cried, laughed, cried some more, all the good stuff.

The beauty of it was that in my depressed state, I struggled to see the beauty in life and the beauty in myself, and everyone around me. 

When you have depression, a lot of times, it’s like you’re seeing life through…you know how the phrase goes, ‘rose-tinted glasses’? Well, for depression it’s gray-tinted glasses.

So, you’re not seeing all the beauty and, you know, all the colors and… just small, simple things. You are just kind of seeing gray. It’s like watching paint dry.

And so mushrooms kind of made me take those gray-tinted glasses off.

It was like I was living again. I was laughing again. I was feeling again.”

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Q: You’ve built a toolbox to support yourself even when things get hard. What does it look like navigating all of that in professional spaces?

“Mmm. Well, it can be challenging, for sure. Oh, man! Um…

It can be challenging, you know… And it also depends on the workplace, right? Because there are some workplaces that don’t have that internal structure or knowledge around people with disabilities, or even know how to navigate that, right? Or how to accommodate that. 

Or maybe it’s a bit more quiet. You kind of have to search for the resources…”

She’s also been in places that did it differently.

“I’ve also been at workplaces that are very accommodating toward people with disabilities. I worked at one organization whose mission was related to disability.

…they weren’t perfect, but I thought that because disability was related to their mission, they were more understanding, and it was a part of the organization’s culture to accommodate not only disabilities, but all of life’s challenges and commitments that pull us away from work.”

A huge shift came from having a supervisor who showed what it meant to honor her own limits:

“I also had a supervisor who modeled that, who also was disabled, and was like, ‘Hey, I’m disabled. So, listen, sometimes I cannot work. Like, that’s just gonna happen.’”

The fact that she said that to me so explicitly was so important, because it gave me permission to also offer myself that.”

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Q: Little bit of a hot-take question. How do you think mainstream advocacy and movements miss the mark when it comes to inclusion and different perspectives?

“…my two experiences at these different organizations is an example of how we miss the mark when we don’t talk openly about things like disability, or race, gender, class, all those things because all those things affect how we show up in the workplace.

I think a lot of organizations, they talk the equity talk. They talk the inclusion talk, but don’t want to take the small steps to make the workplace more equitable.

…If you retaliate against people who have disabilities and need accommodations, or you’re not even having that conversation in the first place, then you’re enabling inequality.”

And then there’s tokenism:

“…a lot of times organizations or movements will use [people as] tokens. To kind of pit them against folks who might have a lived experience that doesn’t fit the organizations or the movements narrative.

There’s so much that can be said around tokenism and disability and other marginalized identities…there’s [a phrase] ‘tokens get spent.’

Well, at the end of the day. A token…It’s just… a symbol, right? A puppet. So once you serve their purpose, you get discarded.”

For her, organizations have a clear responsibility:

“If you’re asking for people to share their lived experience, or use their identity in some way, then you should also be giving them something, you know, whether it be money or some other kind of support. Even just, like, protection.”

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Q: A lot of people in advocacy feel constant urgency and burnout. How do you think about joy and sustainability in the work?

“I think it’s also about not always having such a sense of urgency around the work.

I know that every nonprofit person is going to hate me saying that. But… I don’t care, because it’s true.

Our work is important, but it’s not as important as your life. It’s not as important as your family.

…We just need a change in workplace culture in the U.S. Part of the reason why our work culture sucks is because we don’t have good worker protections. We don’t have paid leave for all. We don’t have paid time off for all people in this country.

We don’t have good health insurance options, so people end up staying in crappy jobs, right?”

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Q: For folks who are newer to advocacy and feeling fired up, what would you want them to know?

“…there’s so many skills that go into advocacy. Public speaking is just one of them, but there are so many ways to use your skills for advocacy, so… Pick the issue that you want to advocate for or against and look at what’s being done already. 

Okay, how can you contribute to that? How can you improve what we’re doing, right?

I would say, it’s okay to be scared…it’s okay to have fear. But don’t let fear stop you from doing what you want or what needs to be done. Don’t let fear paralyze you, it can inform you, and it can give you information…

And if you have naysayers. critics, haters, that’s a good thing. Your work makes people angry, that can be a good thing. Not always. Sometimes people are rightfully angry.

But…you know, give them something good to talk about, give them something good to look at.

Trust yourself in terms of understanding your purpose. And understand that leadership is an evolving skill. It’s never something you’re going to perfect.

Leadership is about always learning. Always listening…Leadership doesn’t look one way…[and it is] a skill.”