“Fitting in” is one of the totally important challenges a teen like you may have to face! Whether it’s your clothes, weight, height, popularity or your grades that mark you as “different”, you can find yourself not only left out, but cruelly teased and tormented. Weight, clothes and even grads are things you can improve to make you more acceptable. But what if it’s something you can’t change – like really bad eyesight, deafness, a limp, a paralyzed arm, or the fact that you have to use a wheelchair to get around?

Being physically different from your peers doesn’t make you inferior to them, or not as good as they are; not at all! If you find this hard to believe, here are just a few of the people with physical handicaps who make it big time:
The former Miss America, Heather Whitestone McCallum is deaf; two famous musicians Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles were blind; and former republican senator, Bob Dole wasn’t able to use one of his arms.
All of these role models learned how to gain self-worth, pride in themselves, and the confidence to feel they were talented, valuable people.

If you still feel being different is a bummer, you might want to try some of the ways these role models and other physically different people sued to gain their self-confidence.