Kelly Narowsky woke up one Saturday to texts from strangers trying to buy cars. Hackers had taken over her Facebook account, impersonated her with a stolen copy of her driver's license, and wiped out roughly 2,600 friends and nearly 3,000 professional followers she'd built as a Kansas City speaker. That crisis is how she and Sam met. The conversation that unfolded from there went much further than cybersecurity, into bipolar disorder, a spinal cord injury at 25, and the quiet work of choosing to keep going.
What You'll Hear
- How a hacked Facebook account cost Kelly roughly 2,600 friends and nearly 3,000 professional followers, and why it felt worse than her early-stage breast cancer diagnosis
- Sam's self-critique that technicians can get desensitized to the emotional weight cyberattacks carry for victims
- Kelly's path to a bipolar I diagnosis in college and a hospitalization she initially refused to accept
- The Santa Barbara car crash at age 25 that left Kelly paralyzed from the lower chest down for life
- What she took from hitting her lowest point after the injury and deciding to keep going
- Why she waited until 2004 to start medication, and how one small daily pill changed the next 21 years of her life
- Her nine years as a travel agent, the 50 countries she reached as a wheelchair user, and the strangers who still make her disability their opening line
- How Army leadership invitations at Fort Campbell and Fort Bragg turned a side gig into a full public-speaking career
The hack that started the conversation
Kelly Narowsky and Sam met under bad circumstances. One Saturday morning, her husband asked if she'd seen the message about people selling cars on her Facebook page. She hadn't. Someone had broken into her account, locked her out, and was using a stolen copy of her driver's license to prove to Facebook, over and over, that they were her. Friends reported the activity. Facebook shut the impostors down. The hackers showed the license again and got the account reinstated. The cycle ran for about a week.
By the time Kelly's real estate agent gave her Sam's name, she'd already tried everything ChatGPT and her techie friends suggested. The account couldn't be recovered. The attackers were operating out of the country and effectively out of reach. What Sam could do was get her roughly 3,200 photos off the account before it was permanently shut down, trace the intrusion back to her compromised email, and close the door there.
Kelly lost around 2,600 Facebook friends and nearly 3,000 followers on her professional speaking page, which held years of client reviews. She compared the violation to her early-stage breast cancer diagnosis and said the hack felt worse, because cancer had a treatment plan and this had none. Sam used the moment to push back on his own industry. Technicians, he admitted, can get cold to what these attacks actually feel like to the person on the other side of the screen.
A bipolar I diagnosis she refused at first
Kelly's high school years looked rebellious from the outside. Honors classes, then she'd quit volleyball, then track, then sleep for days, then barely sleep at all. Her parents thought she was acting out. What was actually happening was undiagnosed bipolar I disorder.
College made it worse. Working three jobs with a full course load, no sleep, and family stress triggered a full mental health crisis that landed her on a psychiatric floor. Her professors, who knew her, treated her with empathy rather than force. A psychiatrist told her she had bipolar disorder. Kelly pushed back. You can break a leg and take an x-ray, she argued. You can't take a picture of my brain. She refused the label for years.
Inside those refusals, she wants listeners to hear something that usually gets lost in casual use of the word bipolar. It is a serious condition that for many people requires real clinical support. She talks about it openly now because she wants anyone who recognizes themselves, or a family member, in her story to know that getting help is a reasonable choice.
Santa Barbara, a Jeep Wrangler, and the split second that changed everything
After college, Kelly moved to Santa Barbara to live with a friend. She was driving a Jeep Wrangler on a curving mountain road with no seatbelt. Looking back, she believes she was hypomanic that day. The reckless behavior fits. The crash broke her spinal cord, caused severe lung damage, and left her paralyzed from the lower chest down for life.
She spent a month in ICU. At some point during that stretch, lying in bed, she had what she calls an aha moment. She realized the people she'd always thought of as inherently different, wheelchair users, were just like her. She'd become one of them in a split second. The social currency she'd carried as an able-bodied 25-year-old was gone. Discrimination, patronizing comments, pity, being talked down to. She'd never experienced any of it before. Now it was daily.
The first year and a half after the injury was brutal. At one low point, she attempted to take her own life. She survived, and she took that as a signal. She was supposed to be here. She's 52 now. There hasn't been another attempt since. She tells that part of the story carefully, because she knows a listener in the wrong moment could hear it the wrong way. Her point is that the story keeps going after the bottom. Help is real. So is the life on the other side of it.
The little white pill that made the next twenty years possible
Kelly spent a month on a psychiatric floor after the overdose. Her stepmother brought her a book by Patty Duke, who wrote openly about living with bipolar disorder. Reading it, Kelly finally recognized herself. That was 1999. She was 26. She accepted the diagnosis but stayed off medication for years. The early drugs caused weight gain. She was vain, she says without apology, and at the time she'd rather have been unmedicated than heavy.
In 2004, boy problems and the grind of dealing with strangers as a wheelchair user pushed her to a therapist. The therapist sent her to a psychiatrist who prescribed a then-new option, Lamictal. One small white pill a day. Twenty-one years later, she credits that pill with everything that came after. She got married 19 years ago. She earned two master's degrees, one in disability studies and one in psychology, and picked up two advanced certifications. She fell into a public speaking career. None of it, she says, would have been possible without the medication.
She doesn't share this for applause. She shares it for the person listening who has a family member with clinical depression or bipolar disorder and is stuck behind internalized stigma. Some people, she says plainly, need real pharmaceuticals. Natural approaches don't always carry the weight. Sam picked up the thread with Jonathan Haidt's concept of the cortical lottery from The Happiness Hypothesis, the idea that some brains run at a naturally higher set point than others and that for the rest, medication is a legitimate tool, not a moral failure. Kelly pointed to happiness researcher Arthur Brooks and the concept of high negative affect as the frame for her own baseline.
Strangers, wheelchairs, and the exhausting work of being seen
Kelly has been a wheelchair user for 27 years. The parts most people assume are the hardest, stairs, not being able to hike, running a bathroom schedule, aren't. Strangers are. She calls it ableism, and she has examples on tap. An old man outside a nail salon in rural Kansas felt compelled to tell her she needed a motor for her chair. A woman in a restaurant bathroom in her hometown asked how long she'd been disabled. Another announced, unprompted, that her own husband was in a wheelchair. At grocery stores, airports, and anywhere else she shows up, people make her wheelchair her master status. Not person. Not wife. Not speaker. Wheelchair first.
She has a clear rule on unsolicited help. Able-bodied strangers never asked if she needed help before the injury. They ask constantly now. Unless someone is visibly struggling, bleeding, or on the ground, she doesn't want the interruption. She wants the independence. As a clarifying test, Sam asked about holding doors for older folks with canes or walkers. Kelly's answer was practical. Obvious mobility impairment, right by the door, common sense. Someone minding their own business outside a restaurant is not an invitation.
Her speaking topics grew out of this life, not around it. Brain and spinal cord injury prevention for high school and college audiences, focused on seat belts, texting and driving, and the neurobiology of a 25-year-old prefrontal cortex that isn't yet fully formed. Disability awareness at conferences, including ableism, stigma, and the ADA. Disability law and policy, including the Air Carrier Access Act. And accessible travel, grounded in her nine years as a travel agent and 50 countries visited as a wheelchair user, plus 49 of 50 US states.
From Think First to Fort Campbell to a speaking career
Kelly's public speaking career started almost by accident. A woman she'd heard about, also paralyzed in a car crash, spoke for an organization called Think First, a brain and spinal cord injury prevention program started by neurosurgeons in the 1980s. Kelly went to hear her. The woman asked if Kelly wanted to try it. Kelly said no. Public speaking scared her. She eventually took five minutes at a school. She found it cathartic.
In 2005, she moved to North Carolina, met an Army officer, and married him the next year. There was no Think First chapter nearby, so she started volunteering for the Army, giving safety briefings to majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. In 2009, a battalion commander called and insisted on paying her. She didn't know how speaking fees worked. She threw out a number. He asked what she'd charge a company like IBM. The dominoes fell from there. Fort Campbell flew her out nine times to speak to thousands of soldiers. The next year, leaders at Fort Lee told her she wasn't charging enough, and she doubled it. A general at West Point brought her in, then brought her back. The commander of the 82nd Airborne Division once told a colonel to find the blonde woman in the wheelchair and get her on the conference stage.
Luck, she says, quoting the old line, is preparation meeting opportunity. Her grandmother gave her the foundation, unconditional love through the bipolar years and the paralysis alike, and a steady belief that Kelly was smart and capable. Dr. Michelle Gibbler, who ran the Missouri chapter of Think First, kept flying her to conferences and telling her she was a strong speaker long before Kelly believed it herself. Kelly closed with two ideas she keeps coming back to. The most important book she read in 2021 was The Courage to Be Disliked. And the best things in life, she says, are often on the other side of discomfort.
About Kelly Narowsky
Kelly Narowsky is a Kansas City-based professional speaker and disability rights advocate. She holds a bachelor's degree in health and exercise science, master's degrees in disability studies and psychology, and two advanced certifications. She speaks on brain and spinal cord injury prevention, disability awareness and ableism, US disability law including the ADA and the Air Carrier Access Act, and accessible travel, drawing on nine years as a travel agent and 50 countries visited as a wheelchair user.