Kintsugi Heroes
Nathan Gutierrez · 47 min
Born with spina bifida, surviving kidney failure, and rebuilding from dialysis, Nathan Gutierrez turned a life of compounding adversity into a mission to close the support gap for people with physical disabilities.
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Nathan Gutierrez was born with spina bifida, a condition that meant he would live his life in a wheelchair. His mother had other ideas about what that would look like. She made him army crawl up fourteen stairs every night to get to his bedroom, building independence through sheer force of will. It felt like climbing Mount Everest. Looking back, Nathan is grateful for it.
By second grade, Nathan was fully mainstreamed into regular school, where his peers treated him as just Nathan, not as the boy in the wheelchair. He played wheelchair basketball with the Rolling Chariots, a team of adults who became his first friends with disabilities and taught him how to live. He ran for student body spokesperson in seventh grade with a campaign built around the spokes on his wheelchair and won. He debated in high school. He was good at arguing.
Then, just as he was starting university, his kidneys began to fail. For three years, he was on dialysis three hours a day, three days a week, fighting his insurance company while trying to complete a degree. The life he had imagined, becoming a tall basketball player people would respect, fell away the moment he got sick. When survival becomes the only priority, other dreams stop mattering. A new protocol at Cedars-Sinai and a living kidney donation from his father saved his life in 2009.
Nathan went on to direct a youth sports league for kids with disabilities, oversee California's first universally accessible baseball field, and work for county and city government on disability employment initiatives. He spoke at the White House. But it was a blind communications professor named Dr. Chuck Wall who asked him the question that changed everything: have you considered professional speaking? Nathan launched Wheel Life Enterprises to fill the support gap for people with physical disabilities that he wished had existed for him growing up. He still has days where he is depressed and unsure. He is transparent about that because he believes you can help another person even when you don't have everything figured out yourself.
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