Librarian Lily Hunter reflects on disability, education, AI, and the lifelong pursuit of purpose in a world built for speed.
Within a world that often measures worth in speed, productivity, and dollar signs, librarian Lily Hunter insists on a different set of values: curiosity, care, and the right to take up space.
I started pretty much from nothing,” Lily says. “I was two pounds at birth.”
Born in Romania in 1990, just after the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Lily entered the world during a time when the country’s hospitals and orphanages were overwhelmed with children. She knows almost nothing about her birth parents, other than her birth mother’s name and age. She spent her first months in a hospital crowded with babies whose families could not care for them.
“My birth mother could not take care of me because I was born with a disability,” she says. “They were probably very poor at that point. That’s a widespread story in Romania.”
When Lily was around nine months old, an American couple adopted her and brought her to the United States.
She grew up in suburban Missouri doing what she describes as all the regular, normal things: school, friends, and summers spent at the library. But her childhood was divided between classrooms and hospitals.
Lily has cerebral palsy.
“If you make a fist and squeeze as tightly as you can and hold it, that’s what my entire body was doing all the time,” she explains. “There was a time when I couldn’t open my hands.”
Her adoptive parents sacrificed nearly everything they could to support her care.
“My father sold his guitars, and my mother sold her wedding ring,” she says. “They were not rich people. They gave up many things to keep me going.”
My first question is always, ‘why?’ And my second is, ‘how do we get there?
Lily Hunter
Those sacrifices, along with nearly a decade of physical therapy, helped her build what appeared from the outside to be an ordinary life. Internally, though, Lily was constantly questioning the world around her.
“My first question is always, ‘Why?’” she says. “And my second is, ‘How do we get there?’”
She says it lightly, but the habit comes from survival as much as curiosity. Growing up with cerebral palsy in a world that was not designed with her body in mind, Lily learned early that access and safety could never be assumed. Every staircase, classroom, and expectation carried the same underlying questions: Why is it built this way? Who is it really for? Where do I fit in?
“I was told to function in a way that only able-bodied people can function,” she says. “There were points in my life where I prided myself because I didn’t need accommodations. It took me years to realize the accommodations are there for a reason.”
Disability shapes the way she sees the world.
“People think that because there are ramps and parking spots and elevators out in the world now that they’ve done their job,” she says. “No, I’m sorry. That’s the bare minimum.” She speaks candidly about how society’s fear of aging and vulnerability often shapes the way people view disability.
“Disability happens to everyone,” Lily says. “It does not matter if you are the best athlete in the world or if you’re like me. Disability will happen to everyone.”
Lily believes that people with disabilities are often turned into symbols, instead of simply being seen as neighbors, co-workers, friends, and full humans.
“We take disability and turn it into inspiration porn,” she says. “I am not here to make others feel better about their lives. I’m here because my life and personhood are valuable.”
Today, Lily works as a reference and instruction librarian at Lincoln University and as a bookseller in Columbia. She jokes that she doesn’t simply have a librarian job; she has a librarian brain. Sometimes that way of thinking can feel exhausting.
“Sometimes I hate being a librarian in the world we are in right now,” she says.
Despite this, she believes deeply in the work.
“Being a librarian is not necessarily about the day-to-day work,” she says. “It’s about the big picture. What am I doing as someone who has access to all this information? What information am I giving students? Why does it matter?”
To her, libraries are a counterweight in a culture obsessed with speed, profit, and constant “progress.”
“Libraries are the old guard,” she says. “Education at all levels, and libraries especially, are the bulwark, not necessarily against progress, but against what losing the balance means.”
That imbalance surfaces most clearly for her in conversations surrounding technology and AI. Lily is not opposed to new tools. She uses databases, digital collections, and online guides every day. What unsettles her is the assumption that if an algorithm can deliver an answer faster, then the human work behind that answer becomes optional.
For students already overwhelmed by information, she worries AI can feel less like a resource and more like a shortcut they are expected to take, whether it serves their learning or not.
Looking to the future, Lily hopes to finish the novel that has been living in her head for years, to travel and “eat [her] way through different places” and to experience more cities, measuring them by how well they welcome bodies like hers. Above all, she hopes to reach what she describes as “a place of safety” and “a place of peace,” a life beyond pure survival where she can continue asking difficult questions without burning herself out.
Then she laughs, aware of how often her mind circles back to the same restless thoughts.
“The purpose is in chasing the purpose,” she says. “I can’t turn it off. I just can’t turn it off.”
