Evan Disney

Caregiver

Missoula, MO

Biography

Born and raised in Missoula, Montana, Evan Disney has dealt with severe ADHD his whole life. His journey with magic began as a tool to help him fit in during high school, but he soon realized he could help other people through his magic as well. Disney, who suffered a career-ending injury during his service in the U.S. Navy that left him with chronic pain, now uses magic to raise money for non-profit organizations. He even travels around to different schools performing a show he calls “WHAM!”, which stands for “Words Have Amazing Magic!” When his mother was recently diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, Evan turned to his magic as a source of hope, both for himself and for his mother.

power of ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We all have the ability to purr through life, we really do. But it’s hard not to defend yourself, you know? We get in this competition of, “Jane’s goldfish died and Sam’s dad died, and, well, Sam is worse off than Jane.” Well, not necessarily true, pain is pain. The same pain of loss over here for the goldfish is the exact same pain of loss over here for the grandfather, the parent. But we don’t take time to step outside ourselves and actually realize that it’s the same pain. It’s not a matter of a competition of whose pain is worse, it’s a matter of most people just want their pain acknowledged. Magic is acknowledgement. It’s key in every aspect of life.

You just gotta give people hope. Even when there isn’t any, there is. Hope’s a state of mind, just like magic’s a state of mind. If you really want to be amazed and you really love magic, you’re going to like what I’m doing, because I love it too. Any time somebody that’s going through this, any time they show you a glimmer of a smile, a glimmer of hope, grab onto that magic and help expand it.

Finding your magic

What it did for me was made me more bold in explaining to my mom what her magic should be. All right, you got dealt a really crap hand, and in this crap hand that you got dealt, you got the best possible scenario. When you get dealt that first hand in poker, and it could be, ’There’s no way I’m going to win with this hand!’ And you put four cards down and you keep that ace. Well, when they give you the other four cards it could be a royal flush and you could have just beat everybody! The first hand you’re dealt isn’t always “the hand.”’ So when my mom was, she’s hard on herself and stayed sheltered I told her, ‘You need to take this opportunity to get unstuck. You need to figure out, as horrible as it is, how to take every ounce of positivity you can out of it.’ So it gave me an opportunity to help her find more of her magic.