Brianna
Finding my identity in stories
I can’t remember when I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to be a writer. Like most things, it dawned slowly. As a child, I loved stories. My dad and I spent hours in an oversized, weathered rocker, with dark blue fabric that felt somewhat like a cross between velvet and corduroy. We lost entire days to reading about different people and different worlds.
I now know that stories were a refuge to my eight-year-old self. She found something in stories that she couldn’t find in the real world. First, it was the sprawling hills of a childhood favorite. Then it was the adventure and thrill of finding a long-lost repository of gold and knowledge. Then it was the wonder of space.
The psychoanalyst in me realizes that, as a young, disabled girl, part of me was yearning for another life. A different one, with a body that worked right, a body that wasn’t constantly trying to sabotage itself. But the counselor in me knows that, really, it wasn’t that I wanted to escape my reality.
It was that I wanted to see myself in theirs.
I was a writer in a world that denied me my own existence. There were no disabled girls in my Saturday morning cartoons. There were no disabled girls on the big screen, fighting the bad guys for the greater good. There were no disabled girls in the background of adventure movies and cult classics. There were no disabled girls in princess movies, even when media executives went out of their way to show that, look, anyone can be a princess! Yes, even you!
“It’s hard to find your passion in a world that tries to erase you. It’s hard to find your passion when, most of the time, disabled people are relegated to hospitals and living rooms.”
We don’t go to prom. The Force isn’t with us. And we certainly don’t steal significant historical documents.
But that’s a narrative. And a false one at that. Disabled girls are everywhere. We go to concerts and poetry readings and midnight premieres. We climb mountains and write papers and sometimes, if we’re really, really lucky, we find someone who will take our wild dreams in stride—even the ones that have to do with significant historical documents. We fall in love. We have families. We stare at the sky and feel, for one blinding moment, that we, too, are made of stardust. We rage and cry and, at the end of the day, we pick ourselves up and do it all over again.
“The world tries to convince us that, no matter how loud we scream, our stories are swallowed by the void. But that’s a narrative. And a false one at that.”
Someone is listening. Someone needs your poem, or your app, or even just your laugh. The real challenge is convincing yourself that, just like everyone else, you deserve the world, and whatever lies beyond.
From one disabled girl to another? You do.