How I Came Out About My Disability

My friends were also 19, young and seemingly invincible, and, however nerdy they were, they still got drunk and went to parties. I did, too, if one of them folded up my wheelchair and threw it in the trunk of their car. And I navigated my new reality with some self-deprecation, describing myself with words like one-legged, stumpy and wobbly to circle around the truth: I was disabled.

Part of the reason I hadn’t accepted my disability was that I didn’t have many people to talk to about what I was experiencing — what it was like to see the world from a wheelchair, and later, wear a prosthesis. There were support groups and the like, but I felt awkward going alone. One of the few times I went to a community event, an ice skating clinic, I realized at the rink that I had misread the flier: The event was for children. In the group photo, I was the tallest person by a foot.

And so I processed my emotions outside of groups, and tried to appreciate my body for what it was: strong and resilient, scarred but powerful. When I took up running, it traveled great distances, including countless park loops and across a marathon finish line. But I didn’t think of it as beautiful until I came across the Instagram accounts of women like the models Mama Cax (who died in 2019), Jess Quinn and Kiara Marshall, among so many others. They made having a prosthetic seem glamorous, even though day-to-day disability is very much not. Here were my women, joyfully showing off their stumps and creating spaces to normalize their differences.

They put words to the ableism I had experienced but struggled to describe. Their hardships resonated: tales of ill-fitting prostheses, or walking pain, or well-meaning comments that carried a sting (“I don’t think of you as disabled!”). I took solace in seeing videos of women putting on their legs, an experience I rarely talk about. When a dear friend asked me how I practice yoga, I sent a post of Mama Cax in midpose. “It looks like this!”

These women, and many others, formed the support group I longed for, one that reiterated what I knew to be true, but didn’t see reflected out in the greater world: that disability can be challenging, but it can also be sexy and stylish and fun and smart. Like me.