Loving My Fellow Disabled Friends Taught Me to Truly Love Myself

July marks Disability Pride Month, a time to commemorate the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act and to celebrate the diversity, resilience, and visibility of the disabled community. This Disability Pride Month, we asked writers to share aspects of their identities and lives that they feel might be "invisible" to others. Check out our latest coverage here.

Brooklyn and I became close friends at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as so many disabled people leaned into each other in the face of such blatant disregard for disabled life, and in the face of such hurt and such fear. Like me, Brooklyn has Spinal Muscular Atrophy and uses a wheelchair. Unlike me, Brooklyn lives in Canada.

Our close friendship was built within virtual spaces, a testament to the power of the disability community. In June 2020, I hosted a weeklong series of writing workshops specifically for disabled creatives. Brooklyn attended, as did other individuals across the country (and the world) that I would go on to form lasting bonds with. This space became an intensive, concentrated well for healing, one where we held space for our grief — that which spilled over the edges of the containers provided us by society — and simultaneously watched our grief transform into art. This space — created by every attendee and guest host — held a mirror up to ourselves to reflect our own community's worth, and thus our own self worth.

There were other lifelines that summer, including the Crip Camp Live Webinars that came together after the release of the documentary "Crip Camp." Brooklyn and I texted each other every Sunday while we watched, checking in on one another and saying how grateful we were these webinars were happening.

Even today, Brooklyn will often begin her texts with "Hi love," or "Hi, beautiful," and it wasn't until she told me about the guy she had started dating in the summer of 2021 that I realized — with that familiar twinge somewhere behind my sternum — that I had been harboring a tiny crush.

The feeling of romantic interest held a small yet lingering pain for me: in the week before the June 2020 writing workshops, I opened Instagram to a photo that gutted me. The girl I had been briefly dating and who had broken up with me after telling me she wasn't able to commit to anyone was now kissing another girl. This woman's lips pressed into my ex's, when I hadn't been willing to risk my life as a high risk individual for physical intimacy at that point. Her legs were wrapped around my ex's waist, her body taking on shapes mine couldn't, even without the presence of COVID.

I was already in a bad headspace by that point in the pandemic, when stay-at-home orders were beginning to lift but a vaccine or true safety was far out of sight. Seeing this photo led me to believe — if even for a short while — that what society was telling us about the value of sick and disabled life, about the value of my life, was the truth. It pushed me into a dark, shame-filled hole filled with thoughts of not wanting to be alive. What eventually allowed me to climb out of this hole was the knowledge that in refusing physical intimacy, I was keeping myself safe, that I wanted to live. That wanting to live was worth holding onto.

In her memoir "10 Steps to Nanette," Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby discusses the intense shame she internalized as a child and young adult growing up in the 1980s, when Australia was embroiled over whether or not same-sex marriage should be legalized, and whether homosexuality should be decriminalized. It was the way this debate invited horrifically dehumanizing rhetoric — which the media then amplified in a sick sort of negative feedback loop — that so solidified Gadsby's shame. "By the time I identified as being gay . . . I was already homophobic," Gadsby says in her 2018 Netflix comedy special "Nanette." "You internalize that homophobia and you learn to hate yourself . . . I sat soaking in shame, in the closet, for 10 years."

For me, shame toward my queer sexuality is something I've barely had to wrestle with as a femme, straight-passing woman with a supportive family. Shame toward my disability, on the other hand, is something that's resided in me since adolescence.

And no wonder: capitalism tells us our worth is based on our level of physical productivity; media in my childhood and adolescence only featured nondisabled characters in roles where life seemed worth living; and conversations around care have often been laced with the belief that disabled, sick, and elderly people should be grateful for any help they can get and should not have preferences about how their bodyminds are treated. When COVID hit, all this became even more clear.

But in the midst of all the ways society was telling me my life wasn't valuable, I had Brooklyn. In so many ways, the mini crush I had on her was proof to myself that we were desirable, with our crumpled, SMA bodies. When Brooklyn told me about her new boyfriend, my "OMGwhat?!Tellmeallabouthim!" caught in the back of my throat — my bodymind's own gift to itself, its own deliverance.

Recently, I attended a friend's wedding, a queer couple whose love and seemingly perfect relationship I envied. I'm good friends with the bride's brother, Seth, and had gotten to know his sister and her partner through him. There was a small part of me, fed by insecurities and internalized shame, that was disbelieving of their friendship with me, that such cool people would enjoy hanging out with me.

At the reception, Seth came up to our table, his fourth drink in hand. "Hey Mikala," he said to the woman sitting two seats down from my friend and helper, who was attending with me. Mikala's chopped curls and GRL PWR tattoo gave her, too, an effortless air of cool. "Hannah's looking for a girlfriend, do you know of anyone?"

In that instant, I saw myself as the stereotype being projected about me: desperate Crip, looking for love. I played it off as Seth being drunk, while Mikala joked about only knowing people in Michigan, where she had driven in from. There I was, feeling reduced to desperation among the company of women I had just met over dinner and who dripped easy confidence. But I still wonder about this internalized projection. Is that how they saw me in that moment following Seth's words, or is that just how I saw myself?

I studied queer history in grad school and examined the lived experiences of queer and trans individuals with intersecting identities. I had compared the Stonewall Uprising and Stormé DeLarverie (the biracial drag king who's largely credited with spurring the uprising, after being hit on the head by a police officer and thrown into the back of car) to rainbow capitalism and the ways Pride month has become increasingly commercialized and corporatized.

Still, it took reading Gadsby's memoir for the idea of "pride" as the opposite of "shame" to click in my mind. Maybe this is because shame I feel toward my own queer sexuality is nearly nonexistent, a relatively tiny tiger I wrestled with as a teen and early 20-something. I credit this to 40-plus years of change, but perhaps more poignant is the fact that I'm straight-passing: I'm a femme who looks and acts, at least from a distance, like we've decided women should look and act.

But then, of course, there's my wheelchair, my own machine body, and the very specific curves and slouches my flesh-and-blood self embodies. It has been within this that shame has for so long resided, particularly in regards to sexuality and desirability, beauty and worth.

My boss has the same condition that Brooklyn and I have. When I first interviewed with her, I was struck, as I now so often am in the presence of other disabled people, by the beauty inherent in her own SMA mannerisms: the way her fingers curled, the way she moved her head and shoulders to resituate herself in her wheelchair. And what was most beautiful in this moment was my ability to recognize this, and to see this reflected in my own way of being, my own bodymind.

I've come to believe that pride is less about making an unashamed claim to our right to exist in the face of a world not built for us as it is about reminding ourselves and each other of our inherent, unconditional worth. Or, it is both; it is just that the latter often gets forgotten, just as we are so often expected to do things for a perspective not our own — the desire for an explanation of our own unruly bodyminds, the inclination, even, to assume we're writing for a nondisabled audience.

It's taking time, but I'm slowly learning, like disabled writer Laura Hershy said in her poem "You Get Proud by Practicing," that pride is the antidote to shame. In so many ways, the love we give each other — like the love we give our disabled friends, my love for Brooklyn — is the surest way to love ourselves.