Here’s a big question: Who are you?
I would say that I am an outgoing, loving, disabled person. Not too long ago, I would've omitted “disabled” from that sentence. It's weird because I've always been highly aware that I am disabled, but I never fully took it and owned it with pride. More so, it was like a festering inconvenience.
I’ve realized after my sixteen years on this earth that in my subconscious, I have constantly feared being rejected and ostracized because of my disability, so I made up for it by constantly acting outgoing and endearing to those around me, just to fill that hole of fear. I have Hemiplegia, which affects my right hand significantly, but those around me may not notice unless they get close up. Nevertheless, I constantly felt that to be accepted, I had to distance myself from the disabled community even though they would be able to understand what I was going through. I created an outgoing persona to fill my personal need for others to never question my disability, or perhaps to never see it at all.
Even though I’ve never been told explicitly that my disability was revolting, I have always feared that the day may come, and so I would hide in the masses as someone attempting to look non-disabled. It felt nice to be accepted by non-disabled people who “fit the mold” of perfectly average humans with no perceived “flaws.” Yes, I hate to admit it, but I had seen my disability as a flaw, and so I tried to do what I had always done before: hide it. When people asked me about my hand, I would often tell outlandish stories like “a dinosaur got ahold of it” or that “I scraped my hand badly.” I tried not to tell anyone about the thing that I had hated the most about myself, using my outgoing personality as a crutch to try to steer the conversation away from my disability. It worked, so I continued to pass as non-disabled until I was forced outside my comfort zone and into something extremely different; a world full of people with disabilities.
You’re probably wondering right now, “Lily, haven’t you ever known that there were people that had disabilities?” and the answer is complicated. Yes, I knew that others like me existed, but I grew up in a town with the majority of the population being non-disabled people that grew uncomfortable even mentioning my disability. I didn’t fully know what hemiplegia even was until the age of twelve when my mother sat me down and decided to ask me not to explain my disability to adults as “I have a stroke” like I used to do. So, if you’re catching on, I had never met another person that was disabled until recently.