My Disability Does Define Me

I resisted the idea of this for years, but I’ve finally come to terms with it.

When I was a child, I was a pretty normal kid in terms of physical activity. Growing up mostly before the age of home internet, all we had at our house was a Commodore 64 that my dad could only sporadically get to work. This meant my younger sister and I spent a lot of time playing outside. In grade 5, I was on the local basketball team—chosen specifically because I thought it would be unexpected of me as the shortest person in my grade (which is also why I chose to play trombone the same year). Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t great at basketball and so in grade 6, I switched over to softball after being inspired by the Mariners nearly making it to the World Series. From about age 7, I’d also been an avid dancer. One of my only career aspirations beyond my love of space in my entire life was to become a professional Irish dancer after Riverdance took the world by storm.

But as I entered junior high, everything changed.

Running around the house in my walker with a CB radio that my would-be-grandfather, who lived with us, attached to it for me. (Because I don’t have any terrible basketball photos to share with you.)

My knees and hips started to cause problems when I was about 12, but it took many doctor’s appointments and deductive reasoning to eventually land on a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis (AS) at the age of 14. Since this is a condition that at the time was thought to predominantly affect middle-aged men, it wasn’t in the first few tiers of things considered…