A common truth among the disabled population is that people who have disabilities have the natural ability to make lemonade out of the worst possible lemons. Because more often than not, we make the conscious decision to take the harmful standards imposed upon us by society and make something positive out of them, which I try to do by writing about my personal experiences.
Similar to most little girls, I grew up idolizing Disney movies and princesses. My favorite was irrefutably “Beauty and the Beast.” I recall my younger self initially being drawn to Belle because she has brown hair and brown eyes as I do, and a large part of my developing book-lover personality was remarkably similar to hers.
But as I grew older and looked in the mirror every day, those similarities became increasingly less apparent: no princesses had a curved spine or used a wheelchair to move around like I did. Princesses had fully-functioning legs that carried their perfect bodies as they frolicked in fields and chatted with cookware. They never had to think about opening their mouths and being self-conscious about their garbled voices.
I grew up not seeing anyone who looked like me: not in the young adult romance novels that I devoured as a teenager, nor in the TV shows that I watched. And that affected me during my teenage years more than I care to admit. Never mind fairytales, a deep part of me yearned to see someone who looked like me in some avenue of the media to prove to myself that the things I dreamed of — falling in love with a man, getting married and having children someday — were not just dreams I was speaking into a void, but things that could happen to someone like me.
It wasn’t until last fall that I began noticing instances where disabled people were portrayed positively in the media. I am extremely proud and honored to say, I played a small role in the creation of one such instance.
Last September, I had the privilege of acquiring my first-ever internship with a publishing company, INCLUDAS Publishing — a company centered around bringing stories into the world that feature disabled characters. And maybe I played a part in voicing the opportunity into existence, in a column in which I remember mentioning wanting to go into publishing but wanting to incorporate my disability advocacy into that work somehow. This opportunity was the break that I needed to combine the best of both those worlds — because in my first week as an editorial intern there I read the manuscript of a young adult romance novel where the main character has the exact same condition I do and catches the attention of the boy of her dreams.
The days in which I fervently poured over that manuscript were an absolutely surreal moment in time for me, from both a professional and personal viewpoint. I have wanted to go into publishing for forever, but upon graduating without any job prospects, I was doubtful I would ever be able to break into that career. But then my entrance into the field was marked by something that my younger self deeply wished for — an accurate portrayal of inter-abled love where the disabled person isn’t infantilized or fetishized — where a disabled person being capable of giving as well as receiving romantic love isn’t taboo.
Having grown up without an example of a person who has similar challenges to mine being the subject of someone else’s affection led me to believe that no man would ever perceive me in that way. It didn’t help my self-esteem that I endured my teenage years without a boy calling me pretty to my face and maybe my relationship to my body would have been different if someone had. But I realize now that this instance wasn’t exactly personal or unique to me, it is something that has been perpetuated by society’s norms of beauty for centuries.
It’s no secret that disabled bodies are rarely seen as objects of beauty compared to women that are able-bodied, and it goes without saying that it’s extremely hard to believe you are worthy of love when the norms of society label you as “weak” and “broken.”
This book’s soon-to-be-existence is one that I hope will help eliminate that horrendous stereotype, as younger girls who have disabilities now have an example of their being worthy of love. Because at the end of the day everyone deserves what it feels like to be loved, regardless of their limitations.
Gazette columnist Joanna Buoniconti is a freelance writer and an editorial intern at INCLUDAS Publishing. She can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.