There is a girl; There are many girls; She is all of them. The girl pulls her hair free and puts her hair band on her wrist, looking up at the TV. The man with a scarred face is shot. The pirate with a hook for a hand is the bad guy. Quasimodo is a prisoner because of his differences. The girl is engrossed.

The movies play, bright and colourful, light flashing over the long-pile carpet she sits on. Fingers trail the threads as she pretends that she is the fairy with the broken wing. It’s easy to pretend, as her fingertips tingle like magic against the carpet fibres, that she’s always been that fairy.

There’s no running from bullies on the playground. No limping because her ankle is always rolling. No waiting on uncomfortable leather chairs, waiting for her teachers to finally listen to her that something is wrong.

Her mother always says, when she asks, that there’s something in human brains that makes them have to see to believe, and that’s why she’s always got to work hard and push herself—push and push and push, and one day, they’ll see. One day, they’ll understand that she’s no less human, no less capable.

But in front of the TV, fingers tingling with carpet magic, watching the fairy’s wing get fixed and all her problems go away, she feels like her wings have been clipped. The scarred man dies, the hooked pirate does too. Sometimes they begin as tragic ghosts, and in other movies, they simply don’t exist.

She wonders, if there is nobody like her on the television, how will anybody ever know? If there is no atlas in which she can look to know herself, then how can anyone else?

The girl snaps the hairband on her wrist; All the girls snap their hairbands on their wrists; She is all of them. It hurts too much for her to be a ghost. She takes pen and paper and thinks, maybe I can make them see.

— —

Writing as a disabled feminist, one who must constantly fight for access to society now more than ever as the world accepts a COVID-positive “normal” that continues to kill dozens of people (most disproportionately disabled and marginalised people of colour) every week in Australia, is making me desperate to create worlds in which I am welcome. After all, with a public-mandated pandemic raging under the advice “just stay home if you don’t like it”, it is clear that I am unwelcome, and thus need to carve out my own space, and the only real estate left for me is in the fictional. I cannot easily see myself in the real world bustling outside my window, yet even the literary landscape offers very limited accessibility.

 I’m desperate to find a place in both non-fictional and fictional worlds, to write myself into them and live my life out of them. I’m desperate for the percentage at which disabled writers are published and granted access to the publishing industry to rise. I’m desperate for positive role models and compassionate representations in media because I need to know that I am not a ghost. In a world that has relegated me to the inside of my bedroom, I might as well be unreal, a story, a figure floating by a window. I am not religious, but individualism is the disease which I ward off with a crucifix of books; communitarianism and collective action, which can be normalised in part through fiction, is the candle I carry through the dark. I am the girl sitting before the TV, wondering why I see only my shadow, or why I am always the beast and so rarely the beauty.

Being born disabled, I felt I never had the same chances as other kids: to watch movies and read books and project myself onto the characters, or even into the worlds those characters exist in. In a world where bodies like mine are often not accommodated for or even considered, media is the most accessible thing to me as I stay at home—yet even in these fictional worlds, people like me are often nowhere to be seen, even though people with disabilities make up one of the largest minority groups. So, where are we?

I feel I must write them myself. With every story I write, I think: How can I bring us in and make space which tells readers that we belong here just as much as anybody else? I think: I know what it’s like to read a book and feel, deep down, that my existence, that disability, was never even considered, and I never want to make someone else feel that way. I think: I too would read for escapism, like so many other voracious readers with online platforms, if ‘escapism’ didn’t so often mean escaping the fact that I exist too.

Unfortunately, though there are some exceptions, I often find myself exposed to images of disabled women in media that perpetuate harmful, negative, and stereotypical depictions, such as the ‘super-crip’ trope and ‘overcoming’ narratives. When I say I want a place in worlds both fictional and real, I don’t mean as inspiration porn, as inherent tragedy, or as someone who overcomes their disability in order to fit in, fly dragons, or battle monsters.

I want to exist without changing my nature, without having to prove myself through amazing feats that I deserve to exist at all. We do not demand the woman in the gothic castle overcome her womanhood in order to escape. I don’t want to live a life where I must grit my teeth and ignore my body’s wants and needs, because our current systems do not extend enough empathy to hear me, see me, or help me, and then go on to read about how inspiring that is. My tenacity! My grit! My strength! You’re so strong; This character is so strong. Why should we have to be?

Ignoring the fact that the ‘overcoming’ narrative demands systemic and structural hardship in order to paint us as heroes for succeeding despite it, they also often refuse to acknowledge the historical and continuous deeply rooted structural violence many disabled women face under those structures, and instead choose to whittle out a tale of individual hardship, hard work, and reclamation of space and value. (I specify ‘disabled women’ in acknowledgement of what some disability theorists call the ‘dual oppression’ of the gendered, female disability experience. I recognise that disability and systemic ableism impacts all genders.) Under our Western, white-supremacist system of individualism, disability is often perceived to exist solely within the individual rather than within the institutions or structures of society, which allows for structural, social, and economic barriers against disabled people to thrive.

So, my existence may be possible in these fictional stories, but only so long as I am dead or will die, when I am the villain, or if I meet the demands of ‘compulsory heroism’ (Beth DeVolder, 2013). When media is packed with patronising portrayals of us succeeding “against the odds”, it depoliticises disability rights and disability justice movements, and glamorises overcoming disability at the expense of those individuals who cannot and should not have to meet these expectations (Shakespeare, 1994). In a reality that relegates disabled bodies to the undesirable, the unseen, the less valuable, the unimportant, to lives that should be lived at home in private to allow the non-disabled community to “go on as normal”, this is demonstrably a systemic issue faced not only now, but in worlds far removed from us in time and space.

Disabled people need to be able to imagine worlds in which we can not only exist, but are welcome to exist as we are. Non-disabled people need to be able to imagine the same thing. And existing as we are requires all worlds, real and unreal, to bring us into community with them, to give us hope, and shun eugenic models of selective representation which relegate us to the fringes or to the non-existent. We should not be typecast and forced to haunt the castle. 

In the 1950s, a Professor Curt Richter at Johns Hopkins conducted a famous experiment involving drowning rats. It was undeniably cruel, and it serves as a good analogy: the experiment placed a vulnerable group (rats) in a detrimental environment and asked how long they could survive. These rats went into buckets filled with water, and in the first round, not one of the 34 survived more than a few minutes. Richter then theorised that, “The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight — it is rather one of hopelessness… the rats are in a situation against which they have no defence… they seem literally to ‘give up.’” When I first read about this experiment, I couldn’t help but draw obvious parallels to my own life, to the ways in which the world is made needlessly difficult and traumatises disabled women, and has, at least for me, led to a constant battle with hopelessness as I try to reconcile a lack of resources, defence, and respect, with my will to live. My life has become an overcoming narrative.

To test this new hypothesis of hope, Richter then put a new group of rats into buckets and again observed their process of drowning (which, in case you need the prod, reads to me like my experience trying to survive in a world not built for me, a metaphorical rat who metaphorically cannot swim). What he did different this time was to observe the moment the rats gave up, at which point he rescued them and gave them time to recover. He then placed them back into the buckets, and his hypothesis proved solid: after being helped, the rats swam for much longer than they had the first time. They had been saved before, so they believed that someone or something could help them again.

I think humans are much the same. In times when I am at my most hopeless, most desperate, I yearn for a helping hand to pull me out of the metaphorical bucket in which I'm drowning—the one which was constructed by society and does not need to exist. Hopelessness is insidious, a silent killer. Give me disabled characters who have hope, give me a world that trades socially constructed buckets for dry land, let me read and write stories where we are big and bold and beautiful, and I will have hope too.

Look at the pillars of humanity: community, and compassion. In order to achieve equality in the world and in fiction, we need to acknowledge our current system of individualism, which is the philosophical belief and political ideology that upholds interests of the individual, rather than the interests of the community, as paramount. We need to realise, accept, and celebrate that we are all in community, all inherently linked to one another. Nobody can thrive without hope and community, and this is why we must embrace the importance of collective, communitarian action and advocacy, which can be, in part, normalised through fiction.

I want to write heroines who are like me, disabled and proud, sad, funny, angry. I want to read them. I want to see them on screen. I want you to see them and love them. But to do so will take collective action: advocacy for disabled voices to be heard, for our stories to be told and published, for us to have safe and equitable access to buildings and other public spaces as well as fictional ones. Do not let us be the 2%, when around 21% of Australians (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022), and 1 in 6 people around the globe (World Health Org, 2023) have disabilities. Do not let us die by pushing ourselves to overcome our limitations, because when we’re forced to do that, so too are you. No more sick days—the company needs you! Your hard work is appreciated. In a communitarian world, your health and humanity are appreciated more. The atlas that guides us is care, and when everyone cares, everything feels alright.

The exclusion of disability narratives not only renders us invisible, distorts and hides social contexts, histories, and our current reality, but also robs us of the chance to imagine. And what is imagination, but one of the coolest, most beautiful things in the world? I want to grieve for disabled characters, get mad for them as I bear witness to their mistreatment, cry with joy when they fall in love, scream when they succeed, lay awake at night imagining myself acting alongside them—travelling through space, riding dragons, hunting vampires, meeting my future partner in a bookstore in true rom-com fashion. 

Alison Kafer in 'Feminist, Queer, Crip' (2013) writes, “In our disabled state, we are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once rehabilitated, normalised, and hopefully cured, we play a starring role: the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body.” What I want to write about are disabled women who exist, rightfully, in their bodies, who are not the object of a socially necessitated change into an able-passing body, who take up space and need painkillers, who need to wear braces and use mobility aids and are fierce and fascinating and fatigued—yes, she can be all three!

This requires collective demand. I have enough desperation and wanting in me to power a starship, but I would love not to have to fight for the right to fly it, and I would love not to have to try and fly it on my own.

To conclude, I come back to the Greek mythological figure of Atlas, he who held the heavens. I thought this was an apt metaphor for the isolation of my experience as a disabled woman who writes, forever feeling at once a part of this world and apart from it, knowing I deserve to be here, yet feeling as though I shouldn’t take up space; When Atlas took the heavens on his shoulders and held them above the world, he did that for everyone on Earth, disabled folks included. But no one person, no one group of people, should have to carry the weight of the world; in a community where everyone cares and is cared for, that world-weight becomes as light as a candle, brightening the way forward.

But, as it currently stands, despite people with disabilities being one of the biggest minority groups, we are often forgotten. The world moves on to a “new normal” and we are forced to stay at home, unseen, or to work in unsafe environments to survive, hopefully, without getting sick. We face discrimination, inequality, and exclusion in many places like healthcare, education, work, community life, even in our own homes—and somehow, though fiction can be anything, anything at all, we are still often treated like this too.

Literature reaches beyond itself, more than just ink printed on paper or pixels on a digital screen or spoken audio transmitted through speakers. It has shaped beliefs and lent power to philosophical movements—think of the feminist writings of Simone de Beauvoir. It has long been studied and said that media socialises us, teaches us how to think, even implicitly. Disabled people are here, we are dear, and we are nothing to fear. We have stories to tell.

So, my desperation grows, likely the same way Atlas’s endurance was tested, and I think of those rats that were so cruelly drowned. I write and I fight for my right to imagine, and to be written and imagined in turn. I cling to hope: I’ll be able to hang out and write my stories in air-conditioned cafes with the people I love again, and I won’t be harassed for wearing my N95 to my doctor’s appointments, and I won’t need to explain to a thousand people on Twitter that disabled people should exist in fiction because we exist in real life, period.

I want belonging in the current, non-fictional world in which I write, and in the fictional worlds around me. “Atlas” means a collection of maps – I hope one day to be able to look at bookshelves and read book after book, mapping worlds that not only have space for me, but which make that space and want me in it. For now, I hold a candle and I wave from the window.