What Disability Changed — And What It Didn’t

I have been navigating the world with a mobility condition for four years. The first year, I spent a lot of time grieving things I could no longer do in the way I had done them. That grief was real and I am not going to minimize it.

But grief is not the only thing that was happening. Alongside it, and sometimes frustratingly parallel to it, I was also solving problems. Finding routes that worked. Finding clothes that worked with my mobility aids rather than against them. Finding the people and places that could hold my full reality without reducing me to the condition first.

What disability changed: how I move through space. How much I think about access before I go somewhere. The relationships that proved unable to hold the change and the ones that proved they could. My relationship to my own time and energy.

What disability did not change: who I am in a room. What I think about. What I care about. The quality of my friendships that survived. My sense of humor, which got darker and I think better. My work. My appetite for a good meal and a long conversation.

I am aware that sounds like a tidy conclusion. It is not meant to. There are hard days. There are moments where the inaccessibility of ordinary spaces makes me angry in a way that does not have a clean outlet. There are things I miss that are not coming back.

But I am also not disappearing. And the life I am building now accounts for all of it: the grief and the humor, the limits and the things that remain. I think that is what continuing actually looks like, not resolution. Just all of it, at once, moving forward.