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hen I was fifteen, I got really into queer feminist fairy tale re-tellings. In my fifteen-year-old hubris, I began a novel imaginatively titled The Princess Story, about a school for princesses who learned to rescue other princesses. I didn’t get too far and the project was soon abandoned. I only recently remembered it ever existed. All the files are long lost (probably for the best) but the characters stick with me. Serena was my favourite, my version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. There’s one detail of her curse the film ignored but I was always fascinated by: every step felt like knives through her feet. Despite that, The Little Mermaid kept dancing with her prince. My Serena escaped her prince and did the sensible thing. She got a wheelchair. When I was fifteen, my legs still worked. I knew I was born with a bad hip, and they’d cut me open and cracked my bones and screwed me back together again. When I was eight I’d almost died of MRSA because they’d had to operate again. But I wasn’t disabled by any means. I skied, I hiked, I ran, I cycled, I climbed, I did karate, and it was all easy. I was going to be fit and strong forever. So why did I keep writing about wheelchairs? My first ever character used a wheelchair. She’d been hit by a truck, which put her in a coma, which sent her to a magic dream world where she was The Chosen One. She later got hit by a second truck saving her bully in the real world. He also had to get a wheelchair. I guess I couldn’t think of any other reason someone would need a wheelchair, but cut me some slack. I was eleven, and how many disabled characters had I ever seen? How many disabled characters have you ever seen? How many had names, important parts, speaking roles? How many were women? How many were queer? How many were POC? How many were in a genre story, sci-fi or fantasy? Are you a writer? How many disabled characters have you written? Do you think that’s enough?
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NEURODIVERSITY
