Coming Out as Disabled

     I am a 21-year-old cis-gender female living with chronic pain.  My illness has never been very black and white.  It’s often based on my own perception and feeling at any given time.  I first started to feel it in 2012, but I am just now revealing this side of me publicly.  It’s been a long 7 years.
      I am here to write to you that people living with invisible disability are real.  I am here to bring up conversation around invisible disability and the challenges that I and many others like me face.
      An experience I’d like to talk about is having people around you literally look at you differently.  I got the chance to study abroad in Italy.  This place is super hilly with lots of stairs which are hard on my chronic illnesses.  I didn’t speak up at the time—I stuck it out because of the opportunity and traveled as much as possible.  I pushed myself so much that I physically had to sit in a wheelchair and take a rest.  I could not walk anymore I hurt so much.  Thankfully at this point we were in a museum, which they had a few wheelchairs available.  This was really great and unexpected with how inaccessible everything else is in Italy.  I had a break down of tears due to the pain, and my classmates were already concerned.  I caught up with them after getting a wheelchair and every single person in the class had their eyes on me, including my teacher.  She could speak through a microphone that connected to many different earplugs to listen to her talk about the art.  She said aloud for everyone to hear:  “What did you do to yourself?”  Another girl in my class asked, “did you sprain your ankle?”  I felt like I was on display for everyone, showing the side of me that is socially looked at as unattractive, weird, undesirable.  I answered as nicely as I could, but I didn’t feel like I had to tell anyone anything.  Most people didn’t ask and were super nice and treated me the same.  It just felt so violating of who I was before, and what people perceived me as.  And, the craziest thing was this happened when I was abroad, so the friends I was building as school and working hard on for a long time didn’t see this side of me, it was still hidden.  I would have to go through this awful situation of revealing a very vulnerable side of me again.
      I was tired of feeling ashamed of it and hiding a part of who I was—a very large part that touched many aspects of my life.  There were people in my life who were tired of hearing about it.  They didn’t want to hear me “complain” anymore, when I was barely even scratching the surface as far as revealing myself.  This relationship as well as how people were reacting to seeing me as disabled has completely motivated my inner activist to come out as disabled.  I’m tired of hiding.  I’m tired of relationships ending because of my illnesses that I have no control over.  I’m here to own who I am.  And, who I am is a strong, daily fighter of many chronic illnesses.