Listen to this post:

I found this picture of me from the early 2010s wearing my handmade I (heart) disability shirt. Yeah, I’m smiling in the picture. But it’s a strained smile. I’m speaking confidently into a microphone at a podium, but I’m wringing my hands, like I am in most pictures from the time. Smiling but freaking out and always on the verge of overload. The heart is actually a heart-shaped brain designed by an old friend, Lauren. This was my brain injury pride shirt.

In the picture, I’m telling a story at a disability-related event at City Hall of being removed from an American Airlines flight for my non-compliance. I’m not wearing my glasses in the picture because I’d crushed them out of frustration during the incident.

If you must know, it started with someone else’s non-compliance: The gate agent refused to let me pre-board despite my request and my right to it under federal law. I requested it over and over, and she mostly smiled and avoided eye contact so it looked like she was ignoring me. When I demanded she write down my name, she rolled her eyes, picked up her pen like her body had been switched to slo-mo mode, and scratched something onto her paper. Who knows what she wrote, because she didn’t call me up like every other gate agent before her and after her had when I gave my name. I panicked over missing pre-boarding and ending up in a packed jetway that was over 80 degrees (and a few other details, but whatever). Then the flight attendant would not lift my bag for me into the overhead bin after I requested her help, and I went into total shutdown mode. The pilot would not fly with me onboard because I was refusing to respond to the flight attendant, which made me a flight risk. I was certainly embarrassed by the whole getting removed from a plane thing, especially because I couldn’t get my bag out of the overhead bin myself without getting super dizzy and falling over, so I just tried to leave the plane without it, forcing an attendant to run after me with my bag.

Over the years, I became much, much better at boarding planes. I eventually stopped pre-boarding altogether because I learned how to stand in the line without panicking. Anyway, planes aren’t comfortable, and sitting on the plane longer than anyone else didn’t feel like a perk.

This event at City Hall was so long ago I can’t remember what it was. But I recall I was there to represent disability storytelling from someone who appears non-disabled and to talk about some cascading consequences that can happen when a disabled person requests accommodations and is denied them without good reason. I guess I would invoke Alice Wong here in how she often said, “Believe disabled people.” I wish the gate agent had believed me that I had a real need even if I didn’t look like the kind of person she thought the law covered. With brain injury–and honestly, with my autoimmune disease now–there’s a real mix of things I can’t do that people can’t believe but also things I can do that people can’t believe. I recovered so much from the brain injury, some people don’t believe it ever happened. Things change. People change.

I still feel bad at the thought that people might’ve been late for their connecting flights or other events because takeoff was delayed. And yet, I continued then and continue now to think that I’m a worthy person deserving of no less just because my cognition and emotions had gotten warped by brain injury. That’s why the I (heart) disability shirt. That’s brain injury pride.