Denarii Monroe

As storytellers, disabled writers have thousands of stories inside of us, some related to our disabilities and some not. Some of us are lucky enough to have some sort of outlet for our words — in public and/or private spaces — while others still struggle to find the voice that lives within.

It had never occurred to me to visit [a Planned Parenthood].... And yet, in a culture where the rights and healthcare needs of people assigned female at birth are constantly under attack, it’s easy, even for someone like me, to have warped ideas about exactly what one will experience.

My therapist of six months — let’s call her L — was letting me go. It was so subtle that I wasn’t even sure what was happening; I had to ask.

I had to learn me because I was never given a chance to. People often act like this is easy or shouldn't be hard to grasp, but when you've literally spent your entire life not even knowing what your real hair feels like, it takes time to get used to that, especially when you have no one and nowhere to go to for solid advice.

I did not leave that theater the same way I arrived. It was then, as I walked back to my building and looked up at the night sky, that I knew. I thought to myself, “I want to make movies.”

Much has already been said about the way the Stanford swimmer's privilege has insulated him from consequence, about the ever-pervasive victim blaming in public discourse, and about the inadequacy of the criminal justice system. But in so many of these conversations, in our rage against the rape culture machine, we forget the survivors — the most important people in the fight against sexual violence.