The Balcony

A Disability Pride Month Essay on the Part of the Story Nobody Tells

MESSY REINVENTION PRESENTS

The Things Disability Taught Me

Four essays about disability, identity, and rebuilding.

Author’s note: This essay describes a period years ago when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. I’m telling it from the other side, and I’m genuinely well now..

There’s a version of this story where I lose my hearing, have a good cry, learn a Valuable Lesson, and emerge wiser and softer and ready for my close-up. I have told that version. It’s easier on everyone, including me.

It’s also a lie, and I think you deserve the true one.

The true one starts on a balcony.

You have to understand who I was first. I was a music kid. Not casually. Musical theater since before I can remember, a scholarship to study it, years spent singing for a living. Sound wasn’t a hobby I had. It was the load-bearing wall of the entire building.

It was how I knew who I was.

And then the flu, and the genetic switch nobody knew about, and six months. That’s all it took. Half a year to go from a life built entirely out of sound to a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse and nothing else.

I stood on the balcony of my apartment one night in that silence. No traffic below. No birds. Nothing. And I looked out at a world that had gone quiet and I genuinely, seriously wondered whether it still had a place in it for a version of me that couldn’t hear. Whether the building could stand at all with the load-bearing wall gone.

I’m not going to dress that moment up.

It was as dark as it sounds.

Here’s what I need you to know about what came after, because this is where the inspirational version lies the hardest.

Nobody cued the music. Chariots of Fire did not start playing while I ran in slow motion toward acceptance. There was no montage. There was no single morning I woke up healed.

I crawled.

I dragged myself through it one genuinely terrible day at a time.

I got help, the real kind, the kind you have to keep showing up for. I gave it time, which is the least glamorous medicine there is. I learned an entire new language with my hands.

And slowly, without ceremony, I found a whole Deaf world I hadn’t known was waiting, full of people who’d never once needed me to perform being fine.

The wall got rebuilt. Not the same wall. A different one, in a different place, out of different material. But it holds.

The building’s still standing. I’m still in it.

I’m telling you the balcony part on purpose. Because a survival story that skips the part where you almost didn’t isn’t a survival story. It’s a brochure. And I’ve never been interested in being anyone’s brochure.

I came back different.

That’s the honest ending.

Not better, not wiser, not a lesson.

Just different, and here, and still building.

A note for anyone standing where I stood:
Please talk to someone. In the U.S., you can call or text 988.

The view is better from over here. I promise it’s worth the climb.

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The Things Disability Taught Me Series:
✓ Seventy Percent
✓ The Floor, Not the Favor
✓ The Balcony
○ Through, Not Despite

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Paid subscribers also get the companion series:

✓ A Complete Guide to Helping a Deaf Person
✓ I Am Not Dead
○ Things Hearing People Say
○ I Said Yes