An Introduction to the story and the person behind the blog

Hello Reader!

My name is Rachel Spencer. I am a Deaf writer and aspiring author. I started this blog in my senior year of college to help writers and educators: learn more about disabilities, why representation is so important, and how to incorporate disabilities into their writing. But I hope there’s something here for everyone.

Each week* I write and post an article. Every other week the article will be about disabilities in general and how to apply disability studies into your writing. In between these articles, I write a “Book Report” analyzing a book, movie, or TV show under a disability lens. These posts will serve to provide teachers with examples of disabled literature that they can include in the classroom. For writers, they provide different ways to incorporate (or how not to incorporate) disabilities into their own works.

I started this blog because I notice that the subject of disabilities rarely comes up in the classroom. In addition, I experienced growing up without stories or heroes that were like me. The lack of representation had a severe impact on me growing up.

Like many who are born or become disabled young, I grew up isolated from the disabled community. I thought I was alone. I remember searching the library for stories with characters who were deaf like me, but not being able to find anything. At eleven, I remember sitting on the steps at recess and wondering what my future would be like. Would I be able to have a career? Would people see me for the things I could do or would they see my limitations instead?

How was it that at eleven years old, I could already feel and describe the effects of ableism in my life? I believe it was because I never had a hero like me to look up to. I never saw myself in a Disney princess or in a superhero. I never saw myself in the dolls on the shelves at Target. Not in any advertisement. Nowhere. I thought I was the only deaf person on the face of the planet. You can imagine how lonely that feels.

All that changed the first time I came across a deaf character. I bawled for an hour straight. To sweeten the deal, the character was in the best series I had ever read. I was so happy that I couldn’t see the words on the page through my tears. Here was someone like me. For the first time in my life, I had a hero. For once—I didn’t feel so lonely. It was something that should have changed my life for the better.

Five pages later, the deaf character was killed.

That’s when a lot of things clicked for me. First and foremost, deaf people weren’t worth writing stories about. That was the only conclusion I could come to. Second, that meant I was worthless because I was deaf. Third . . . while it wasn’t the first time, I considered suicide.

All of these, of course, I now know to be lies. Deaf people, or a person with any kind of disability, are more than worthy to be in stories. My experiences prove that, in fact, it is a necessity to write stories with disabled characters. I firmly believe that if I had characters I could relate to and look up to, who were like me, I wouldn’t have spent years of my life battling depression.

Over the last several years I have been learning more and more about what it means to be disabled. I still feel new to all of this and I imagine some part of me will always feel that way because of how much there is to learn. Of course, I never would have had the courage to start this blog if it weren’t for a good friend of mine, Stephanie Hurzeler, who once said to me something along the lines of “Because you taught me so much about disabilities, I wasn’t so afraid when I got my own.”

So here I am, learning, and I hope that I can help you learn too. I want to give writers more tools they can use to include diversity and I want to give educators a place they can learn about disabilities to bring up the subject in the classroom. I can’t build a better world by myself. It’ll take all of us working together.

*As of May 23, 2021, I have switched to writing one post every other week instead of weekly. This allows me to have a better work-life balance, enable me to work on other writing projects while continuing to write quality blog posts for you. Thank you for your understanding and continued support!