Like any middle schooler, I usually start my day with cereal. Every morning, after brushing my teeth, I have a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch with milk, and try to catch all the flakes with my spoon before they go soggy. I get dressed for the day, and try to put on some makeup before my mom yells at me for hogging the bathroom. Then I go catch the bus.



While in most other ways I’m just your typical eighth grader, I also happen to have been born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a form of muscular dystrophy. Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a degenerative nerve disease that causes muscles in my arms and legs to atrophy over time. I wear leg braces and use a wheelchair to get around, and have an aide at school who helps me spin my locker combination. Every morning, an accessible bus arrives at my house to pick me up. Actually, it’s more of a van, with a “School Bus” sign on top.

For the most part, despite my wheelchair and knowledge of medical terminology (you build that kind of vocabulary when it’s about your own limbs), my daily reality is mostly the same as that of my classmates. I groan over the same math and science homework, giggle with the same friends, and like every other adolescent, I probably spend too much time on my phone. As a girl with a disability, I know that my story is not a sad one.

For the past four years, I’ve been trying to convince everyone else as well that my story doesn’t have to be a sad one. In 2013, I started a Change.org petition asking American Girl, my favorite doll company, to make a doll with a disability. As a longtime fan of the company, whose dolls are accompanied by books and movies with positive stories of girls overcoming challenges, I wanted to see a story with a heroine who was in a wheelchair like me. The petition got 140,000 signatures, and got a lot of news coverage. People clearly wanted to see kids with disabilities featured in an upbeat ways.