Charlie and I continued to date even though she also talked to a few other girls behind my back. I was insecure and didn’t say anything. I was attached to her and didn’t want to lose her, even if she cheated on me. It was like we were trauma-bonded: We were one of the first out queer couples in high school. She was much stronger than I was — she was always the one to respond to straight guys calling us dykes in the hallway or classmates gawking at us kissing in front of my locker. I wasn’t happy with her, but at 17 years old, I irrationally worried she’d be the only other queer woman I’d ever meet. Even though our relationship wasn’t working, we stayed together.

We were about 17 when the anonymous comment website Formspring became popular. Formspring was a social networking service that had its heyday in 2009. Users were able to set up a profile and others could comment anything they wanted, completely anonymously. This was obviously very popular for high school students who wanted to cyberbully each other. I made a profile because I wanted to know what my classmates thought of me. Deep down, I worried people thought I was ugly — or worse, ugly because of my arm.

On my Formspring profile, I received compliments saying that I inspired people to be themselves (I was never afraid to experiment with my look or speak my mind) but was equally flooded with insults. I received nasty comments for being gay, for having an orange spray tan, for being a theater geek — but nothing about being disabled.

Before having access to my classmates’ opinions about me, I hadn’t given my disability much thought. But now that they could say anything behind the safety of a computer screen, I began to worry that someone would make fun of me for being an amputee.

I was asked if I was dating Charlie, who was completely out. Charlie got comments about me in her inbox when she wasn’t being told that she turned straight girls gay. (She was very swaggy and all girls, including straight ones, liked her.) “Why are you dating Dayna? She’s orange.” All pretty benign comments, and none that had to do with my disability. Charlie didn’t defend me — she just approved the comments and let them sit on her profile. I could tell she didn’t really care about me anymore. This enraged me, so I did something immature: I hatched a plan to get her to care about me again.

After school one day, I went straight to the computer lab. Looking to either side of me to make sure no one was watching, I logged on to one of the PCs and went on Charlie’s Formspring. I commented anonymously, “How could you date a girl with only one arm?” My hands shook as I typed.

I stayed in the library, switching between homework and compulsively refreshing the page until Charlie responded a few hours later. The rush I felt from her defending me was almost sexual. She threatened to fight whoever said it and listed a whole bunch of nice things about me. Even a girl she was talking to on the down-low jumped in to defend me. “Keep talking shit about Dayna and you’ll be the one missing an arm,” she said.

No one had ever blatantly questioned whether I was undateable because of my arm, so why did I? I thought my disability was something I didn’t think about, something that didn’t bother me, but apparently it did. I wanted Charlie to stand up for me because she hadn’t in so long — we broke up shortly after. But mostly I was so terrified of someone else saying I was unattractive because of my arm that I tried to mitigate the pain by saying it first.