I also began to consider how best to convey the epistemologically enriching experience that learning to live with a disability can be. I discovered the work of people like the scholar David Bolt, whose article on “positive stereotyping” left a lasting impression. He argues that depicting disability as the source of supernatural capabilities troublingly obfuscates the accomplishments of impaired individuals who must navigate stressors and barriers unknown to others.

It’s an important point because, as I found out, even if we’re no longer perceived as prophets or Muse-inspired poets, many are still convinced that people with disabilities command superpowers — of a sort.

After all, ours is an era obsessed with applications — for college, for jobs, for scholarships — which often ask whether you have a background the review committee should know about. Perhaps then traditionally disadvantaged individuals are the most advantaged of all because they wield access to additional attention — and guilt their way into positions with captivating, if pitiable, “sob stories.” Just watch the “Seinfeld” episode “The Butter Shave” to see what I mean, as George Costanza delights in special privileges while feigning an injury far longer than it has actually lasted.

Donald Trump’s victory evinces that many Americans are indeed frustrated by how various groups seem to be reaping the benefits of their “otherness.” Certainly, a number of the president’s comments, including his crude imitation of the journalist Serge F. Kovaleski, who lives with a congenital joint condition, underscores that minorities can’t expect preferential or “politically correct” treatment any longer.

This way of thinking tends, problematically, to attribute the entirety of a person’s success or failure to her disability. It is probably safe to say that people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (polio), Harriet Tubman (narcolepsy) or even the Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin (deafness) succeeded both despite and because of their impairments. Do I think that disability made an impact on these figures, that it offered up a unique brand of understanding and metamorphosed into a kind of Muse for them? Of course.

But most people with disabilities will not be remembered by history. They are usually living challenging lives with little to show for it: Unemployment rates are disturbingly high, health care costs are often debilitating, and the emotional toll of living with an “aberration” can rend families apart. The only thing that a fidelity to positive stereotypes accomplishes, then, is to absolve society of maintaining commitments to the disabled, like making places more accessible, since it would be ridiculous to aid people who already have a leg up with added perks.

And yet it is not a “perk” to take the elevator when your friends walk up the stairs or to park in one of the handicapped spaces or to use a capacious bathroom stall or to be wheeled to the gate when you fly. It’s not just convenient either. It’s essential. This is the challenging, needy underbelly of living with an impairment that positive stereotyping can obscure. Accommodations serve the invaluable purpose of ensuring the human dignity of people with disabilities — our ability to participate in society as completely as possible without being de facto quarantined for “defects” in a world that prizes fitness and forgets that disability is the most fluid identity category of all.

Believe me, I, too, sometimes wonder whether my scholarship is predicated upon pity. I can’t help it. After all, words are easily said but not easily cast aside. It’s true that I discussed disability in my personal statement — but focused not on the “triumph” of learning to walk again, but on how that experience affected the life I want to live. My spinal cord injury has given me the insight that challenges in life often provide, not inroads to a charmed existence.