BERKELEY, Calif. — My best Route 88 AC transit friend has cancer. He’s waiting until the end of the holidays to “turn himself in” to the hospital, where they’ll “poke him all over,” but he knows in any case he has to do this soon because there’s a big lump on his stomach. I didn’t know how much I’d begun to care for him, my fellow in-a-wheelchair bus rider, until I felt my sadness become a different kind of lump in my throat.

My friend Olantis and his chair, Roscoe, emit more life than I’ve seen from any walkie. He tricked out Roscoe with some seriously powerful Bluetooth speakers through which he blasts the music that matches his mood — sometimes gospel, sometimes house, usually something with a good beat and lyrics that make you think. Olantis is big. He’s tall and fat. He’s black. His voice booms and his laugh ricochets. He goes so fast in Roscoe! The first time I saw him, before we’d officially met, he was zooming down Shattuck Avenue weaving in and out of groups of students walking in clusters with their oversized backpacks. His music was blasting. This man was up in every available sensory input of every single passer-by.

I wasn’t envious just that Roscoe had the horsepower to go so much faster than Anita (my own motorized wheelchair). I was also envious of Olantis’s flagrant disregard of social norms. I spend my days at Cal trying to balance my need to advocate my right to physically enter spaces with my perceived need to not offend anyone in the process — by dressing modestly, not too dykey, careful not to break any obvious gender or fashion rules; by keeping my mouth shut in the face of minor issues if I can deal with them on my own; by projecting a friendly and helpful attitude as much as I can. It doesn’t always work, though, so seeing and being with Olantis is sometimes liberating.

I make the two-mile commute most weekdays to fulfill my duties as a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley — to attend class, work as a teaching assistant, research or go to meetings. Anita helps me from home to school and in and out of the buildings on campus as I deal with my collection of conditions — asthma, Type 1 diabetes, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and dysautonomia among them. Anita allows me to stay in the game and remain competitive as a student and teacher, despite the daily exclusions and presumptions of incompetence I face. I’ve learned to thicken my skin and employ my stubborn nature. But the connections I make with other disabled people like Olantis along the way help keep me going in ways Anita can’t.