This past month, I went back to Dream Street, my summer camp for kids with disabilities, and participated in Great Expectations (a specialized program for teenagers with disabilities that fosters independence) for the second year in a row.
I was so looking forward to it, not just because camp is a fun experience, but because of how I feel about myself when I’m there.
During the 360 days of the year when I’m not at camp (generally speaking), I feel like an imposter. Because my cerebral palsy is mild, I appear able-bodied when I’m really not. However, many people don’t consider me “disabled enough” to deserve accommodations despite my diagnosis. I sit solidly between the world of the able-bodied and the disabled. I try to hide my pain because there is no explanation for it, and sometimes it’s just easier than dealing with people’s reactions. But the consequence to that is I am often perceived as able-bodied, and I am not. An entire layer of my identity is ignored. In the real world, I am not disabled enough to “count”, but I’m not physically independent enough to fit in.
As “mild” as my cerebral palsy is, my differences are glaring around people who don’t have mobility limitations. The way I walk brings many assumptions with it:
My life is lesser because I’m disabled.
I need to be protected.
I’m incapable of being independent.
At camp, however, I am seen as a person with her own autonomy. My cerebral palsy doesn’t walk into the room first. At camp, we walk together. My disability is accepted as a part of me without detracting from my worth—which, as far as I’m concerned, is how it should be everywhere.
No one assumes things about me. My disability isn’t invalidated, but neither am I smothered by people believing that they need to keep me in a bubble. I am given the chance to prove I can be autonomous at camp, but I don’t have to prove my needs. My pain isn’t put on trial; instead, everyone understands that I will do whatever is in my power to keep going despite the pain, and that doesn’t mean I’m faking it.
I have felt inferior for such a long time because I have judged myself by society’s ideals of what both a disabled person and an able-bodied person “should” look like. I don’t meet either expectation.
I am not judged for the things that I’m not at camp. There are so many people at Camp Dream Street, who make up a whole spectrum of disability severity. I don’t feel like the odd one out. So frequently, disabled people are expected to adapt to the world. At camp, people adapt to me. Maybe I’m not what people expect.
But camp taught me it doesn’t mean that the way that I am is wrong.
Going to camp teaches me so much about myself every year. I always knew that I wanted to do something meaningful with my life, but I could never picture exactly how I would get there. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to live on my own one day. Up until I went to camp, I had never met a disabled person who had done those things—which doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, just that there isn’t much of a precedent. And that scared me. I wondered if I had the courage it took to blaze my own path.
This year at camp, I realized my dreams are possible. There are people at camp who have gone to college, people who have left the nest—women I look up to—and they have done it all while being disabled. I have so much more hope for my own future now. I can still follow my own path, but I take solace in the fact that a road has been paved for me to travel.
Speaking of roads, I was given the opportunity to drive! After my surgery in 2023, I lost sensation in my feet. This means that I can’t feel the brake. Before I went to camp last year, I thought driving was a milestone that I wouldn’t get to participate in, but there are options. At camp, I drove a van using hand brakes, which I got the chance to do again this year. I realized that my cerebral palsy is not always something I have to fight against in order to achieve my goals. Honestly, I believe that’s what adapting with a disability is—not endlessly pushing to do things in the same way as everyone else, but finding a way to be independent, even if that requires modification. In this case (driving), I can acknowledge that my CP makes some things more difficult, but that doesn’t mean I should just throw in the towel. A lot of times, if I were to say, “I have CP”, that would be the end of the conversation. But cerebral palsy—or any other disability—is not a hard limit at Dream Street. I can do things with my CP, not in spite of it.
I think that’s partially why I love Camp Dream Street so much. I feel broken a lot of the time—like my needs are too much, and I am not enough. But at camp, I feel whole. My identity isn’t fragmented into pieces. I don’t have to hide my cerebral palsy or my pain. I don’t have to prove anything. I just have to be myself.