Brianna Albers (she/her) is a crip cyborg storyteller living in Minneapolis-St. Paul. In 2016, she founded Monstering, a magazine for disabled women and nonbinary people. She consults as a patient ambassador for SMA My Way and writes the column “The Wolf Finally Frees Itself” for SMA News Today. She is currently revising THE SAINT AND THE SPIDER, an adult space fantasy with #OwnVoices disability representation. Find her on social media @briehalbers.
If you have SMA or care for someone with the disease, you’ll know what I mean when I say we get sweaty. At first I thought it was just me, but then I read somewhere online that folks like me have sweaty palms. This moment was one of those…
It’s 2014. I’m months-deep into a major depressive episode. Nothing is enjoyable, not even my all-time favorite video game. I feel listless in the worst of ways. Several of my friends are playing “Dragon Age: Inquisition” (DAI), the latest installment in the long-running video game franchise by developer BioWare.
“Watch out for that Heidi Brown,” my dad likes to say. “She’ll keep you on your toes.” It’s true. If there’s one thing my mom excels at (and there are many), it’s coming up with the most exquisite of curveballs. See our last-minute trip to Pensacola, Florida, last December…
I’m about to date myself, but hang with me for a sec. Back in my day (which wasn’t really that long ago; I’m not that old), online school was unthinkable. Perpetually online folks like me were seeing the writing on the wall and begging people in power to embrace the…
The thing about visible disabilities is that you can’t really hide them. You can try, but there’s only so much you can do when it comes to a big honking wheelchair. The internet, however, is a completely different story. There’s a freedom to it, a flexibility, that you can’t get…
If you’d asked me a year ago what my plans were for SMA Awareness Month, I would’ve come back with a laundry list of items, from Instagram Reels to the Minnesota Walk-n-Roll event put on by Cure SMA. This year looks a little different. Part of it is…
I was supposed to be preparing for an upcoming work trip to Austin, Texas. Instead, I was sitting in a hospital room, waiting for the doctor on call to look at the area around my gastrostomy tube (G-tube). I’d spent the past several months in a nebulous state of health.
When I graduated with a master’s degree in 2020, people kept asking me if I’d ever go back to school. I looked them in the eye and with all seriousness said, “Over my dead body.” Well, color me pallid, because it turns out I was wrong. It was my mom’s…
Months ago, I had an idea for a column. I wrote it down with the intention of revisiting it around my golden birthday on June 29: “Diagnosed at nine months, given nine years to live, and going on 29.” I thought it was cute at the time, a hook I…
I’d been anxious about our trip to Austin, Texas, for months. I look forward to the annual Cure SMA conference every year around June, but my excitement this time was tempered by a kind of deep-seated dread. I knew it would be fine, but I was still nervous. It…
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