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.On Saturday, May 27, I’ll be boarding an Amtrak train at Union Depot in St. Paul, Minnesota, at some god-awful time in the morning. You can tell my mom was the one in charge of the trip itinerary. We have a layover in Chicago, and…
I don’t want to spend too much time talking about video games — mainly because I know some of my readers have never played one. However, for my last installment (for a while, at least), I want to discuss how video games and their inaccessibility have forced…
Game developers will never embrace accessibility — unless they realize how much the medium means to disabled people. So, continuing with the theme of last week’s column, I want to talk a bit about “Star Wars: The Old Republic” (SWTOR),…
I want to talk a bit more about game accessibility this week. But, unlike last week, I’m going to offer up some actual, concrete experiences that will hopefully make it easier to understand how I — a disabled person; more specifically, a…
I don’t really consider myself a gamer these days. I enjoy video games, and will occasionally take the day off to play the newest Star Wars: The Old Republic expansion, but it’s not my passion anymore. But 12 years ago, video games — in particular,…
The surgeon didn’t find anything wrong with my lungs. They are, in her words, “perfectly clear.” Still, there was a significant amount of congestion around my voice box, which apparently explains the tightness in my chest. It just feels like there’s something…
I wish I could say things have become better since I wrote about my current health issues a few weeks ago. But for the most part they haven’t. My chest isn’t as tight as it used to be, and I’ve started addressing my fatigue with energy drinks. V8 V-Fusion, to…
Last night, I asked my dad what I should write about for my next column about life with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). “Why you don’t write about the struggles you have with eating?” he suggested. I laughed. “No one wants…
I experimented with highlights in middle school. I wanted to get this professionally done, but my mother, who’s been dyeing her own hair for probably longer than I’ve been alive, insisted we use a box kit, like the kind you find at Target. It became a…
Last August, I inhaled something. I wasn’t too worried. It might take a few days, but usually when I inhale something, it comes out on its own. But this time it didn’t. So, I’ve been doing treatments. For months —…
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