Brianna Albers (she/her) is a crip-cyborg storyteller living in Minneapolis-St. Paul. She was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy type 2 in 1996 and lives with co-occurring physical and mental health conditions. By day she works as an advocate, bridging disability and mental health awareness to empower people to live their best lives; by night, she dabbles in imagination, and is currently writing “An Angel in the Garden,” an adult space fantasy with #OwnVoices disability representation. Find her online at briannahopealbers.com and on social media @briehalbers.
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…
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Time has no meaning anymore. I barely know what day it is. I’m safe in my self-contained bubble of cat cuddles and electric blankets. I rarely ever leave the house. Most of my doctors offer virtual visits (the sole…
It’s become a sort of ritual. Once every few weeks around 3 p.m., my mom will drop by my room. “So,” she’ll say, with ridiculous amounts of forced brightness. “So.” Code word for “We need to talk.” Code word…
You already know that for the longest time, I didn’t want friends with SMA. I was young and desperate to be seen as “cool” (whatever that means), but more than that, I was dumb. I thought that being…
We all know that I hate getting up early. Just like I hate adjusting to a new wheelchair — I’ll do it if I have to, but that doesn’t mean I won’t complain about it. So you can…
When it comes to “Lost,” you either hate it, love it, or don’t get why people feel so strongly about it. I’m in the second camp, which is to say I feel strongly about the groundbreaking and controversial TV…
For the longest time, winters were a joyful occasion. It wasn’t that I liked the snow, or the sickness, or the slog of self-isolation. I didn’t want to stay home for a third of the school year. I didn’t…
I didn’t have many friends growing up. Part of it was the disability. Part of it was the mental illness — social anxiety, depression, and a dash of trauma for good measure. And part of it was the…
I’m notorious for despising new wheelchairs. It’s not just the discomfort. It’s the painstaking process of calibration — tweaking and experimenting and grumbling under my breath, because my head needs to be tilted a certain way, and how am…
Many, many weeks ago, I said I was going to read “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. In a month. Reader, I was wrong. I was busy revising my novel, so it doesn’t surprise…
Inspired by Susannah Conway, I’ve started to assign a word — yes, a single word — to the upcoming year, as a kind of landmark. Something to focus on as I go through the seasons, so I don’t lose…
I may have thrown a fit about genetic testing, but at the end of the day, it was easier than most things. The genetic counselor sent me the test in the mail. (I’m tired of COVID-19, but I…
The two most common words in the Albers household are probably “Hey, Google.” (That’s not strictly true. I tell my parents I love them more than I should, because I’m a sap, and my heart is notorious for bleeding…
