My friends were also 19, young and seemingly invincible, and, however nerdy they were, they still got drunk and went to parties. I did, too, if one of them folded up my wheelchair and threw it in the trunk of their car. But I didn’t think of it as beautiful until I came across the Instagram accounts of women like the models Mama Cax (who died in 2019), Jess Quinn and Kiara Marshall, among so many others. They made having a prosthetic seem glamorous, even though day-to-day disability is very much not. I took solace in seeing videos of women putting on their legs, an experience I rarely talk about.

Source: New York Times July 13, 2020 14:48 UTC