As a kid, I hated being disabled. I resented my body every day - marinating my skin, heart and brain in the foulest self loathing. For so long, it hurt to breathe. To be awake. To be alive. It’s only in the last couple of years, that hurt has got quieter but I don’t know that it will ever completely be silent. I internalised all the ableism I could soak up; burden, unloveable, broken, make yourself small or even better, disappear entirely. But I stayed, clinging to all the magic I could find until I built a new world with all of you and tonight I get to make myself big. To own a piece of Australian TV history. And I get to do it on a day I didn’t know existed until I was 19. A Better yet, I get to celebrate it with people who see me for all that I am, something I’ve spent my whole life searching for. Finding so many of them at once was intimidating. What if after waiting and hoping, they didn’t like what they saw? What if all the voices in my past had been right and I WAS the problem? But that didn’t happen. Instead they saw me and embraced, challenged, loved and dreamed. Latecomers might be about to change representation forever. But it’s also given me the ability to see myself as the full human I have always been. That coupled with my writing, advocacy, @missingperspectives and my million other creative dreams makes being alive glow and heal. So I don’t hate being disabled anymore. Instead I do my best to be tender with it. To be quietly revolutionary in my honesty and to give every feeling I have the space to exist in vibrant technicolour 🥰 I adore every single one of the incredible humans who worked on @latecomers_tv and I am so grateful to SBS for being the first. Better late than never. But I hope they’re not the last. If you want more disabled stories, you need to watch tonight. 8:30pm @sbsviceland @sbsondemand You need to tell big and small media that we matter. Because I don’t want anyone to have to wait 20 years to figure out that they matter, the way I have. Happy International Day of People With Disabilities 💛 (we’re here 24/7/365) If only I could go back and show all the little girls and angry teenagers I was, the me I am now...