Lately, I’ve been feeling kind of rough. In what was already a series of bumpy personal life moments, last week’s news cycle hit me especially hard. I was angry when I learned that a deaf theatergoer had been humiliated by an actor who stopped the show multiple times to scold her for “recording,” when in reality she had been using a handheld captioning device provided by the theater. I felt powerless watching Famous People on the Internet rush to that actor’s defense; she should have been warned that a disabled person might be in her midst.

The deeply ableist political drama surrounding Fetterman’s use of an automatic captioning app sunk me even lower, not only because I’m invested in the race here in PA, but also because I have been in his shoes—the ones where people assume I’m of inferior intelligence because of the language I speak or accommodations I use—and those shoes suck. It was one of those crashing-back-to-earth reminders that no matter our qualifications or work ethic, disabled people can never really measure up, because for us they’ve got a whole different measuring stick.

These past few months have been a magical cornucopia of all the good things being a Deaf writer can mean: creating something that hasn’t been made before just by telling the truth, teaching hearing people about our (and their) history and culture, giving deaf kids a place to see themselves in literature. Watching hearing people identify with deaf characters, and in those moments, glimpsing our humanity.

It’s been absolutely intoxicating to have a book like True Biz reach a mainstream audience. But it’s also made the comedown a farther fall, the contrast between what it’s normally like to be a deaf/disabled artist a little starker. There’s the relentless tide of rejection well-known to all writers, of course. But for disabled people, these rejections come with certain justifications attached—the notion that disabled stories are a passing trend, or that our success is unearned and/or strictly inspirational; the tokenism that makes one deaf story enough to tick the diversity box, and two more than “regular” readers will be willing to indulge. Most of all, there’s the isolation that comes with being excluded from the literary community, because communicating with us takes effort most are unable or unwilling to expend.