I've Been Disabled Since I Was a Child. Co-Writing Being Heumann Still Taught Me So Much

The night before an airline lost my wheelchair was among the most dazzling of my life. I sat at a long table in the back of an L.A. movie theater as talented writers, actors, and creatives read aloud the draft of a movie script I’d co-written with Oscar-winning filmmaker Siân Heder. I felt the thrill of people laughing at just the right moments. I clocked cheeks shiny with tears. But more than anything, I marveled over the possibility that this movie might actually get made. When I was a newly paralyzed kid in the ’90s, with freshly fitted leg braces, I watched Forrest Gump overcome his disability by running so hard his own braces literally fell off. Months after I started college, I watched a recently disabled boxer ask her coach to end her life in Million Dollar Baby. In my formative years, the stories of disability I saw were scarce, unrecognizable, and often harmful.Our script, Being Heumann, tells the real-life David and Goliath story of a standoff between the U.S. government and a group of scrappy disabled protesters that changed the course of American history. The fight revolved around Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a tiny bit of legislation that reframed how we thin...