Late last year, my therapist told me I was bipolar. We had talked about my personal history, and I’d always had phases of depression and mania, though the former had lately been a deeper, more life-altering issue. Depression for me is melancholy, feeling I’m sinking deeper into a hole, and compounded guilt over missing deadlines and not being there for the people I love. But I knew that I would eventually shift into mania, where I would rush to get as much done as possible, which in turn only led to being irritable because things were not happening, and exhaustion because I operated on little sleep and attempted to keep it up with too much coffee and sugar. With medication, talk therapy, and lifestyle changes (for me, getting to sleep on a regular schedule and curbing caffeine intake) the condition is manageable, but bipolar remains an important part of who I am. It’s still there, but less intense, not going back and forth as violently.

There’s no medical test for bipolar. Diagnosis and treatment relies on the patient self-reporting their symptoms. In other words, stories. Talk therapy for me is all about the stories we tell about ourselves. So, let me tell you about the stories and characters that helped me through the three decades before I was diagnosed.

I was drawn to genre fiction during my quest to understand myself. Since I was young kid, I read a lot of fantasy fiction, starting with fairy tales and classical mythology. In middle school, I devoured the Narnia books, reading and rereading whichever volume was close at hand. Then I graduated to Tolkien before I was in high school. The Hobbit was shelved in the children’s section of the library, and once I’d read it three times, the librarian on duty let me into the adult fantasy section.

It took me a few tries to get into The Lord of the Rings. I was already too cynical a kid to hang around Bilbo’s birthday party for long. But there were enough twists, and a band of brothers who reminded me of my own circle of friends. I knew people like Merry and Pippin and Sam. I so wanted to be a Sam, always resolute and sure of what he wanted.

But the Fates had made me a Frodo.

Frodo resonated with me. He kept going. He survived. He carried the weight of the One Ring, even as it got ever heavier; he was always tempted to turn invisible and slip away when things got too intense. The Ring he carried came to symbolize not wanting to let go of those powerful emotions that I’d wrapped around myself. Deep in mania, the whole world seemed within my reach, that I could accomplish so much if only I could push myself a little harder. Like the Ring, my mania stretched me and left me hollow until, like the Ringwraiths who pursued Frodo and Sam, I became a shadow of myself. I began to search for answers because I was in too deep to resist its power alone.

But the most important lesson Frodo Baggins taught me is that even when it’s over, the scars remain. Rereading The Lord of the Rings this year, I remember what hooked me in as a teenager: the pain takes a long time to go away, even when surrounded by love, and like Frodo sometimes you just can’t go home again.

Frodo prepared me for other representations of mental health in genre fiction and related media. As I was first approaching treatment, a friend recommended Joss Whedon’s Firefly. I initially found a lot to like about the TV series. The character River Tam is presented with symptoms that reminded me of what I was going through. Her brother, Simon, a medical doctor, was focused on “fixing” her, and everyone around her treated her as irrational, including at times, herself. I felt I likewise had little control over my choices and shifted radically from frenetic activity to melancholy. Once I was diagnosed and learned more about bipolar, however, the more problematic her character arc became. Rarely throughout the series or the follow-up movie Serenity do we see the world from her perspective. This goes beyond the male gaze that pervades the series. She is a broken genius to be protected or a scary, sometimes violent, mad girl. Unlike Frodo, once her burden is lifted in Serenity, she is instantly better, with no scars to deal with.

The third character that helped illuminate my mental health struggle is The Sleeper, a recurring character in George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards anthology series. Unlike many people affected by the mutating virus, The Sleeper has developed good and bad abilities, and his trait is sleeping for an extended period then waking up with a new set of abilities each time. I recognized in this character the unpredictability of my own condition. From one day to another, my mood and corresponding energy levels varied, sometimes rather unpredictably. Deep, dark depression might give way to a supercharged, agitated mania that would allow me to get everything done before I fell again into the darkness.

None of these characters are called bipolar in the material itself. Rather, seeking answers, I read my problems through the lenses of the stories that gripped me, filling in the gaps with my own feelings and experience. I sought out characters who represented my own struggles, to help me tell my story. Stories like these prepared me for talk therapy, because they gave me characters like Frodo who survived despite the odds.

Genre fiction needs more characters with bipolar who are not presented as scary, irrational, or possessing superhuman abilities because of their disability. The bipolar characters I’m writing struggle with their disability but aren’t limited by it. Bipolar characters must be given the same attention as any other character, with their own motivations, ambitions, and weaknesses. They can pilot starships, talk to dragons, travel between worlds, and fight for a future worth saving.

Design a spaceship. Or a space station, if you prefer. Imagine an artificial planet, or a galaxy.

But start with a spaceship. Start from nothing except the vacuum of space. Sketch it with a freshly sharpened pencil across the blue-green lines of graph paper, or model it in three dimensions, dragging your mouse to shape components to your will. Research and make notes as you go, a form emerging from details and words. Picture it in your mind’s eye.

Now make it habitable.

Most people have similar ideas about how to make a spaceship habitable. Our designs usually start with oxygen. Then we add water and light and food. Most people stop there.

Or, at least, they think they stop there. In truth, nondisabled people assume everything else. They assume their hands will grip the controls easily. They assume the chairs will hold their bodies, that the noise levels will be tolerable for their ears and their brains, and that they will be able to move from one end of the ship to the other without barriers.

You cannot make those assumptions. You’ve never had the luxury of assuming everything will work for you, that you will always be welcome.

Maybe you’ve always imagined a world where all their assumptions are true for you as well, where each house and library and shop and bus—and yes, spaceship—is as welcoming to you as it is to anyone else.

Maybe you’ve never dared to imagine. But it’s time to start.

People will tell you it’s unrealistic. Ignore them. If faster-than-light travel is a given, then you can sure as hell have a corridor you can roll along smoothly with a wheelchair and never have to worry about being caught out by a flight of steps or someone having left the recycling out halfway across its width. If they can imagine a time when food comes from a protein synthesiser on request, you can absolutely have a world where you can be sure to find something to eat without needing to check or worry, without you have to tighten with anxiety and hear the frustration in their voices as you ask, again, are you sure. And if they can imagine environments for silicon-based life forms¹ and methane breathing aliens², ships filled with water to be crewed by sentient dolphins³, then they can imagine spaces for people like you.

It’s easy, when you start making these comparisons, to let this become an us-and-them game. Look at those aliens with their alien sector⁴ full of fancy atmospheres. How about a little less for the aliens and a little more for the hard-working, tax-paying humans, huh?

Ignore those sentiments. They’re designed to tear us apart, to pit us against each other. Only the powerful win when we start fighting. Learn from what you see instead. Learn that if space can be built for aliens, it can be built for disabled people like you, that this is not a zero-sum game, that your frustration is reasonable but that any advance made can help you get there faster.

Remember that if Sector 12 General Hospital⁵ could have been built to accommodate aliens who breathe chlorine, oxygen, or methane, who communicate through the production of sap or through ripples in their fur, who need different gravitational levels, who have two, four, or twenty eyes, then spaces can be build that accommodate us.

Remember that those who live in the Alien Sector of Babylon 5 call the rest of the ship the Alien Sector. Remember that you, the writer, get to choose the words here. Remember that normal is defined by the world you live in, and that it is not static or immutable, that it can be challenged.

Remember that right now you’re designing a new world to live in.

You don’t have much to go on. You don’t know much about spaceships, and you haven’t seen many people like you aboard the ones you have seen.

Maybe you caught a glimpse of a crewman using a wheelchair aboard the USS Discovery (for once, played by a disabled actor, George Alevizos). Maybe you have read your way through every book of the Vorkosigan saga, recommended to you every time as if there’s nothing else out there.

Mostly, if you see people at all like yourself, you see them with advanced technology. You see Geordi LaForge⁶, his visor providing superior, but nonidentical, vision to that of the other human characters. You see Luke and Anakin Skywalker with their prosthetic hands. Or, if they don’t use assistive technology themselves, then technology is used to rid them of their impairment, to grow replacement legs in days⁷ or to enable them to exist in a virtual space.⁸

Maybe you can imagine yourself using technology like that. You think about how it could enhance your senses, aid your mobility, calm your thoughts. You wonder who would have access to it in this future, perhaps, or if it’s really as good as it seems, but it seems a positive sign to you.

Maybe, instead, the thought worries and frustrates you. Assistive technology is a good thing, of course it is, but you’ve seen so many miracle solutions that are unusable, painful, or exhausting, that work no better than what you’ve learned, perfected, and shared with others, that you’re sceptical. How will they treat you if you can’t use this technology? What if you don’t want it? Is it all just a way to make them more comfortable with you?

You’re wary, too, of these people who can imagine the intricacies of hover chairs but can’t even give you accurate information as to whether there are steps into a building, who won’t turn the music down on request. How can they imagine what these futures will be like for you when they can’t understand what you experience now?

Otherwise, the stories are all about medicalised experiences. Disability arises from injury, intentional or otherwise, or from plague. It’s something to be fought and overcome. It’s something you experience alone, and the answers you look for are changes in your body, not changes in the world.

You probably like some of these stories, find they have edges you can tug at, find you can wrap them around yourself and they fit in more places than they don’t. Maybe some of these stories make you angry, and others you simply laugh at. Even the worst of them assure you that there will be a place for people like you in the future, that you will not be abandoned on a dying Earth, that you can live, that you can fight—for your government or against it—that you can work, that you can build new worlds. That you can explore ocean planets and desolate moons and caves of crystal, planets where the plants are sentient or the very world itself is alive and conscious, that you can fly through space itself, your hands clenched as you steer, or as a passenger, lying on your bunk, watching the stars through your tiny window.

It’s a low bar to aim for; simply being allowed to exist in the places other people do, and you hate that you feel you have to take consolation from the mere possibility of existing when others take it for granted. But right now that future is still open, and it is your future just as much as it is theirs.

You think about these stories when you design your ship. You think about the technology you will have available, and how those who use it will live in your ship. You think about the medical facilities you will have on board, wonder if they are equipped only for emergencies, for normative people facing an abnormal event, or if they will work for people like you.

Maybe the discussions of medical ethics resonate with you. Maybe you dream of that speed and ease of diagnosis, of being believed even when you report symptoms they haven’t heard of before, symptoms that don’t even seem to come from this world. Maybe you would do anything for a cure, maybe you would fight against it with everything you have. Maybe, like for most of us, perhaps, the truth is much more complicated.

Tell these stories with your spaceship, on board your spaceship. But don’t accept that these are the only stories to be told about us.

It’s a lot of work, designing a spaceship. And maybe you love it, feel like it’s what you were born to do; maybe once you start the ideas flow fast, each answer producing three more questions. But maybe you have other things you’d rather be doing; maybe you stumble over the shapes and the numbers, and you see how other people just have the spaceships designed for them, without needing to do all of this work, and you’re already so tired.

You may still have to design this spaceship, even though you shouldn’t have to, but do not let them make you think you have to be grateful for being allocated this patch of emptiness, for being permitted to find a way to exist. Don’t think, when I said to design your own spaceship, I meant you must think it is okay that you have to use every last piece of your precious energy to cobble together a ship from old parts. Don’t think that this means you must carve out your own space because you will never belong in theirs, that you have the right—grudgingly offered—to fly and breathe and eat, but not to pilot and explore and maintain and repair and upgrade.

You can fly alone if you like, and you can fly alone if you have to. But we’re not just designing spaceships here, we’re designing whole universes. Universes where you make that choice rather than it being made for you.

There are people who have looked for this spaceship before. There are people who have designed this sort of spaceship before, or something that comes closer to it. You are not starting with nothing after all.

Sylvia Tilly⁹ is allocated single quarters and nonstandard bedding to enable her to serve aboard the Discovery with a respiratory condition. These low-tech, entirely realistic accommodations are refreshing (though you could be forgiven for wondering if they would have made the effort had she not been the best theoretical engineer at Starfleet Academy).

Xandri Corelel¹⁰ thinks to build a relationship with the spaceship she serves aboard (and is rewarded with coffee!) because she is autistic, not despite it. The ship is not so much designed to meet her needs as chooses to. There are strips of satin sewn inside her sleeves, making even the smallest of spaces well designed for her needs.

The Guildhall on Tiananmen Station¹¹ is described as spartan with heavy use of contrasting colours and precisely spaced chairs because many of the Guild’s members have “visual handicaps or other sensory distortions.” It’s noted that assistive technology is available, but many choose not to use it.

Starting from nothing doesn’t mean bringing nothing with you. Your spaceship can take you to new planets, but you’ll always remember this one. It’s a planet that may be cold and inaccessible, sometimes violent, but you cannot separate yourself from it entirely, and perhaps you don’t want to. You can bring your pain and anger or leave them behind. It’s your choice. But bring your communities. Bring your lessons hard learned. Bring the love they told you that you couldn’t feel, and the art they told you that you could never create.

Do not think you cannot live in new worlds just because you bear the scars of the one you came from.

You’ve designed spaceships before. Or if not spaceships, then wide-open planets with space and clear air and firm ground beneath your wheels. You’ve redesigned your house so you don’t fall climbing out of the shower, you’ve redesigned the train network that takes you to work. You’ve been imagining them all your life, asking over and over: how could this be better?

You’ve realised before now that the social model of disability carries a promise within it: there could be other worlds than this one. A promise that how things are is not how things will always be. It invites us to imagine not merely the removal of specific barriers, but whole other worlds. What would a world look like that did not disable you? What would a world look like that did not disable anyone?

You think about how the Hani¹² ships are designed to be operated by those with claws, how when humans pilot them they have to use prosthetics. You think about disability as a product of our society and environment, the implication that different societies would disable different people in different ways, or not at all.

So often, when you look at the spaceships designed by others, you find yourself there only by metaphor. You find experiences that skate so close to your own that you clutch the edges of the book, emotions you didn’t know you had rising inside you, and yet they will not name them, they do not show people like you. Your humanity is stripped away in the worlds you’d love to go to. You exist as alien, you are identified with robots and telepaths, you are locked away inside analogies. You find representation of yourself and the worlds you could inhabit, dissections of how you live in the world you do inhabit, so often in science fiction, and yet you are so rarely there directly.

You’re torn in how you feel about it. These are the works you love the most, those that saved you, those that helped you understand both yourself and the world around you, that gave you words and stories for experiences you could not put into words and stories—and yet you’re most invisible where you find yourself the most.

It might be because they hate you. It might be because your stories bore them. But perhaps it’s because you’re dangerous. Perhaps it’s because if you can imagine a different world, if you can design a spaceship, you’re not just going to accept how things are here.

You’re going to believe, instead, that this is not the end of history. That this is not the way it’s always been, and it is not the way it always will be. That it is not the only way it can be.

Even to people like you and I, who have so much to gain, that’s a terrifying thought. But it’s a beautiful kind of terrifying.

So: design a spaceship. Design yourself a spaceship.

You have the vacuum of space. Everything else is up to you.

Footnotes
¹ Doctor Who (television series): Season 14, Story 2 “The Hand of Fear” (1976).
² The Gaim from Babylon 5 (television series), among many others.
³ Startide Rising. David Brin. New York: Bantam, 1983.
⁴ Babylon 5 (1994-1998).
⁵ Hospital Station. James White. New York: Ballantine, 1962.
⁶ Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
⁷ The Orville: Season 1, Episode 5, “Pria” (2017).
⁸ Star Trek: Season 1, Episode 16, “The Menagerie, Part II” (1966).
⁹ Star Trek: Discovery. Season 1, Episode 3, “Context is for Kings” (2017).
¹⁰ Failure to Communicate. Kaia Sønderby. Going To Mars, 2017.
¹¹ This Alien Shore. C.S. Friedman. New York: DAW, 1998.
¹² The Pride of Chanur. C.J. Cherryh. New York: DAW, 1981.

(Content Note for discussion of self-harm and suicide.)

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley taught me that gangly, self-conscious girls could become heroes; not damsels, but knights and dragon slayers. Robert Heinlein’s Friday introduced me to pansexuality, sex without shame, and the joy of multiple partners.

Like most, I discovered myself through the role models I had been given. In my majority heterosexual and extremely patriarchal world, few seemed like safe harbors. I felt abnormal. I wasn’t what everyone wanted me to be, and I was miserable when I tried. So when I read characters that didn’t just feel like me but also achieved their goals while remaining happily divergent, I felt like I’d been thrown a lifeline I hadn’t realized I needed.

I wanted to be strong like Aerin. I wanted to be free like Friday.

All I had to do was grow up, goals firmly in sight.

I had no role model for the largest obstacle I’d face next.

Puberty unleashed wild swings I couldn’t understand. Depression set in, getting worse every year. Reading, always my escapism of choice, kept me distracted from the world. Sometimes, I found Aerins or Fridays, characters who took parts of me and reminded me that Yes! I could! But somehow, those stories served only those pieces already self-aware, and left the greater whole of me feeling more alone than ever after. I’d wanted so badly to seize my world the way the protagonists I’d read about had, and I couldn’t. I hated myself so much. I was a failure, broken somehow.

I cut myself because numbness followed the pain; a sharp sting followed by a second of relief. In only a couple days, I’d bounce into manic productivity and finish projects, start new ones, ignore food and sleep until I crashed back into bleak depression again.

I had no control. I grew up, I became an adult, and every year, I lost a little more hope. A little more will to keep trying.

I’d never be Aerin. I’d never be Friday. I’d never be any of the protagonists I admired so much. I couldn’t cope.

It took thirty-four years and a suicide plan to understand just how desperate I was. With the last of my strength, I made an appointment with a psychiatrist.

Being diagnosed with Type II Bipolar Disorder felt like both a relief and an anchor. I was scared. As abnormal as I’d always thought. I’d never read about it in a book, had never seen it on the screen. How was I supposed to go about living with this? Research told me I’d be okay if I was careful, but I stood alone in my world and knew the monsters would come for me again.

When a real world role model appeared in that isolated existence, I thought I’d found the mental version of Aerin and Friday. Somebody who paved the way in the dark.

The late Carrie Fisher, a determined advocate for mental health awareness, became my light. Her open struggles and visible triumphs kindled a new hope that maybe I could be as brave and candid as she had been. I wish I’d learned about her sooner. Not as Leia, the princess, but as the real life warrior she was outside the role that branded her.

Why did I have to wait so long? In fiction, I’d learned about sex, violence, cultures, religions, genocide, solar systems, and stars, but had never seen my own disability. Why?

Science fiction shapes generations—how we think, the way we act. It influences the careers we choose and our thirst for knowledge. It cautions against the worst of our impulses, and quietly teaches us empathy. Without knowing it, we are slowly acclimated to people and beliefs that live outside our rigid monocultures.

A genre that was once the domain of white men has become the forefront of a battlefield for representation—queer folx, people of color, women, and more. Every day, new books and new characters that reflect the world we live in are released. New authors delve into centuries old topics blatantly whitewashed by the aging white genre, no longer confined to the old guard’s self-prescribed limitations.

We have come so far, and we fight so hard. But we have so much more to share, a whole other curtain to peel back.

Neurodivergent communities exist, but we are excluded from the stories authors and screenwriters tell. So many of us are outspoken—and judging by the amount of shares and retweets and comments we get, we are heard.

So when do we get to fly the Millennium Falcon?

Mental illness is so often invisible. We may have service dogs to help us, caretakers to mind us, medication to keep us as stable as possible, but we are still worthy of our place in the future. More, we are worthy of our starring roles rather than relegated to the role of plot device, or a footnote to another protagonist’s journey. Today, in the rare case a neurodivergent character is included, we serve as movable pieces in the service of somebody else’s agency. The new damsels, the ongoing villains. We are incarcerated, or we are fixed.

It’s bullshit. I am no damsel and if I am a villain, it’s sure as hell not because I’m “crazy.” I refuse to be your reason for striving. After thirty odd years of struggling to live, after a year of working my ass off to be the strong person I have more than proven that I am, I deserve better. We are all real people, and we are capable. Neurodivergent characters can colonize Mars, explore new worlds, seduce aliens, and live with our disability. Every single one of us battling our internal, invisible monsters are goddamn heroes.

People like Carrie, loud and proud, deserve to be written. Her efforts put mental health awareness in the spotlight, and I’ll be damned if we let that fade back into the dark. Characters like us, fighting every day, need to be read.

How do we do it?

The same way we have torn holes in the bigoted boundaries of race and color and sexuality. Slowly, surely, we write the stories that reflect the world we live in, and publishers determined to make the changes we need acquire them. Publish them. Market them.

Together, we have destroyed the common narrative. Queers have destroyed it. People of color have destroyed it. Women destroy it.

Now, neurodivergency is seizing its rightful place in the future.

We are not your platforms, your aliens, your Other. We are the sum of our whole, invisible disability and all, and we are not damsels. I am an incredible story. We deserve our incredible stories.

So get out there and tell them. Buy them. Publish them.

Read them.

The genre can accept us or it can be dragged, bloody and screaming, into enlightenment. We aren’t going away. We’re just going to get louder and louder, linking elbows with our compatriots in the battle for representation.

One industry. One world. One book at a time.

So very many readers.

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

I’m at a local science fiction convention, riding in an elevator with this little boy of about six and his mother. I am dressed sharp because I’ve been making public appearances all day. I’m wearing my big dark wrap around glasses because the burning summer sun shining in through the big windows all over the hotel convention space is dazzling my diseased eyes. I’m wielding my white cane because without it, well, things get interesting. Mostly for innocent bystanders who have no idea I can’t see them, or at least see them clearly.

The boy scrutinizes me despite his mother’s whispered admonishments. “Timmy, stop it! Don’t stare. Stop it.”

I look straight ahead, trying not to laugh because it’s the loudest whisper ever and we are in an elevator. Finally, to his mother’s horror, the boy tugs at my sleeve. “Mister?”

I look down at him. “Yeah?” I can guess what is coming next. While it has never happened to me before, I know other blind SF fans and professionals, regardless of gender, have been asked some variant of this question.

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

I have to tell you, I have a deep and abiding love of Daredevil. As a kid forced to deal with the knowledge that I was slowly, steadily becoming blind and then given no follow up care or counseling after the diagnosis, Daredevil was my hero, my sanctuary, and my hope.

As an adult, I find him problematic. As a reader and consumer of SF, I’m faced with the fact that Daredevil doesn’t live the life of a blind person, that he doesn’t reflect the experience of any blind person I know.

But I’m also faced with that fact that most SF cannot claim to have done any better. I’ve encountered too much science fiction and fantasy where the blind character is an object to be cured by science, magic, or by being turned into a vampire. Too many disabled characters play The Wise Mentor. Gruff on the outside, they have a golden heart within and will guide The Hero on his journey until killed by The Villain to show just how villainous the villain is (insert mustache twirling, puppy-kicking, and random tying of women to railroad tracks here).  Too often, a blind character doesn’t live in their blindness. They fight crime and drive cars and do all the things sighted people can because they have special powers, supernatural abilities, or science fiction tech. They see into the future or are depicted as sporting sharpened senses because of their blindness.

I live in this world. I can’t toss my white cane aside when I need to spring into action: the cane goes with me everywhere. I travel around my city on public transportation. My other senses are not supernaturally sharper because I am blind. I simply pay better attention to those other senses. It’s a learned skill. I live within my blindness every day, and I want to read about fictional characters who also live with and within their blindness.

When I began writing fiction and plays for publication and production, I made a mindful decision to write the characters I wanted to read. I decided I would be “that blind author and playwright from Minnesota,” would wear that mantle proudly, and my blindness would inform my fiction.

This is my job now, to write stories where the disabled’s presence in the narrative is not driven by other characters’ (or the author’s) need to fix them. Disability is part of who they are, as opposed to being their identifying characteristic. It is important to me to show the audience the joy, pathos, and everything in-between that makes any character, disabled or not, endearingly, heart-rendingly human.

I try to write the characters I want to read. The kind I wanted to be when I was a kid. The kind I still need as an adult.

I might find Daredevil problematic these days, might roll my eyes at his “radar sense” allowing him to see the world and toss his mobility cane aside at will despite his blindness, but when a child tugs on my sleeve and asks, “Mister, are you Daredevil?” what can a blind author do? I don’t know this child’s story. I don’t know what secrets and demons he might be carrying all alone, even at his age. All I know is, in this moment I have a choice, and I remember how much I needed heroes to believe in as a child. How much I still need heroes to believe in as an adult.

I look down and put a finger over my mouth and his face lights up in pure joy as I say in a low whisper, “Shh. You can’t tell anyone, promise?”

He nods agreement, eyes wide. The elevator doors open and he and his mother exit. I will probably never see him again, but…

“Mister? Mister, are you Daredevil?”

Hell yeah, kid. I am Daredevil.