I lived with an undiagnosed, debilitating autoimmune disorder most of my life. I was finally diagnosed in August of 2021. It’s difficult for a child to believe that nothing is wrong with them when they end up at the doctor’s, at Urgent Care, and occasionally the Emergency Room far more frequently than their peers. It’s difficult for an adult to believe they are being taken seriously when doctors agree that something may be wrong, but refuse to run any further tests because the tests they’ve run have all come back normal. It’s difficult to believe that you aren’t disabled when you are drowning in medical bills and constantly calling your health insurance company to verify and fight for coverage. It’s difficult for your coworkers to believe that you aren’t a hypochondriac when you are constantly calling out of work and ask for workplace accommodations, but can only provide proof of discombobulated symptoms instead of a diagnosed disability. More difficult than all of those, though, is to gradually lose your mobility to increasing pain. I was recently diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). Both are rare, difficult to diagnose, and virtually invisible to the untrained eye. Both disorders, left untreated, can cause untold physical damage to the body ranging from limb dislocations and organ damage all the way to anaphylaxis. Both disorders require lifelong intensive medical care to treat, and I am now raging an uphill battle against three decades of untreated damage. I returned to University in 2019 and was in my second semester back when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I was elated to be granted full-time online University courses for that year. The return to campus has proved challenging. My University campus is built into a massive hill and is a huge physical challenge for any student with disabilities, including myself. The University and my professors offer marginal disability accommodations and face-value assistance to disabled students, but the tone is always dismissive, and the unspoken narrative is “be grateful for the help we do give you, and quit asking for anything more.” My experience with disability on a college campus has taught me that the stigma against disabled people is invasive, pervasive, and insidious. Our society shuns the disabled. It prefers we remain unseen, unheard from, and tucked away. Abled society does not want to hear that just “meeting our basic needs” is not enough and never will be. Disabled people have hopes and dreams too, and we have the imagination and creativity to solve problems in ways that abled people can’t even conceive of. Abled society needs our talents, and disabled people deserve to be treated equally, not merely adequately. I have started the first organization for disabled students at UMBC – the Disabled Student Union. Our purpose is two-fold: to create social community for disabled students and allies, and to organize activism around disabled accessibility and accommodations on our campus. We will no longer be treated like second-class citizens, and we will rise up to demand change. This scholarship is essential to the continuation of my goals as I am an adult learner who is completing further education solely off of student loans, as my disability forced me to quit my former full-time retail job. I intend to go into disability studies and disability activism and continue my pursuit of equal access and treatment for disabled people on a national level. Your decision to help me reach my goals will have widespread impact as I go on to make tangible, visible improvement in the lives of my fellow disabled persons.