Keah Brown - The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me

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An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Copyright 2019 by Keah Brown

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Paperback edition August 2019

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Interior design by Laura Levatino

Cover design by James Iacobelli

Cover photograph by Katelyn Shufelt

Author photograph courtesy of Katelyn Shufelt Photography

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-0054-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-0055-1 (ebook)

To Vera Brown and Scott Brown

We did it!

I love you.

I miss you.

Thank you.

Hey, friends! My name is Keah and Im cute as hell. I love popular culture, music, cheesecake, cheeseburgers, and pizza. I dance in cars with my friends and again at their weddings. We sing songs down store aisles and play cards for hours. I live-tweet TV shows and laugh at my own jokes. I text my friend Danielle Sepulveres about Christmas movies and watch the Hallmark Channel for hours. When I am alone, I thoroughly enjoy playing The Sims . I am obsessed with lipsticks and I am trying and failing to learn the art of applying eye shadow. (I hope that you read all of that in the same vein as the intro to the Nickelodeon show The Wild Thornberrys, because that was my intent, though I dont think it lines up quite as nicely as I would have liked it to.)

My point is that I do all these things in a disabled body, not because I am brave or bold , but because I like doing them and I would love doing them in any body. I adapt to the world because I have to do so in order to live. My disability is cerebral palsy, and it affects the right side of my body, effectively altering my motor skills and reaction time as well as the strength of my bones on that side. I dont do things in spite of anythingexcept for maybe the people who told me Id be nothing and no one. I dont mind being an inspiration if it is for a valid reason, such as admiring how many slices of pizza I ate, an essay or an article I wrote, my clothing choices, or how quickly I can learn the lyrics to songs. As long as the inspiration doesnt come with pity or self-congratulatory pats on the back, I am all for it. Let my love for cheesecake inspire you the way it will one day inspire a nation. At least you can say you were there first.

Before I hop on a soapbox, let me stop and share some fun but key facts about myself. Lets start with music: Paramore and Demi Lovato are my favorite musicians, and music has been a huge part of my journey so far. I tell myself that my love for TV is balanced only by my love for books, so its fitting that I became a writer, in order to write about TV and fight for proper representation in media for people who look like me, and a journalist, in order to talk to musicians, writers, and actors. I love doing both, so dont even bother asking me to choose. I like getting lost in other peoples worlds for a whileit takes the pressure off having to answer for my disabled body and sit in the contempt that some people have for itand I like talking to people and figuring out how and why they became who they became. I hate winter even though I live in western New York, where it snows so much that it has felt like a personal attack on my life, for all my life.

Apart from the weather where I live, my life experience is far exceeding my expectations. I never thought anyone would want to hear what I had to say until I started telling stories and talking about the things and people that matter to me. The truth is this: Ive always felt average, plain, and wrong, but there is nothing average, plain, or wrong about me, and it took me only half my life so far to figure that out. I wrote an entire book and you are gearing up to read it. How cool is that? So cool.

Sometimes, it is beautiful to prove yourself wrong.

A thing that happens when youre tasked with writing a book is that you start to learn new things about yourself while you write to contend with your past. Who I am at present is a person who loudly and proudly gives a damn about herself, other people, and the world at large. Caring is fun, and I find that it has made me both happier and healthier, though I wish that I could care less about the opinions of naysayers. Rome wasnt built in a day and all that, so Im guessing there is still time to change and reach my final form. When writing this book, I had to remind myself that who I had been in the past is important, too, and I try my hardest to remember that, instead of hiding her away out of embarrassment. In any case, I am unable to go back in time and tell her what I think she knows now. If I did that, though, who knows if any of this would still be possible? I wont let wishful time travel get in the way of my experience.

There is still so much left to learn. One of the biggest things that I am discovering is that I should learn to sit in my joy longer and not immediately apologize for being proud and happy. My happiness and joy are still relatively new because I started embracing them only four years ago, and while they are still growing, changing, and taking form in new and exciting ways, where I am now and where I am going are possible only because of where I was.

What I can see now is that I was always cute. I look at old pictures and see a girl whose smile was wide and face was full but who didnt see her beauty. I smiled widely for a girl who didnt like waking up and seeing herself, because she didnt want anyone else to know the truth, which she let out only when she was alone. It is my belief that sometimes we keep secrets and hide our deepest insecurities because we believe that if other people found them out they would agree and believe them to be true, too. At least, this was why I tried my hardest not to let on how depressed and angry I was. (But Im certain now that I wasnt as good at hiding my feelings as I thought I was.)