In my life, I never planned to climb a mountain. It was never a dream or life pursuit. I’m an active person, but mountain climbing? Never my thing.
But, here I am, one week away from traveling to Tanzania and scaling the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. Mt. Kilimanjaro is a picturesque behemoth – standing tall and domineering over Africa’s landscape at nearly 20,000 feet. By the time I reach the top, I will have passed through five distinct ecological climates.
So, what convinced me to train for the last two years and dedicate my life to this climb? My hope to change the way the world views disability through story.
I’m climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with my documentary production company, BirdMine, for our first big film, MEANDERING SCARS.
The journey here began in 2020 after I met Erika Bogan, a North Carolina woman paralyzed in a domestic violence incident who is climbing the mountain to raise awareness about suicide in the disability community.
But my trajectory to this moment really began at birth, after being born into a family where disability – both developmental and physical – was central to our lives.
My older sister Becky is severely cognitively disabled, and my grandmother used a wheelchair and other mobility devices because of multiple sclerosis, a disease that slowly deteriorated her body.
As a child, I saw firsthand both my sister’s and my grandmother’s struggle. Not their struggle with disability, but the difficulty they faced being disabled in a world built without them in mind – a world built against them.
I can’t count the number of times my mom and I struggled to get my grandmother into restaurants, stores, and doctor’s offices – either because her wheelchair wouldn’t fit, there was no accessible entrance, or the parking designated for people with disabilities was taken by nondisabled people.
And the attitudes we faced about disability? Saying they were unkind is too kind. I’ve lost friends because they were “scared” of my sister. I grew up hearing the R-word like it was regular vocabulary. There were so many times people in stores teased my sister, pretty blatantly, in front of our faces. It happened enough that my mom, an artist, painted us shirts; mine said, “my sister is autistic, what’s your problem?”
My sister is vocal but not verbal, meaning she can’t speak but can make noise and communicate in other ways. Sometimes, she makes sounds at inopportune times, like during our synagogue prayer services or at events and ceremonies. There were moments when we were scolded as a family for her “disruption” and asked to leave.
Time after time, my grandmother, sister, and family were excluded from society; we were made to feel unequal because of our family dynamic and because we embraced disability. All because we didn’t hide members of our family.
We forced the world – a place that encourages the concealment of disability – to see us in all our unique beauty.
When I got older, that is what I set out to do professionally. I became a journalist and advocate as a way to change the way the world views disability. During my tenure in television, I won a Catalyst For Change award for all my work focused on the disability community. I received an Emmy nomination for a story focused on this community, too. I’ve written stories for ForbesWomen, HuffPo, and other publications, all focused on disability.
Storytelling and writing in news eventually led me to co-found a documentary production company, BirdMine, as a way to tell more profound, long-form stories focused on disability and all marginalized communities.
And that led me to meet Erika Bogan in 2020, who became the focus of our first significant documentary and why I will be flying to Africa in just a few days to climb Kilimanjaro.
When I first met Erika, it was to potentially film her for a series BirdMine was thinking of producing about people with disabilities making an impact in the fitness industry. An acquaintance told me about Erika’s love for Crossfit and obstacle course racing (Spartan), and we thought she’d be perfect to be highlighted.
Little did I know that this conversation would change my life.
At the end of our hour or so discussion over Zoom, she haphazardly mentioned that she planned to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro as we were about to log off.
I think my response was, “excuse me, can you repeat that?”
From there our plan to tell fitness related disability stories morphed into MEANDERING SCARS, a full-length feature documentary about Erika’s life and her road to climb Kilimanjaro.
What attracted my business partner, Kody Leibowitz, and me to Erika’s story was not so much about her Kilimanjaro adventure but her ‘why’ – why she planned to scale the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. Erika told us that during her life, especially after becoming disabled due to domestic violence, she struggled with depression, anxiety, and suicide ideation. She almost lost her own life to suicide and had countless friends – mostly disabled friends – die by taking their own lives. She wanted to spread a message to the world that this is a significant problem but one that is never spoken about because people with disabilities are seen as burdens within society.
From there, Kody and I discovered that she is right: research on suicide in the disability community is minimal and underfunded. We found only two researchers within the entire country who focus their work on suicide and the disability community.
Erika hopes to shed light on this fact and why people with disabilities become depressed and suicidal. (Usually, it is not about their disability, but because of attitudes towards disability and the financial strain of being disabled within a broken system that devalues disabled lives).
Kody and I believe immensely in Erika’s story and her mission, and we decided to use our platform to help her to tell her story with the hope of spreading awareness and saving lives.
And again, that leads me to where I am today: with jitters and butterflies just days out from one of my most challenging few weeks.
After more than a year-and-a-half of shooting with Erika, we will be filming and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with her and members of her team. We will trudge through cultivated agriculture lands, a rainforest, heath and moorland, and alpine desert while eventually experiencing depleted oxygen in the atmosphere to hopefully reach the summit – an arctic biome – 19,341 feet above sea level.
We will film Erika in her wheelchair as she makes her way up this spectacular mountain, proving to the world and to herself that disability knows no bounds.
It’s the trip of a lifetime, and one I definitely never expected or intended to take before meeting Erika Bogan. But I’ll do just about anything to tell a good story, especially one that could change how the world views disability and create a more fair and equal society.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey – financially, emotionally, and mentally – to tell the story of MEANDERING SCARS.