Whenever anything really great happens, I feel sorry for myself because my dad isn’t around to celebrate with me. He may not have known off the top of his head what a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship was, let alone the enormous financial and psychological boost it gives a writer, but if I told him it was for a story about us he would have been pleased, and probably a little shocked.

I spent hours interviewing him in his hospital bed, a cheap microphone plugged into the jack of my iPod. While my brother asked about girls Dad had dated in college, I stuck to philosophical questions. I wanted to know what it felt like inside his ALS-weakened body. His dreams fascinated me. Was he still walking around like normal in them? Did he think of himself as “disabled?”

We’d started to use that word with each other: disabled. It was a word I never would have used with friends or at the newspaper where I worked. Admitting the physical limitations related to my mild cerebral palsy would discredit me. You couldn’t be a real writer and have a disability, not without an asterisk by your name.

My interviews with Dad were the first chance I ever had to talk to someone about what it’s like to move through the world with a brain and body that don’t work like they’re supposed to. It was only years after his death that I sat down to write about CP, but when I did it was with the courage of his example: his open-heartedness and curiosity, his patience with himself and me.

If winning an NEA grant has shown me one thing, it’s that the fears that surrounded including my disability in my work were overblown. I’m a writer. No asterisk required.