You are a kid, but your life -- as short as it has thus far been -- has felt quite long. You are not like other kids, and you never will be. Your one close friend acts like she understands what it's like to be you, but she doesn't. You exhaust yourself, always pushing past the diminished limits of your physical self to keep up with her. Your biggest fear is that one day, she will grow tired of you and leave, and you will be alone again. So you stop trying to tell her how hard it is to be you. You give up. No one will ever know how much you suffer inside.
While you might think I'm solely describing Skeleton Crew's KB -- and in part, I am -- I'm also reliving my own story from a long time ago. As excited as I was for this show to air, and as much as it has met and occasionally exceeded my expectations thus far, I never expected it to speak directly to what I experienced as a kid. All I could think about, as KB opened up about what it was like to live with a body she could neither control nor fully repair, is how much I needed her when I was younger -- and how kids watching this will forever have a reference for what it is like to endure what KB lives with on a daily basis.
I wasn't like other kids, and they all knew it. So I constantly tried to fit in by following the crowd and doing what everyone else was doing. I put myself at risk of physical harm more times than I'll ever even to this day admit to my parents because of how badly I needed friends. Growing up, I had one -- and while she claimed to know exactly what I could and couldn't do, she knew only what I had the energy to explain. The rest of it I kept to myself. It felt exhausting and humiliating to constantly remind her that I was different. Everything she did, I tried to do too. At the time, I thought I was being brave or strong or -- I hate this phrase, but this is what I believed then -- well-adjusted to what other kids considered "normal."
But of course, I wasn't "normal," whatever that meant. I distinctly remember the moment no one would ever see me as normal again, during one of those stubborn occasions when I tried to do what everyone else was doing and ended up laying in the middle of the school gym floor with everyone staring at me and no one but my one friend helping me. I'd pushed my body too far, and I paid the price.
KB's storyline in episode 6 felt eerily parallel to my experience as a kid. But that's also what made me realize that, despite what I may have thought back then, I couldn't have been the only differently-abled kid struggling to keep up. This is a much more universal experience among people like me than I ever knew, and it took a Star Wars TV show to really hit that point home for me. Darn my internalized ableism. We all have it. Even those of us who grew up not knowing what being "abled" even meant.
I needed this story then, but I'm so glad kids will have this story now. I hope it shows them, perhaps for the first time, that they are not alone. That real friends won't leave them for voicing their limitations. That there are dozens of ways to have adventures and explore galaxies without breaking down. When we say Star Wars is for everyone, this is what we mean. Everyone needs a KB to show them that they don't just exist -- they are important. Their stories matter. They are not just sidekicks. They are worth so much more.