I spent years trying to fit into sports that weren’t mine. Volleyball, lacrosse, soccer – I played them all because that’s what the popular girls did, and I desperately wanted to belong. I was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa at nine, and by middle school my night blindness made me feel like an outsider in my own life. I kept showing up to practices I hated, hoping that if I could just be athletic enough, maybe people would forget I was different.

Then I found rowing. A 5:45am Learn to Row class during sophomore year of high school changed everything. I’d found a sport where my vision wasn’t an automatic disadvantage. I could compete on equal footing. By 2019, I was standing on a World Championships podium with a bronze medal and the American flag over my shoulders.

But in 2023, I didn’t make the selection for the Paris Paralympics. I stepped away from national team rowing, questioning whether I was even an athlete without that status. For months, I wondered if my competitive career was over.

Then in 2024, I was invited to join the first US para coastal rowing team. We raced in Peru, Costa Rica, at the World Championships. The waves, the chaos, the pure joy of it – coastal rowing reignited everything I’d loved about the sport.

It is all built toward 2025 trials. The year before, I’d narrowly missed the beach sprint event, placing second and racing endurance instead. This year, my teammate and I were ready to win. Then everything stopped. World Rowing had barred visually impaired athletes from coastal competition. The decision had been made quietly months earlier – a bylaw buried in a block of changes at a March congress. The news didn’t reach us until weeks before trials. No precedent. No warning. No explanation beyond vague “safety concerns” they couldn’t clarify. There was one path forward: US Rowing had to appeal on my behalf. I asked them to fight for me. They refused.

Not making the Paris selection made me question my worth. The coastal exclusion clarified it. I’m not just fighting to get myself back in the boat – I’m fighting because decisions about para athletes shouldn’t be made without para athletes. Because governing bodies can’t exclude entire groups based on disability alone and call it “safety.” Because if they can do this to us, they can do it to anyone. This isn’t about me anymore. It’s about making sure the next generation doesn’t lose the sports they love to ignorance and assumption.

Right now, I’m training for this winter’s ski season and still fighting for VI athletes to be reinstated in coastal. I’m figuring out what it means to be an athlete when the rules keep changing and the doors keep closing. Some days are harder than others. But I keep showing up – on the water, on the snow, in the fight.

Because I’m often the only blind female skier on the course, sometimes the only para athlete at all. And if I don’t show up, that opportunity disappears. Not just for me, but for everyone who comes after.

The story isn’t finished. I don’t know yet how it ends. But I know I’m still here, still racing, still fighting. And that has to be enough.