How I learned to party in a wheelchair on Friday nights

Nights out with friends weren’t always this complicated. In my early twenties in New York, Friday nights meant stumbling out of cramped Lower East Side bars at 2am, heels clicking against wet pavements as we laughed our way to our favourite late-night taco joint. We’d dance until our feet ached and often catch the sunrise from misted taxi windows. Life moved with the easy rhythm of youth—decisions made on a whim, adventures born from boredom, freedom taken for granted.

Then, at 23, everything changed. After a serious motorcycle-taxi accident in Uganda, where I’d moved from New York to work, my world turned upside down. The traumatic brain injury severely impacted my movements on my right side. When I woke three months later, I couldn’t move my right arm or hand, and damaged nerve pathways blocked motor signals to my right leg, too.

What had been a strong, independent body, able to climb stairs, dance for hours and navigate any terrain, became one that had to relearn the most basic movements through rigorous physical therapy. Having lived away from my family across continents, happily with friends, I had to move back under my parents’ roof. The injury also affected the muscles used for speech, slowing my pace and slurring my words.

Six years after my accident, I enrolled in university in the U.S. to pursue an MBA. I wasn’t at Yale only to get a degree; I was also determined to reclaim a ‘normal’ social life. I was using a quad cane to walk indoors, but ventured into the world on a power wheelchair. This meant calendarising my weekends like an army general. Each outing required immense planning, patience and delicate negotiation: with my own body, with exclusionary infrastructure, and often, with my mother, who had accompanied me to university. Naturally, she carried her own fears about letting me out into a world that hasn’t learned to make space for people like me.

When I stopped to think about it, the contrast was brutal. I’d gone from spontaneously meeting friends anywhere to researching every venue in advance. Were the bathrooms accessible? Were there steps to enter? Could my power wheelchair fit through the door?

Nights out meant travelling in groups so friends could help navigate crowded spaces and accepting that my soft and slightly slurred speech required patient ears. I would jostle through the crowds with friends flanking me, carving out space for my wheelchair, until we escaped to a dimmer back room where conversation didn’t require shouting over music that made my already-challenged speech even harder to understand.