Ill be honest: When I first learned about Netflixs new horror series The Midnight Club, I was nervous. As a wheelchair user myself, one might think I would be excited to see a character using a power wheelchair prominently displayed in the promotional images but Ive learned to assume the worst when it comes to disability representation in the media.

I was intrigued to learn that the showrunners of The Midnight Club deliberately avoided the practice of cripping up (that is, casting able-bodied actors in disabled roles on stage or screen). Instead, the character of Anya is played by Ruth Codd , an Irish actor and amputee who previously made a name for herself discussing everything from disability to her work as a barber on TikTok.

Created by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong and based on Christopher Pikes 1994 YA novel series, The Midnight Club follows a group of teens with terminal diagnoses who decide to spend the final months of their lives at Brightcliffe, an unconventional hospice near Seattle. Instead of devoting their lives to fighting for expensive cures that may never come, the residents lay down their weapons and live in the moment. At Brightcliffe, mysteries (and, maybe, ghosts) lurk in the hallways, but one thing is unchanging: Every night, the young residents meet at midnight to drink wine and swap original ghost stories.

In many ways, I felt a certain kinship with the Brightcliffe teens as they lament being pitied or ostracized by their able-bodied peers at a formative stage in their lives. I became a quadriplegic after a spinal cord injury in my early 20s, and spent several months in an inpatient rehabilitation program for spinal cord injury survivors many of whom were my age. While Brightcliffe had more bumps in the night than my hospital, we often relied on the same gallows humor and defiant spirit to help each other through the trauma of near-death experiences and our newfound disabled identities.

For obvious reasons, I related most to Anya, who defies the predictable tropes that often hold back disabled characters from full-fledged characterization. In many productions, the camera views wheelchair users the same way able-bodied audience members often do that is, with shock and a bit of awkward distance. Its common for the camera to pan up the wheelchair dramatically as part of a grand reveal.