But when you're a little kid, you kind of expect everything to be balanced out, like it is in the movies.

Like the good guys always win over the bad guys, or that there's always going to be some happy ending at the end.

But I think real life is very different from that.

I'm Nora McNeerney, and this is Terrible Thanks for asking.

And that was Hannah Divini, and that lovely accent that your hearing is Australian, and we all love Australian accent, don't we?

Hannah and I met the way so many of us meet, the internet.

Hannah at the time was 17. She listened to the podcast, and she sent me a message, and then we just started messaging on Instagram, and then moved it to WhatsApp.

We sent texts, we sent voice notes, we would sometimes, you know, a video call, and Hannah called me her fairy godmother, but I really think she meant her fairy, internet sister, because so many of her thoughts and feelings felt like reliving, and replaying my own teenage years with one big addition, which is that Hannah is also disabled.

I often show that being disabled is like having a full-time job, but you don't get any breaks, and you don't get paid.

Kind of like most media internships.

The job that Hannah doesn't get a break from is having cerebral palsy.

I was born three months early, so my birth date is supposed to be in November, but it's in August.

And basically when I was born, they were told that I had a bleed on my brain, that there was cysts on my brain as well, and that those cysts would act like black holes, which basically means that when they dissolved, so did the parts of my brain that they were attached to.

And for years, we were like, what do you mean? That kind of sounds like I don't have as much brain as I'm supposed to.

And then recently, I had to have an MRI, and we pulled the stands out, and we could actually see the holes.

We were like, oh, okay, that's what that is.

When I was born, I was diagnosed with a thing called pariventricular leukemalacia, which is basically a condition where it eats away at the white matter in your brain. And that's what left me with cerebral palsy.

Cerebral palsy exists on a spectrum. When Hannah was a baby, the doctors gave her parents the worst case scenario. They said that Hannah would likely never walk, talk, or feed herself.

There's everyone from those people who kind of walk a little upside in and maybe don't have use of one hand to people who can't talk, can't move, can't really do anything on their own.

Except breathe and swallow, and sometimes even that is difficult. I guess it's just luck. There's no reason that I didn't end up that way. There's nothing that I did that they didn't do or that their parents didn't do. But I'm kind of luckily in the middle of the spectrum.

Like obviously my legs and arms don't work, but I have a great advantage and I'm well able to communicate for myself.

Hannah grew up around her two young sisters who are as Hannah describes able bodied and classmates who were also mostly able bodied people.

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