Kayla Cromer

Authentic Representation. Growing up, women with disabilities, especially in autism, were very rarely represented on screen. My earliest memory of a project was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, with Leonardo DiCaprio. He gave an amazing performance, but still, he isn’t on the spectrum. And then more TV shows started coming out with just male characters. So I was missing the female aspect that I wanted to see. And so did millions of viewers.

If I could give advice to someone with a disability, it would be to accept your difference, embrace it. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need — whether it’s accommodations or if you just need help by any means. Accepting your disability is never easy, but having a good support system in place always helps. For me, once I embraced it, once I accepted that it’s going to always be a part of my life, it just changed my perceptions of things of, “You know, my brain just thinks differently. That’s all it is, I’m still a person and everything is just going to come together.” I’m not going to guarantee it’s going to be easy because most of the time it’s not, it can take a long time, but everything’s going to be okay.

The most personal scene in Everything's Gonna Be Okay is definitely the eulogy in the pilot episode because I did my grandma's eulogy, my Grandma Shirley, when she passed away. I wanted to incorporate humor into the eulogy for Matilda's dad because sometimes humor is the best medicine in a moment of sadness or tragedy to just lift people's spirits up.