Darlings, this is difficult for me. In fact, I’ve been trying to work up to writing this essay since the beginning of last summer. There’s the question of how open and honest to be, and there’s the question of how much this will hurt.

I love Brittany for a million reasons. I find out a lot of those reasons as I watch Hemo’s performance, and I find out a lot of them as I write for Brittany or read any of dozens of beautiful stories.

But why I began writing for her was for a very personal reason.

At the end of the summer, almost a year and a half ago, one of my closest friends in the whole world died. It was very sudden, and more than a little senseless. She had made it through cancer, then caught pneumonia in the hospital while recovering from a surgery.

When I say she was one of my closest friends, what I mean is that I spent about half my waking hours with her for four years—I took care of her, and we joked about being the two-headed monster from Sesame Street, always within about ten inches of each other, sometimes pulling in different directions, sometimes arguing, frequently finishing each other’s sentences, and laughing the same laugh. I was the part of her that could stand up and walk across a room to get a book, and she was the part of me that knew when I was tired. She knew me better than anyone, and I mean that. She knew all kinds of things about me that I could never say out loud.

So why Brittany?

People thought a lot of things about my sweet girl. She had a hell of a time getting a sentence out that wasn’t a non sequitur. She could come across as not having much idea of what was going on.

She had many challenges that are the exact opposite of Brittany’s: she was wheelchair bound, had partial facial paralysis, partial vocal cord paralysis, ataxia (shaking hands), poor eyesight and partial deafness. She stuttered and tended to repeat parts of her sentences until she could get them right.

But dear god. She was also brilliant. She had one of the darkest, wittiest, most cynical, sweetest and daffiest senses of humor I’ve ever run into. She liked to mess with people’s heads when she knew they thought she was stupid. She didn’t edit for strangeness: she had almost died and lost almost everything that she had had. She wasn’t going to waste time editing everything she said. She was a singer before the brain tumor; after, she had vocal cord paralysis and it was much harder. She had been a dancer before; after, she walked as if she was drunk because the surgery knocked out her sense of balance. She had been a sketch artist; after, her hands shook so badly it was hard for her to write legibly. She used to be able to memorize any song or movie after hearing or seeing it once; after, she had a hard time remembering things that I told her more than once, even within a few minutes of hearing it.

But as much as these things hurt her, what bothered her most was the separation she felt with almost everyone because of their perception of her intelligence. She was obscenely lonely.

Darlings, when I say that she was one of the closest human beings in the world to me, partly what I mean is that the inside of her head and the inside of mine were remarkably similar. This has to be true, because she and I laughed constantly and always at the same things and for the same reasons. Her sense of whimsy and mine matched up. Her sense of compassion and social justice and sensitivity and outrage were delicate things that I understand in the way I understand whatever of those qualities I have in myself.

I began to write Brittany because the inside of my head is so similar to my girl’s that I hoped I could offer a glimpse of what thoughts and feelings might be going on behind a blank gaze and a very strange sense of what to say when. When I write Brittany, she is almost entirely me, narrated with Heather Morris’s voice in my head and with Heather and Naya’s body language playing in my mind.

But I write her not because I want you to understand me, but because I want to give a voice to a girl who is dismissed, constantly, because she is not easy to understand. Because there are some people whose voices have to be amplified if they are ever going to be heard.

I will share something perhaps a little controversial. I don’t care about whether or not Brittany is “smart”. I hold with JJ’s and others’ views that she has a non-normative intelligence. I also think intelligence is something nearly impossible to assess.

What I do care about is that people acknowledge that she has a mind. That she perceives, thinks, feels, and is entitled to every bit of respect that any human being is. That to maintain anything else—that she’s a “dumb blonde”, that she’s an idiot, that she’s not good enough for Santana—all of that is to reduce her and everyone like her to something less than human.

It may feel like fair game. She’s beautiful, talented, and sweet enough that she’s given almost every social advantage despite people’s views of her as an incompetent human being. But the fact is that it’s a terrible feeling when people talk about you as if you aren’t in the room or can’t understand. It is a terrible thing to be teased or belittled. And worse, it’s terribly lonely to know that there are a million things that people will never share with you because they don’t think you can handle sophisticated thoughts and emotions.

The reason fictional characters matter is because they represent something in us. Between canon and fanon, we know fictional characters better than we know most of the human beings we will ever meet. And when we hurt them, we hurt ourselves. Always. We are always hurting each other and a part of ourselves when we dismiss someone who could walk past us down the street. When we laugh at Brittany with any disrespect, we hurt the parts of ourselves that identify with her, and we hurt anyone who thinks she’s a lot like them.

Thank you, darlings, if you’re still reading. I only mean that language is easy not to notice—that we refer to ourselves and sometimes even each other without thinking. And I’m sorry my tone is a little uneven—it’s just that this still hurts so much. But please know how much I think that as different as we all are from each other—how very unique each of us is—I think that if we were to climb inside someone else’s body and listen to their thoughts, we would be astonished at how very like us they were. We would be struck dumb and unable to speak in complete sentences for a long, long time.

It makes me happier than I can tell you that I have you as friends, and that people read what to me is one long love letter to beauty and strangeness and gentleness and quiet. My sweet girl was all these things, and I am more at peace—more floating—every time I pick up my pen or touch the keyboard to write from the inside of her head. From the inside of my own heart and head.

One last thing—I’m more grateful to Heather Morris than I can possibly say. She gives Brittany every ounce of her humanity, and Heather tells everyone who asks that she’s just like Brittany. She is standing up for women who love women; for bisexual, lesbian and questioning people; and for people who are dismissed because we can’t quite imagine what might be going on in their heads. She’s as much my hero as any other person I know of. Just like my girl was my example of how to be an amazing human being, just by breathing and smiling and forgiving people every single day for not quite understanding. I am in debt every second of my life.