Author and comic artist Kristin Beale
Kristin Beale could easily have become mired in self-pity. Instead, she used life-changing injuries to fuel her creativity.
In August 2005, at the age of 14, Beale suffered a Jet Ski accident on Lake Gaston, along the Virginia-North Carolina border. She and a schoolmate were riding one Jet Ski when another ran over them, hitting Beale mid-torso and killing the friend she was riding with. Beale suffered a traumatic brain injury, liver lacerations, collapsed lungs and a spinal cord injury.
Prior to the accident, Beale was an active student at Henrico’s Deep Run High School, involved in competition cheerleading, lacrosse and hockey. Afterward, she had to relearn how to perform daily tasks. “When I was in the hospital, doctors told my parents I would be a vegetable, that I wouldn’t be able to breathe or swallow. I wanted to disprove everything they had on their list,” she says. “I told my parents, ‘I am going to work and do this.’”
Her parents discovered a facility in California for people contending with spinal cord injuries and flew Beale there to spend four hours a day for more than a month relearning tasks and strengthening her muscles. She traveled to California nine times to work on her recovery.
To process her thoughts, Beale began writing about her experiences. By the time she finished, she had written 32 stories. She pared them down and eventually gathered them into her first nonfiction book, “Greater Things,” about how people react to her and how she has overcome her injuries and stays positive.
“I never thought it would become a book, but that’s how it all started,” Beale says. “I quit my job to become an author.”
Her second book, “Date Me,” is a collection of comics stemming from three dozen unsuccessful dates over the span of two and a half months. “I would turn those dates into comic strips,” Beale says. “For whatever reason, all my dates were bad.”
Instead of typical banter, she says, each meeting was “disability-centered dating. It didn’t feel like dating, it felt like interviewing about my disability. I would open up on the dates and then never see them again. It happened over and over.”
“Trying to find humor in something that is not really funny,” Beale drew comics about her dates’ reactions to her wheelchair-bound status. She says the stories made her feel “less of an ‘other’ and more like ‘I am just like you.’ That has been fun.”
She didn’t start dating to get material for a book, Beale notes. “I love to meet people, go out and do things. It turned into, ‘How can I turn a waste of time and hurt feelings into something good?’”
The Beale-Gupta family: Kristin and Christopher with their son, Malachi, and dog, Achilles
Beale’s “date-me experiment,” as she refers to it, does have a happy ending. She met her husband, Christopher Gupta, in 2019 when she found him sitting in her seat at a Hill City Church service — they usually attended different services. “He was an attractive man,” she says. “He came to my small group at church two weeks later. We started dating and got married in April 2021, one year and three days later. Let’s say it was a pretty good date.” The couple recently welcomed a son.
Now working as a literary scout for her publisher, Morgan James Publishing in Hampton, Beale continues to write. Another nonfiction book, “A Million Suns,” details her journey “from the darkness of disability into the sunlight of circumstance” and how she has found happiness. In her new fiction offering, “Wide Awake,” she assigns names and personalities to 12 objects belonging to a young girl, Madison, and interviews them to find out what they are thinking and feeling. “They talk about their experiences as they are being used by this person,” she explains. She’s also still drawing comics, something she’s done since 2018.
In addition, Beale has created the first episode of a YouTube show based on “Date Me,” medaled as a wheelchair fencer and finished 16 marathons with a handcycle since 2011. “I’ve worked my butt off to get to where I am,” she says.
Her father, Chris Beale, puts it another way: “Kristin has the distinct ability, rarely found, to bring everyone she meets to a special place. Everything about her exudes humor, sensitivity and an untethered creative boldness.”
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