Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire hopes her crown can help others the same way it helped her

Today, Nenia Ballard is 2026’s Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire, but her early days using the chair were filled with shame.

She stopped leaving the house. She didn’t want people to take her photo. She didn’t tell her own parents about the wheelchair for six months.

“I had this thought in the back of my head that, like, maybe I’d get better before I had to tell people that I was using a wheelchair,” she said. “Maybe this was just a temporary thing, and if we could just get past it, nobody would have to know. It was this internalized shame and ableism that I had built up inside of me.”

Ballard had been a police officer in Canaan for about a decade when she contracted COVID-19 in 2021. However, unlike most people infected by the virus, Ballard’s symptoms never seemed to go away. She has what doctors now understand to be long COVID, and her symptoms include intense brain fog, fatigue, and muscle weakness. In short, the condition leaves her feeling constantly drained.

It got to the point where she quit her job because she didn’t have the energy to do it effectively or safely. She said leaving the house was a challenge and her husband was having to carry her upstairs. She spent years in various treatments, including occupational therapy. Long COVID is a newly discovered condition, and doctors around the world have struggled to understand and treat it. For Ballard, nothing worked and her symptoms worsened. Eventually, leaving the house became impossible because of how difficult it was to walk around, she said.

One day her occupational therapist suggested she use a wheelchair.

“And I was completely against it,” Ballard said. “I didn’t want anybody who knew me as the strong independent police officer to see me in a wheelchair because I thought that they would think less of me.”

Ballard ultimately relented and began using the wheelchair, but for the first few months, she didn’t leave the house even though the wheelchair was giving her that ability for the first time in a long time. But eventually, she started to come to terms with it. She and her husband went to parks where she would only be around strangers to get comfortable in the chair.

“I started having this slow acceptance of, like, this is actually helping,” she said. “I’m actually going places. And I was able to start going to my kids’ sporting events. I was able to start experiencing life again, and it finally clicked in my head: The whole reason I’m able to do these things is because of the wheelchair, not despite it.”

And a big part of that acceptance came through advocacy she was able to do.

“I didn’t actually set out to do advocacy,” she said. “I just saw a problem and saw something that I was dealing with, and didn’t see a lot of people talking about it, and I was just getting on and complaining.”

One of the first things Ballard noticed when she started using a wheelchair was how different her clothes fit. Even her favorite outfits became difficult to wear.

“The difference between those same exact outfits on someone who’s standing and someone who’s seated in a wheelchair was just night and day,” she said. “Things like the length of the clothes, because, especially with dresses and things like that, if it’s too long, it’ll get caught up in the front wheels. If it’s got too much volume, it can get caught up in the side wheels, both of those things can be dangerous. Also, the fit of the top. Someone like me, who is almost 6 feet tall when I was standing, I never really had to worry about if someone was looking down my shirt when I was standing. But when I’m seated and I’m in a conversation with someone who’s now towering over me, they can see directly down the top of my blouse or the top of my dress.”

So Ballard started reviewing clothes on TikTok with a wheelchair user in mind, and through those reviews she found a community of wheelchair users to connect with.

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“I didn’t see it as advocacy,” she said. “Even though now looking back, and now that I’m doing it more regularly, I see that that’s what I am doing. But it’s not what I set out to do.”

It was through those videos that she was discovered by Miss Wheelchair America, which was founded in 1972 to empower women “to lead as advocates for accessibility, inclusion, and disability rights.”  

“(They) reached out and said, ‘Hey, you’d make a really good candidate for this. Have you ever thought about it?’” Ballard said.

So she applied and was crowned Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire. In August, Ballard will travel to Michigan for the national Miss Wheelchair America contest. There, she’ll attend workshops and training sessions on advocacy and participate in a contest to crown Miss Wheelchair America. Even if she doesn’t win the national contest, Ballard said having the title of Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire is “a crowning achievement for me.”

“When I first was diagnosed and had to get to the point of using a wheelchair, I was in a low place,” she said. “I associated weakness with the chair and not the freedom that it gives me. It took probably a year and a half before I was really comfortable to just go out.”

As Ballard sees it, becoming Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire and embracing the platform it gives her to encourage others, both those who use wheelchairs and those with long COVID, serves as a milestone in her journey. 

“And I have to give a lot of credit to that online community, the TikTok, the social medias, all of those things,” she said. “There’s a lot of other people who have gone through that and experienced that, and just through kind of connecting with some of those people and hearing some of those stories, I was able to overcome and see that it’s not the wheelchair that makes me a weak person, it’s my own mind that’s making me weak.”

Still, Ballard acknowledges it was “not an overnight switch.”

“There were moments where I went out, and I felt like people were looking over my head, and people that knew me made eye contact and then didn’t approach me,” she said. “I definitely had some setbacks where I had made progress, and then that was the thing that sent me back home crying, but slowly I realized that if it wasn’t for the wheelchair, I would be spending all day, every day in bed, and I wouldn’t be experiencing anything.”

Ballard is the first ever contestant in Miss Wheelchair America who uses a wheelchair because of long COVID, which presents a fresh opportunity to educate.

“I feel like people still don’t really know what to think because their experience with COVID is not my experience with COVID, and they didn’t need a wheelchair. They can’t rectify it in their brain,” she said. “They can’t figure out why, for them, all it was was a cold, and for me I would need a wheelchair, so there must be some level of I’m faking it or I’m lying or I’m just a very dramatic hypochondriac person that is just like looking for attention. What they don’t realize is like nobody would go this far with the ruse.”

As Miss Wheelchair New Hampshire, Ballard travels across New England through public events. She hopes she can build understanding through those events.

She attended a Boston Fleet hockey game representing the organization and wearing her sash this past season. The team put her on the Jumbotron and spoke about her advocacy. She said a woman came up to her between periods to tell her about her own son who was just diagnosed with long COVID. The woman was encouraged to hear that Ballard was eventually able to get out of the house again.

“She said she called him right away to tell him that I was there,” Ballard said. “To just hear that, and to hear that there are people that need that representation. I was like, ‘OK I did the right thing, like, I’m glad that I’m doing this.’”