Ever since she can remember, Chelsie Hill has loved to dance. She started taking dance lessons when she was just 3 years old. By 5, she was competing at a national level. She was poised to launch a career in Los Angeles, California, but fate intervened when she was just a teenager. On the way home from a dance competition, Chelsie was involved in a drunk driving accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

She was 17 years old, and suddenly her entire life needed to be rearranged; her hopes and ambitions had to be redesigned to suit her new lifestyle.“Growing up as a dancer, my body was everything to me,” Chelsie explained. “I feel like it’s something that I worked on, I used, it was what I wanted to do with my career.

But going from having all functions of my entire body and being able to leap, jump, and kick to having someone who I didn’t meet before telling me that that was no longer possible — the first year I was completely in disbelief. I didn’t know you could go one day from walking to then not.” Instead of giving up on a career in dance,

Chelsie decided then and there to keep following her dream. She came up with a personal motto she still uses to this day: “Dance is dance whether you’re walking or rolling™.”In 2012, Chelsie moved to L.A. and started taking body dance classes. At first, she felt strange being the only person using a wheelchair in her classes, but she was determined to nail the choreography and find a way to do it all on wheels instead of two legs.

As she became more proficient at dancing in her chair, she felt compelled to find other women like her who wanted to keep dancing in spite of their differences.“I had this idea, this vision, that it’d be still cool to have a bunch of girls in wheelchairs dancing in a ballroom,” she said. “And for me, going into the disability community, there was nothing like that.

There was no space for women to go to feel some sort of normalcy and then also a place for women to go and empower each other and network.”Chelsie used social media to reach out to other women who use wheelchairs and wanted to dance. She started with just six members. Ten years later, the Rollettes has created:

“To enable women with disabilities to live boundlessly and transform perspective through dance,” says this all-female dance troupe. Women from all around the world can join the Rollettes for dance courses, cosmetics clinics, parties, and more. They also perform in front of live audiences and post the footage to their social media sites on a regular basis.

It’s been ten years since they began, and the band is still growing in popularity! Chelsie just married her long-term lover, Jay Bloom, who has been by her side for almost seven years. Chelsie spent months planning a wonderful surprise for her wedding day: walking down the aisle with only a walker and a special back and leg brace.

“It was a moment for which I will be eternally thankful,” she said. “I am extremely fortunate to have a spouse that loves me whether I am walking or rolling!” Chelsie has demonstrated great grace under pressure for more than a decade. She is live proof that no matter how different we are physical, there is no limit to what we may achieve!