When she lost vision, she lost her community. On YouTube, she’s building her own.
Oct 10, 2025 [[read-time]] minute read
“I lost my vision and along with it, I lost all my friends,” Molly Burke recounts in our interview at the annual Disability:IN conference. “I had a lot of free time on my hands where I used to be doing sleepovers with girlfriends or out at the shopping mall. I was alone. That’s when I stumbled upon the OG lifestyle and beauty community on YouTube.”
That pivotal moment of discovery set in motion the journey Burke now shares in her highly anticipated book, Unseen: How I Lost My Vision but Found My Voice. At four years old, Molly was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative eye disease that eventually led to her blindness. While the loss of her vision was gradual, the loss of community was sudden and absolute. YouTube offered a respite.
“I was just another comment or follow… but to me, they were community”
“It was all of these girls around the same age as me, talking about the same things I would’ve been talking about with my friends, and that kind of filled the void of loneliness,” she says. “It was really incredible that these absolute strangers who didn't know who I am, I was just another comment or follow… but to me, they were community.”
After a couple years of public speaking and sharing her story around the world, Molly made the decision to build a channel of her own. While the beauty creators on YouTube brought her joy, none publicly identified as disabled, an experience that had become a core part of Molly. YouTube was the perfect opportunity to create the representation she wasn’t seeing in movies and TV shows.
“But online, you just need the average person to believe in you.”
“Growing up, I dreamed of being an actress but I didn’t think it was possible because I never saw myself in the media. But YouTube didn’t have the gatekeepers that Hollywood had. For film, you need the directors, the writers, the producers, and the casting agents to all believe in you. But online, you just need the average person to believe in you. You just need to connect with humans, so I thought there's no reason there isn't disability representation online yet. It just hasn't been done yet. “
Molly began her channel with a simple hope: to build a small community of blind people to talk about makeup. But her modest dream quickly grew into something bigger than she ever could have imagined. Her channel blossomed into a safe place for over 2 million people, both disabled and non-disabled, to learn and ask questions that can feel taboo — like, “If you’re blind, how do you look at the camera?” “Why aren’t you wearing dark sunglasses?“
“So much of the discrimination disabled people face is not due to hatred, it's due to ignorance,” Molly explains. “And we've lived in a society where when kids ask about disability, their parents say, shh. They're taught to not look, don't stare, don't point, don't ask questions. What that does is create fear around disability. Kids don't point and ask questions to be rude. They're learning about the world.
If the first thing they learn about disabled people is to ignore them, they become adults who are so scared to do or say the wrong thing, so they’d rather do and say nothing at all.”
While videos like “Top 5 Reasons Why People On YouTube Think I'm Not Blind” and “The reality of traveling with a disability that you never see…” offer education and insight into life with a disability, they aren't Molly's only focus. She’s found a fine balance between sharing her life with blindness alongside other passions like fashion, yoga, travel, and food. “I can't separate my blindness from me, so no video is absent of my disability, but my disability doesn't have to be the sole focus of everything either.”
On September 23rd, Molly is set to release her memoir, “Unseen: How I Lost My Vision but Found My Voice.” Part memoir, part rallying cry, the story follows her journey both on and offline. Designed with her community in mind, the book uses an enlarged Braille Institute font with increased spacing to enhance legibility for readers with low vision and dyslexia. The cover features tactile Braille, real gold foil (an homage to how Molly can see a bit of light in reflective surfaces) and a stunning headshot taken thanks to the hard work of three disabled creatives — an amputee photographer, quadriplegic makeup artist, and a legally blind hairstylist. The book will be available in physical, digital, and audio copies of wherever books are sold.
Since YouTube, not only has Molly’s channel grown, but so has disability representation at large on the platform. Over the past eleven years, a small group of channels relating to disability have grown into a community of diverse creators sharing stories and experiences using the platform to educate, gain employment, and run businesses. That growth is thanks, in many ways, to trailblazers like Molly.
“I don't and never will claim to speak for a whole community,” she says. “I'm just one disabled person sharing my perspective and experience — but it's one more perspective and experience that people finally have access to.”