Hannah and Shane Burcaw Say IVF Journey Has Been ‘Heavy’ to Share as They Open Up About Interabled Relationship (Exclusive)

Over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers have seen Shane and Hannah Burcaw demonstrate what it means to love someone for who they are, inside and out. With every post, vlog and update shared with their followers, the interabled couple — known as Squirmy and Grubs online — continues to prove their connection runs deeper than how the world may perceive or judge them.

Now, with the publication of their co-authored book Interabled: True Stories about Love and Disability from Squirmy and Grubs and Other Interabled Couples, the Burcaws are showing that they're not alone. They've compiled a collection of essays to tell chapters of their own story and give other interabled couples a platform to share their experiences as well.

Speaking to PEOPLE exclusively, Shane and Hannah explain that their book stands as a way to celebrate partnerships like the one they share. By conducting interviews with a wide array of couples, they strived to illustrate the authentic reality of relationships in which one or both partners live with a disability.

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"Something that we realized from running the channel is that there were a ton of misconceptions out there about disability and dating, disability and relationships about our relationship, but also more widely in society," says Shane, who has spinal muscular atrophy.

The book includes exclusive, never-before-told stories from Hannah and Shane themselves. The new medium gave them both the confidence to open up about their deeper, more emotional moments, like their unsuccessful journey with IVF.

They've spoken about aspects of the journey in videos, but given the privacy and sensitivity of the subject, the couple — who married in September 2020 — felt like they could only explain so much. The written word proved to be a more comfortable way to share other sides of the story.

"When you have a YouTube channel as big as ours, it can be scary at times or just not always the most fun to share more difficult life experiences," says Shane. "We felt like the book would be a better vehicle for digging into that finally, and really letting everyone know what happened and just making a place to be totally open and honest about it."

However having a major platform has given Hannah and Shane a chance to get to know other interabled couples, some of whom are featured in the published essays. Interabled also spotlights people they haven't met yet, whom they found by creating an online forum that opened up the opportunity to their fanbase and beyond.

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"We made a video on our YouTube channel asking for submissions from couples, and within 24 hours we had over 600 submissions. So we had to shut the forum down because it was too many applications to go through," Hannah recalls. "It was a huge response."

"We were hoping for like five," Shane confirms.

Both admit it was a bit challenging to sort through all of their interviews and turn them into essays, especially considering the collaborative aspect of the process. At times they wrote chapters separately, then swapped their drafts so the other could add and change things as they felt necessary. In other cases, they sat down and wrote together.

"That took a little bit longer because we would argue over which word to use, what was the right very specific word," Hannah explains. "It was kind of a mix of methods for coming up with the book."

Shane adds, "I'm also a procrastinator and Hannah is not. So that was a big challenge. I was like, 'We can do it next month.' And Hannah was like, 'Why not today?'"

Looking back, Shane — who has previously published three books on his own — considers co-authoring with his wife a testament to the importance of compromise.

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"If we had disagreements about how a sentence should be laid out or a chapter, you have to make the decision at the end of the day. So there was a lot of that, which we don't have to do on our YouTube because we're just kind of chatting on camera," he says. "Luckily, Hannah and I see eye to eye pretty well. It's not like we were fighting the entire time."

They were also surprised to learn how difficult it could be to distill their interviews — which often spanned three hours — into written essays.

"We wanted to make sure that we did these couples justice, but they all had such interesting stories and lives, and we'd only have a certain number of pages to tell their story," says Shane. "It was a challenge, but it was a fun one."

They ended up with a final product to be proud of and some new friends with whom they've kept up since meeting them for the purposes of the book. Shane points to their encounter with an older couple, Robin and Jay, whom they profiled in one chapter. Jay has a visual impairment, and Robin — like Shane — uses a wheelchair due to her spinal muscular atrophy. She and Jay have been together for decades.

"It was so interesting how throughout their life, they found ways to help each other," Shane remembers of their interview. "For instance, as Jay began losing more vision, Robin would ride around in the car with him kind of to be like his eyes. She'd point out road signs and helping out in that way and even help her get in and out into her wheelchair."

The YouTube star continues, "It was interesting to see their humor. By the end of the interview, we wanted them to be our grandparents. We were like, 'Can we come to live with you?'"

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Their hope is for the book to reach people with little knowledge about interabled partnerships and show them that "relationships like ours are not rare," says Shane. "We're hoping that when they see a book full of dozens of couples that deal with disabilities, they begin thinking differently about that."

Over the past six years, Shane and Hannah's honesty and dedication to interabled representation has also opened them up to the darker sides of social media — the negativity and hate from those less willing to open their minds. Some even claim their relationship is fake. But after putting themselves out there for so long, Shane says it continues to get easier for them to put those comments out of mind.

"I've accepted the fact that there are just ignorant, mean people out there who maybe will never change their opinions," he tells PEOPLE. "But I've also learned — we've learned together — that there are people who have misconceptions about disability and maybe leave nasty comments who are capable of changing and improving their thinking about disability."

In their experience, Shane says it's "almost unheard of" for an online hater to apologize, but he has seen it happen.

"We've had a handful of people over the years come back to us after being horrible online and say, 'Hey, the more I follow you, the more I watch, the more I begin to question my own assumptions and biases about disability, and I regret being mean to you guys, and now I'm trying harder to be more open-minded,'" he notes. "It does show us that people can change, and we use that as motivation to keep going."

Like with their book, Shane and Hannah have always created content with the goal of improving the way society understands disability, but their videos have evolved over the years. While they maintain that they "still love to make a silly video here and there," they've become more direct with the message they want to communicate to viewers.

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"There's less, 'Here's what we're having for dinner tonight,' and more, 'Here is a systemic issue that we experienced or that the human people experienced, and here's why it's a problem generally,'" Shane explains.

Now that they've learned their dynamic power as a writing team, the Burcaws are working toward a new goal: writing for the screen. In fact, they've moved out to L.A. for part of the year to try to dig into the entertainment industry. Beyond the fact that they share a love for film and TV, Hannah underscores how it's a space "that needs more disability representation."

In the meantime, they continue to give millions of YouTube viewers a window into their lives, including their ongoing journey to start a family. For the time being, they've paused their IVF efforts, but they're proud to be candid about it at any stage.

"When we began IVF, it was helpful for us to go online and read accounts from other people or watch videos of other people that had already gone through it," says Shane. "Now we get to be one more example that you can go through IVF and you can fail at IVF, but it will still be okay, but life goes on. Your relationship will be okay. It can be okay. It is possible to navigate."

Hannah tells PEOPLE that they didn't find much information on interabled experiences with IVF, so it feels especially important for them to be one of the few creators who can speak to the subject.

"It's a heavy thing to share, but people definitely appreciate it," says Shane. "We've gotten lots of messages and emails from other disabled people who are wanting more info because they are considering going through it. So that's been nice to be able to be like, 'Hey, we experienced it and here's what we can tell you.'"

Such kind feedback reassures them that they're doing the right thing: "[It] makes us feel great about sharing it," Hannah adds.

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Inviting the world into their more personal struggles does mean they have to deliver disappointing news to their supportive fans, and not just in videos. Some people have approached Hannah and Shane on the street and asked for "baby updates."

"People seeing us in public and asking us how it's going can be a little uncomfortable because so far the answer is just not good," says Hannah. "We'd love to give them good news. I hate for them to be like, 'Oh, no.'"

Shane agrees, "Obviously people don't mean any ill will when they ask for updates, so we just have to remember they're just excited."

They look forward to the day when they can deliver a positive announcement to their audience, and for now, they cope with it all the best way they know how.

"We go through negative stuff of we try our best to support each other and laugh about it when we can. It's how we are ... That's how we live our life," says Shane. "The day that we have good news to share, I can't wait to make that video."

Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled Couples by Shane and Hannah Burcaw is available now, wherever books are sold.

Read the original article on People