A moment that changed me: refusing to let disability silence me, and blogging

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/05/moment-that-changed-me-disability-blog

Version 0 of 1.

That Saturday was significant only in hindsight. I was 15. It was 6 November 2010, and I had just been to what was generously described as a training day for my school’s new journalism team. The teacher organising the day had suggested I start a blog as a good way to get into writing. Bored and in need of a project, I got home, raced upstairs and set up a Blogger account. I was ready to go.

As I typed post after badly written post in the months that followed, I assumed I would run out of steam. My laptop was filled with the beginning of novels, half-finished song lyrics, the odd poem – things I’d started in a fit of teenage enthusiasm only to be disappointed by my lack of creative flair.

But somehow writing about the news and, later, about myself, came easily. I loved the research that went into each post, loved being able to explore what interested me, loved finding just the right phrase to capture how I felt. I had found something I was good at, something I enjoyed, and – most importantly – something that I did for me.

It had, to say the least, not been a good year. I was becoming increasingly isolated as my peers grew up and went to parties while my disability kept me at home with my parents. My carer of five years and, if I’m honest, only real friend had just walked out of my life with no real explanation as to why.

This, and the bullying new carer who replaced her, somehow threw into sharp relief the fact that I couldn’t just ignore the reality of being disabled and hope everything would be fine – a strategy I had vigorously pursued for as long as I could remember, despite its obvious and multiple flaws. I was stuck trying to find a new way to approach life, with absolutely no one to point me in the right direction.

So there I was: 15, lonely and scared. There were so many things I couldn’t do – or, at least, convinced myself I couldn’t. But here was something interesting that required only a laptop and an idea, something that cerebral palsy couldn’t make difficult, as it did everything else: I could write. And after many painful years of shyness, I found I had a voice – clear, confident and mine.

While everything else felt like it was falling apart, I kept posting. I wrote about everything – WikiLeaks, Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, chick-lit books I’d read on holiday. I was terrible at it, sounding like a less-informed version of the BBC’s headlines, and yet people read what I published. Slowly I got better. I redrafted, edited and even learned the right circumstances in which to deploy a metaphor. I fiddled endlessly with the blog’s design. It became what I worked on every night once I’d finished my biology coursework.

It wasn’t long until my mind was made up: I was going to be a journalist.

Seven years later, I am. I can draw a direct line from that first Google search of “how to start a blog” to writing this article: a line that weaves through getting my first freelance gig because of a blogpost, to being named the Guardian’s Student Columnist of the Year, in part thanks to that same blog.

Having just completed a fantastic placement at the BBC, I have never been so grateful to my younger self for actually listening to the one piece of advice that turned out to matter most.

I don’t publish much on my blog these days. I’m concentrating on freelancing and finding a job. Sometimes I feel guilty that it is there, in its own very quiet and solitary place on the internet, with no one taking any notice of it. After a while it acquires the same quality as last week’s newspaper, rendered useless by new developments. But I have no plans to take it down or send it to the archive, no intention of letting go.

I still go back to it when I have something I desperately need to say, as I did when I finally wrote an honest account of growing up with cerebral palsy. Because no matter how long it’s been, my blog still gives me the same thing it did on that very first day: somewhere to go, all of my own.