Writer Me, Disabled Me, and Common Purpose

From the 6th-8th of July, I am going on the Frontrunner course run by Common Purpose . I think it is more than a little ironic that the Dead Leg and I are going anywhere near anything with 'runner' in the title...but maybe that is just my gallows bravado talking.

I got the rest of the bumph I need via email yesterday, all of the speaker and attendee bios, and I feel a bit nervous about the whole thing. I've recently begun to really embrace Writer Me again, and don't, despite presenting at 5 conferences in the last month, feel like I am fully confident, fully occupying that part of me. Frontrunner will present another challenge, one I struggle with at least as much as I struggled with acknowledging that I wanted to write "properly, like books and stuff," as my 8 year old says: trying to embrace Disabled Me.

All of me is affected by my disability, but I spend a lot of energy and time trying to keep it from affecting me. And it doesn't work. Going on the Frontrunner course is about trying to make the adjustments I need to make to lead as a disabled person, to advocate for myself as well as for patients and clients. I don't have any hangups about advocating for them; it is me, and people like me, the Spoonies with hidden disabilities, I need to be better at advocating for. So the Dead Leg, my walking stick and/or crutches, and I are off to London to meet a lot of people. So here's the bio I sent:

     I wrote my first poem when I was 7, shortly after ensuring (or so I thought) that my youngest brother’s adoption proceeded smoothly, and prior to performing open-heart surgery on a snapping turtle crushed in an MVA. He (I think he was a he) didn’t last long. I have failed, to some extent, to live up to the early promise I demonstrated.
I ran track and cross-country before discovering I had arthritis. I cooked a lot of cheesecakes before perfecting that black art. I lived all over the US before falling in love, marrying, and moving to Italy, briefly, before settling in Scotland. I have two fantastic sons who ensure that I don’t get too full of myself, and humiliate me regularly at cricket. I trained and work as a Speech and Language therapist, write, edit, stupidly agree to organise and attend conferences, and write more. I am incubating 3 poetry collections, some short fiction, and a novel (please don’t mention the novel to my supervisor, as he quite rightly assumes I am taking on too much already). I am learning to play the guitar—badly, as it turns out. I love feeding people.



(The writing prompt  Sleep Is For the Weak gave me (well, me and the Internet, but you know what I mean) is to choose something that represents me, some article of clothing, an accessory, and write about that. I hope it is obvious I chose crutches and other accoutrements of Crippledom.)