I don’t actually blame anyone for how I was treated. I couldn’t see myself and therefore couldn’t see what others saw all day long. I would keep my appointments with a mirror to the minimum, always shrouding my bony arms beneath a jumper, even on the hottest day of the year. I always wished I …
If others were asked what most defines my life, they would say religion: first being raised in a very religious home, then adhering to an alternative religious tradition from the age of twenty-one. However, I would say that what most defines me is a chromosome disorder undiagnosed in my youth. The failure to diagnose being …
Interesting fact: you can’t open old doc files from the 1990s in Microsoft Word, but you can convert them in Google Docs, to at least read what they once contained.
In my alternative timeline, I am diagnosed in adolescence or before that, and thus access treatments which completely rewrite my youth.
I dwell on the past because it keeps me grounded in the present. It reminds me to be grateful for all I have.
This is the first period of my life since my early childhood that I have been happy with my face. When I was little, I was quite cute, but through my teens and early twenties I became a skeleton.
I realise I’m not a speaker; I’m a writer. It’s part of the reason my career has so slowly progressed: because I detest the sound of my own voice. My beloved wanted us to start a podcast, but I just can’t do it, for my voice is so boring, stuttery and slow. I cannot do …
God bestowed me an extra chromosome, by which He made me all that I am.
I used to be extremely timid in company. These days I find myself accidentally challenging people when they start making sweeping generalisations and outlandish claims. I don’t mean to be contrary. But really, someone needs to be the dissenting voice, offering an alternative perspective. Even if everyone thinks that the dissenting one is an idiot as …
My companions are brilliant, erudite, learned and wise; perceptive, with piercing insight. I sit with them, flummoxed by my own ignorance, confounded by my dumb tongue and my outbursts of unmistakably unhilarious humour. They are the hyperliterate intellectuals our community so desperately needs. I am the court jester, muttering incoherently, constrained by my unmatched, unfailing …
With increasing frequency I suffer from bouts of melancholy. It exhibits itself in periods of unhappiness which come upon me unexpectedly and seemingly for no reason. It also appears – as it has done this afternoon – in the form of heightened emotions. I have written about this in the past, identifying spiritual causes as …
Where are the real men? The latest book I have started reading is the Al-Azhar translation of “The men around the Messenger” which I was given several years ago. Naturally it goes without saying that we are like flies beside these great characters, but still it would be nice to think we were not a …
It is now two years and a month since I was told that I could never have children. The news was broken by a Locum Doctor while my GP was on her summer holidays – he didn’t know much about the disorder, had to look it up in his medical encyclopaedia, then advised me to …
