Hello,
It’s officially less than a month until publication day! And I am feeling all the emotions.
The thing about this book is it is intensely personal. So while I am very proud of it, as publication day approaches I am feeling a bit exposed.
Writing a memoir like this is a sure-fire way to trigger some introspection - and it turns out that sending it out into the world only adds to that.
I have a brilliant new PA (hurrah!) and I gave her the book to read as a sort of crash course in ableism (sorry, Eva). She’s nearly finished it, so I asked her what she thought the main takeaway message from the book was. Her response hit the nail bang on: “How much easier your life would be if people were less ableist.” (The key here is that she didn’t say “if you weren’t disabled,” which bodes well for our partnership.)
Anyway, her response really hit home because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I really do love my life but Christ it is hard to live in an ableist world. Often it’s just regular ol’ hard, but sometimes it is bone-crushingly, suck-the-air-from-your-lungs hard, and a lot of those times are in the book, so I have had to reckon with them recently in a way I have found completely overwhelming. I have, frankly, shed a lot of tears.
I often see the community talk about “disability grief” - specifically in relation to the loss of ability over time. For me, though, I think the grief is for the life I could have lived if it wasn’t for ableism. And it is grief, or maybe heartbreak; it sits in your chest and makes you feel hollow. Because for all the ways my life is genuinely brilliant, there are many things I would have loved to do or experience, which society has robbed me of before I even really had the chance to try. (Saying this as bluntly as I am here feels ridiculously over-dramatic, but it is true nonetheless and I don’t want to pretend it’s not.)
It won’t come as much as a surprise to long-term readers of this newsletter that, for me, that grief is particularly acute when it comes to dating and relationships. For a while after I was turned away from a dating agency for being a wheelchair user, I buried that grief (extremely healthy, I know!), but it’s been coming up again recently in new and unexpected ways.
That is partly because of the book, and also partly because, in the past few months or so, it has finally dawned on me that I am a bit, well, gay. Surprise - or actually, as it turns out, not a surprise to any of my friends, so make of that what you will. Anyway, I am incredibly lucky that coming out has been an overwhelmingly positive experience (further confirmation that I picked the right mates), and the queer community on the whole has been much less ableist than the straight men I wasted time pursuing, but nevertheless I have been feeling a bit sad about the fact I didn’t work this out sooner.
Obviously, I spent much of last weekend watching series two of Heartstopper. The whole thing is an emotional rollercoaster, but the bit that really made me well up was the teacher saying he’d missed out on so many teenage experiences because he hadn’t come out until his twenties. Oof. I missed out on all those teenage experiences too, not so much because I hadn’t come out but because I didn’t have any care or crucially, any friends to experience them with (hello ableism). And, to be honest, I’ve spent the last ten-to-twelve years attempting and failing to catch up. I can’t help but wonder if, had I had those teenage experiences, I’d have worked out who I am and what I want a lot sooner and maybe saved myself some heartache along the way. So, yes, amid the joy of getting there eventually, there is some disability grief here too.
Of course, you can’t change the past. You can’t even really control the future. So I’m just trying to accept the complicated feelings, allow myself to feel the grief along with the joy, and see where life takes me next. If nothing else, my book is out in three weeks and six days (who’s counting?), and the world is full of possibility.
See you next week,
Lucy
That’s right! My debut book is out on 7 September and it’s now available to pre-order!
It’s a memoir about life as a disabled woman, how ableism and sexism interact in complicated and multifaceted ways, and how we often have to fight to be seen as women at all. Find out more here.
I put my heart and soul into this book and I’d love it to reach as many people as possible. Pre-orders will help it do so, as they encourage media coverage and stock buying by booksellers.
AAAH! Congratulations and welcome to the rainbow community!
I super appreciate your description of disabled grief as reflecting on "the life I could have lived if it wasn’t for ableism."
I think queer grief is similar—'Heartstopper' is a hard show for me to watch. I love it because it's adorable and it's so full of young queer joy and it wasn't the teenage experience I got to have. So I'm simultaneously so happy that this media exists in the world for young queers and I am sad and brokenhearted that it didn't exist until so recently and how many of us had to struggle through those years in total isolation.
When I realised I'm also disabled, it felt so similar to my experience of coming out as queer. The only language I had before coming out was the limited language of cishets and the limited language of ableism. Then I came out and found a whole breadth of terms and ways of talking about my lived experience that the status quo could barelt scratch the surface of.
One of the core reasons Heartstopper is so good is because it subverts the terrible tropes of the past that framed being queer as the problem. Being queer isn't hard, homophobia, transphobia, and cisheteronormativity being forced on people are hard. And so yea, disability isn't hard, ableism is hard. Being Black or Asian or brown or mixed isn't hard, white supremacy and racism is hard. It's an important distinction to make because it shifts the issue from the individual and personal attitudes to society.
Anyhoo-I'm so excited for your book. :) I pre-ordered it from a local bookstore and I will almost definitly scream when it surprise-arrives.