What’s the most fun way to exercise?
Honestly I hate exercise.
I just don’t have the energy for it. I would rather take a nap.
Moving hurts. Why would I do more of it than absolutely necessary.
Category: Writing Prompts
Red White and Royal Blue. ❤️🤍💙
What book could you read over and over again?
Honestly this is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever read.
But as sometimes happens the film adaptation is nowhere near as good. They just miss a whole load of relevant parts of the story out. It made me so sad.
I have to admit I’m not a big reader of traditional books. But I read this book in two days, that’s very fast for me. I just couldn’t put it down.
I wish I could forget the book and read it again from the beginning without knowing where it would go. I wish I could experience all the emotions all over again. All the feelings, all the pain and love.
Carers
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
The carers get me changed and dressed and then I tend to go back to sleep in my wheelchair.
This depends on whether I have to do things in the day, mind you. If I have to do things that involve going out, and have a say in when they get done, I try to get them done as early in the day as possible. In this case I wouldn’t go straight back to sleep. I would wait until I’ve done what I needed to do.
If I don’t have a say in the times things need to be done, I would probably sleep until the time that I need to do whatever it was.
If I get a say in it, which because I need help to do if, I don’t always. I like to get the dogs walked as early as possible. In all honesty this is just to get it over and done with so that I can go back to sleep.
Fatigue sucks let me put it that way.
The way we experience emotions
Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
I think the most unique thing about humans is the way we experience emotions.
The fact that different things make us all angry, sad, scared, loved. While you may understand someone’s emotions it can be difficult to understand what triggers them, and impossible to understand how they feel them. And I honestly find that extremely fascinating.
I firmly believe that nobody’s experience is exactly the same where emotions are concerned. But if you can try to understand someone’s emotions in a situation you may be able to understand more about them and who they are as a person.
I feel like emotions, the emotions of others, are a big part of how I understand the world around me. I think this comes down to my disability, and the fact that I cannot understand the world completely physically. No matter how I hard I try, physically there will always be things that I miss due to my disability. But emotionally I am able to have a more complete understanding of the world around me. Man made ablesim doesn’t exist in the emotional world.
But just because I understand the world around me better through emotions, doesn’t mean that my emotions are easier to deal with.
At the minute I am dealing with anxiety over doing something that I know is important but scares me because it involves a phone call. I hate phone calls. No matter how important I know they aren’t I don’t want to make them. Annoyingly sometimes I get the confidence to make the necessary phone calls, but of course this never lines up to when I’m actually able to do that. And when I am able to do it, my anxiety acts up again.
What I can be sure of is my emotions don’t like me. But maybe that’s part of what makes me a unique person.
Probably a dancer.
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I’ll be honest I can’t completely remember, but at that age I probably wanted to dance, if I’m honest I still do. For awhile I did wheelchair dancing, but I’ve been unable to find a competitive group for adults, so I haven’t done it in years, and that makes me sad honest.
I love dance.
It’s just my luck that I’d enjoy something so much that doesn’t work in the way people expect when you’re in a wheelchair. Even when I’ve found dancers in wheelchairs, they’ve almost always been in manual wheelchairs and had a lot more movement than me.
Moral of that story is dancing doesn’t really work for me.
Freedom
You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?
The freedom people get when they are not disabled will probably never cease to amaze me. The freedom just to answer questions like this, to not be stopped by who they are when they try to do so.
Many of these modes of transport aren’t accessible to me, and those that require planning.
As a full time wheelchair user, an airplane is not accessible to me, it is simply too risky. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then you are lucky.
While a train is generally accessible to me, with assistance. There’s no guarantee that all the stations I may want to go to are accessible to me. In fact from experience, money aren’t, and this often determines exactly where I will travel.
While buses at least in my area are accessible to me, they are only accessible to me if there isn’t already someone in a wheelchair on the bus. One day, the people that designed for which transport might learn that multiple disabled people can and often do travel at the same time.
Certain cars are accessible to me, but not many. I cannot just get a lift off anyone. And while I can learn to drive a specifically adapted vehicle, to do get the vehicle would cost me money I don’t have. This is before I even know whether driving is something I would be physically capable of.
I’m going to just say that we bike is concerned, I cannot ride one and we’ll leave it at that.
You don’t travel to a place on a journey, you visit that place as well. Accessibility doesn’t stop in modes of transport.
The world isn’t generally accessible for people like me in various many ways. I don’t really get to explore questions like this, without an element of ignoring reality. There’s a word for this, which took me as surprising amount of time to remember at 3:30 am. Cognitive Dissonance.
I think somebody’s gonna read this and wonder why did I take it so seriously? It’s obviously one of those writing prompts like what would you do if you won the lottery? Reality isn’t really supposed to be considered in these situations.
But I’m not really good considering reality when someone asks me these questions. I’m not really good at the cognitive dissonance. I’m thinking about myself and situations I might be in. My disability is such an integral part of who I am and the experiences I have. That it’s hard to separate myself from it, even in the situations.
I suppose I don’t really know what it’s like to think as a non-disabled person. I don’t really understand what it means to have that freedom on any level, whether that be thought or reality, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Maybe if I had a bit more freedom, in reality, it might be something that would reach my imagination, a little bit easier. Then perhaps I could answer these questions as they were intended to be answered.
The only way I reach this level of freedom in thought, as I am sometimes able to reflect in my writing, is to completely distance myself from the thought. In reality, my freedom is always limited by the world around me and there is nothing I can do about it. As soon as I put myself in the situation, my reality hits again, and I am limited by it.
Please forgive the state of this post as my sleep deprived brain is unable to reread it and make sure it actually makes any sense at all.
Listening to music.
What activities do you lose yourself in?
I could listen to music all day ever day. It’s a major form of escapism for me. The only one I can partake in when the fatigue hits.
While I can’t say I have a favourite song, I love music to much just to pick one song. I can say that my current go to song is linked below.
Music is amazing. But as much as I don’t like silence, if I want to focus on what I’m doing then I have to have tv on rather than music. If I have music on I will just get too lost in the lyrics to be focusing on what I’m supposed to be focusing on.
So if I’m ever ignoring you, when I’m listening to music, know that I’m not doing it on purpose. I’ve just got lost in a song or two.
What’s your current go to song?
This is a hard question, then it might seem, at least for me.
Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?
As you may have notice with these writing prompts, I might not always answer them the way they’re intended to be answered. But maybe that’s the point of the prompts.
So in order to answer this question, how I want to, I have to answer it to different ways. Reflecting my life, I suppose. The way I would answer it on instinct. And the way, I answer it as a disabled person. This might seem odd given the type of question being asked, but I think it’s just hardwired into my understanding of the world. And given the fact I’m disabled I think that’s fair.
My instinct is to go with an elephant. They’re clever like to watch the world go by. They seem to revel in the joys of an easy life, and sometimes that’s all I want.
Taking my disability into consideration I think I would be a good dog. Dogs are calm and loyal and they understand the needs of the people around them, believe me a say this from experience of my own doggies. I think these are qualities that my disability has taught me.
I would like to be a dog most of all I think. The calm relaxed lifestyle, the love, to never get bored of your food. All of it just seems better than being a human.
Names.
What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
My middle names come from other family names. One comes from a grandparent and the othe d from one of my siblings who died before I was born, so yes that they do have a special meaning.
The same applies to my first name. My name is Kathleen, but I went by Katy for years, to the point where I didn’t know this was my birth name until later in life.
But the way Katy is spelt is also significant. Being born with Cerebral Pasly, meant that didn’t know if I would be able to read or write until I reached that age. The joys of the unpredictability of brain damage for you.
This makes the fact that I enjoy writing even more ironic, and I hope shows you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Disconnection.
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
A story that doesn’t quite fit together.
As a sentence on its own own, this makes no sense. Which I suppose could be said to defeat this purpose of this writing prompt. But to me, this just seems perfect.
It seems like the perfect way to describe a life that has felt like it never ended up with anything. My mind always seems and a different page page to my body, and I really don’t know where my heart is half to time. But it seems to be the prevailing theme of my life, that these areas, nor any areas will ever line up.
Did you ever play that game where you would draw the top half of something, a person maybe, or write the first sentence of a story. Then you would fold over the page and hand it to the next person to draw or write the next part. And so on until you had a completed, drawing or a completed story. Then you would read the story out loud, or look at the drawing, and laugh.
You would always laugh at them nonsense that would be produced. When the person before I had no idea what had been written drawn. When the next step seemed to be off kilter with the previous.
My entire life, kind of feels like that.
I can’t say I have a bad life. There are some really great parts. But I always get a sense that I’m living a life that was never supposed to be mine.
I don’t mean that in the sense that I believe someone else should have had to deal with my difficulties. I’m frequently glad that while those around me have their own struggles, they aren’t the ones I have.
I mean it in the sense that it feels like I mind or a soul like mine wasn’t built for the life I have no choice but to lead.
Does that make sense?
Does it sound selfish? Is it selfish? I honestly don’t know.
But that’s where I got the opening sentence for my autobiography from. Or more accurately, I suppose the opening idea.
Interestingly, even my sexuality found itself fitting into this area. Despite that being a lot more difficult to figure out in many ways. And yet it sometimes feels like the only part of my life that makes any kind of sense, and as in any way within my control. But I have to be very careful with exploring that as I can easily get sidetracked.
While I know that my life will never slot into the life I feel I should have had. I can only hope that one day it at least slots together, and begins to feel like one life. That I begin to feel like one person, rather than several parts of a person that will never quite meet.
My Inaccessible Life 