I was born at 29 weeks and three days gestation, a June baby instead of the September baby I was supposed to be. Not expected to live past that first day on Earth, my parents were told that if I did, I would never walk or talk. Such an early entrance into the world meant that after birth, I had a brain haemorrhage that would leave me with the mildest form of hemiplegic cerebral palsy on my left side and near total deafness on my right-hand side among a whole list of other things that I wouldn’t be diagnosed with until well into my teenage years. All things considered, I actually got off pretty lightly if you think about it.
Growing up, my parents would always make sure that I got the same opportunities as everybody else in my life: they put me in drama lessons and sent me to various Girlguiding groups, I did bronze Duke of Edinburgh and went on every school trip that was offered to me. The only thing separating me from every other person my age was the odd hospital appointment.
Dating as a person with a disability or illness of any kind is excruciating because you know that as much as you may wish to hide these things from potential partners, there will come a time where you do have to sit down and have ‘the conversation’ and there’s always SO many questions that follow which are fine but there’s a constant feeling of dread that lingers in the pit of my stomach because sex almost always makes up a good 70% of this discussion. My answer always remains the same: yes I can and yes I have with both men and women. Whether or not I can be intimate with another person is not the issue but rather the idea that most nondisabled people have that disabled people should either a) not be having sex or b) we can’t have sex is the real problem here. Having this conversation feels a bit like a test of other people’s maturity at times too because either they’re grown up enough to stick around and realise that none of what is ‘wrong’ with me is as bad as it first seems, or they run away at the first sign that something is ‘off’. It really isn’t hard to be adult about something even when you don’t understand it.
I can deal with numerous questions and people not being able to cope, I get it and over the years I’ve learnt there’s no point in wasting time trying to make people understand because at the end of the day it’s a reflection on the type of person they are more than anything else. It’s the almost inevitable infantilisation and the patronising tone of voice that a small fraction of people adopt to address me because apparently having a mild physical disability means that I can’t have basic, adult conversation that I can’t cope with. It ignites an anger in me like nothing else because like I will keep on reiterating, nothing about me is all that different from the average person other than the fact I’m a bit deaf and a bit slow. I have ten GCSE’s, three A-Levels, am a third of the way through a Journalism degree, I live independently and am also a published writer. In fact, I think it’s quite possible that I’ve done more than most people ever will and it’s something that I’m incredibly proud of on the inside – I just wish I wasn’t so embarrassed to be more vocal about it publicly.
If I could change my life so that I didn’t have to go for yearly check-ups or sit embarrassed in doctors’ offices, I would but I know no different and I never will. I want other people to get used to the fact that people like me exist and we are NOT burdens. Even know sometimes it’s incredibly hard to believe, I know that I am more than capable of being loved – I just need to stop looking for love in all the wrong places and putting my faith in people that will never see me the way I would like them to.