I am nervously awaiting back to hear if I have a shortlisting interview for the Editorial Assistant Internship I applied for. Well, I’m telling myself not to be nervous. I have already been to a longlisting group zoom interview where everyone invited was asked their experience and why they wanted the job. There was 20 of us on the call, narrowed down from 200. I quickly saw that I had some of the most relevant experience for the job, so I expect to be shortlisted. But still, I don’t want to get my hopes up.

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I guess I’m nervous about the fact that I can only use one hand, so I am a lot slower at manual tasks. I know that really doesn’t matter in terms of making editorial decisions, but it still makes me worry that I’m not a good dogsbody like a stereotypical intern. I recently volunteered for the Barnes Children’s Literature Festival school’s program, where teachers can book in their class to see authors, and I couldn’t be very helpful with all the fiddly volunteer tasks like attaching paper clips to clipboards. I was torn, because part of me wants to be helpful, and part of me is very glad I had a cast-iron excuse to not have to do boring tasks. I just sat with the other volunteers and talked to them, slightly mesmerized by the movement of their fingers. I don’t feel jealous when I see people doing things I can’t, I just feel a sense of awe. Maybe some people would find it uncomfortable that I’m so impressed by them doing mundane jobs, but that’s how I feel when people praise me for doing similarly mundane things, like taking the bus alone.

One of the other volunteers told us about how a long time ago, before radios were invented, some people kept canaries to entertain them whilst they did boring tasks (I haven’t been able to verify this fact). Maybe I’m a canary?

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Whilst waiting to hear back about the job, I’ve been doing another edit of Becoming Sweetwood, and reading lots of books. I really enjoyed Jean-Dominique Bauby’s 1997 memoir The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (translated from the French), transcribed from single eye-blinks whilst living with locked-in syndrome. He died shortly after the book was released. Written out one letter at a time, Bauby describes his life after a massive brain-stem stroke took all of his mobility. The title is derived from how his mind feels as free as a butterfly, trapped in his motionless body.

Having heard of this book before, I held off reading it because I thought I might find it too sad or traumatic, having experienced full-body paralysis, but when I actually read it I was pleasantly surprised. Bauby acknowledges the sheer irony he sometimes feels of his condition and the mind games he has to play, amongst his obvious anger and grief. I related to his ability to find humour in the horror, which is something I want to impress on the reader in my own writing. Gratitude for simple things like sunlight can also be found in Henry Fraser’s memoir of paralysis The Little Big Things. Sunlight and beauty are things I’ve always swooned over.

The image I want to end this blog post with is one that I’ll hold in my mind forever. It was the first time my intensive care nurse took me outside, after my first two weeks in hospital. Until then, I had only been in my bed, facing away from the window. This meant that all my visitors got to see the sky and comment on the view, but not me. That day, my family and I braced ourselves for physical discomfort as I was put in a wheelchair wheeled through the hospital. With an extra nurse with us to be responsible for the portable ventilator I was using to breathe, we took the patient lift all the way down to ground level (for some reason the Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield has their neuro-intensive care on the top floor. Thankfully they have private patient lifts as well as public visitor lifts). I was taken out into the bustling foyer and prepared to look out of the front doors at the front entrance onto the awe-inspiring (sarcasm) sight of a road, preparing an average sunny day. But on that day unexpected clouds filled the air, dark swarming shells and flashes of wings. I sat in my wheelchair looking out at a sky full of ladybirds.




(Featured Image is of the cover of the 2019 edition of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly that I read, designed by Jack Smyth)