The World I Fell Out Of

A certain pattern descends when you come as an adult to disability. You have a problem, you learn how to manage it. For as long as things proceed on an even keel, that's fine. You become a little complacent and relax a bit. Then more things go wrong, only in a different way, and you're forced to raise your game and learn from scratch how to handle them as well.

Deep breath. This is the memoir of Melanie Reid, who was thrown from her horse and broke her neck, leaving her paralysed. The book follows the events of the fall herself, to the year she spent at a spinal-unit in a hospital in Glasgow, and the long process afterwards of trying to reintegrate with life at home, outside of the hospital.

I really could not have predicted how relatable I would find so much of this book. I now, after many, many years of constant denial, identify as disabled. My disability has entirely different practicalities to Reid's, but many chapters are devoted to the mental difficulties in coping with “becoming” disabled, as it actually requires a complete shift in identity and how you perceive yourself, and that's something that I deeply related to. I think this is something that able-bodied people completely fail to understand (even when they try), and it was honestly a relief to read Reid's words. I have absolutely failed to express these kind of feelings over the years, so I really appreciate Reid just sharing her writing and thoughts in this way.

One example is the fact I've tried myself to explain to my family before how strange it can feel sometimes, as a wheelchair user, to be, as Reid beautifully puts it, “crotch-height”. Now, I am no where near as tall as Reid, so I can see how “loss” of height would hurt her sense of self even more, but even I as a much shorter person found using a wheelchair at first really surreal for this very reason. It completely changes how you feel in a space (in terms of safety, confidence and much more) when you are suddenly so much lower down than other adults. I now love my wheelchair, and can see how much freedom it gives me (so no I do not like the term “wheelchair-bound”), but it was definitely a huge shift and required a lot to cope with internally.

On the physical side, Reid is surprised again and again how a linear recovery and much hoped for return to “normality” feels more and more out of reach. Despite surprising her doctors and nurses with her progress, she feels increasingly depressed at not being able to achieve the unrealistically high goals she set for her recovery. She just can't stop hoping:

I felt the weight of that moral duty to recover, but paralysis was not recoverable from. It was a dead end. A no return. What was I to do? Even though I knew - and science knows; Christ, everyone knows - there is no existing cure for broken and crushed spines, not to try to get better at the very least seemed improper. Hence the need to resist disability, the failure to accept.