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Hello! I am the Goldfish.

I live in rural East Anglia with my partner, my fish and our delipidated VW Beetle. I have been blogging at for two and a half years. It was something I started doing to get things out of my system; personal ups and downs, political arguments, reviews of books, films and music I liked, and the occasional bad poem.

Soon enough, I found myself to be part of a rich community of bloggers from all over the world, including others writing about disability. Blogging can be a wonderfully accessible soapbox and whilst not exactly mainstream, it is a medium in which we have complete control over our representation as disabled people.

Disability is an important part of my identity, partly because it took so long for me to recognise. Disabled meant broken, unchanging, hopeless. Curious as it may seem, I preferred to see myself as merely ill, regardless of the Blue Badge, wheelchair, the absence of gainful employment and everything else which spoke 'disabled' to other people. It was through the good people at the Ouch Messageboard that I learnt about and began to understand that disabled people are united by our experiences, more than anything that might be going on in our brains or bodies. And having realised that some of my limitations were to do with attitudes and man-made obstacles - and therefore entirely adjustable - it became imperative to try and address them wherever possible.

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