I was re-reading some of my older writing recently in preparation for an art workshop at UCBerkeley this week and found this old recording of me reading my creative nonfiction story Pose [pdf download].

How odd it sounds to me to hear my voice.  Like it’s me, but not me.  As I listen I hear things in the story that are threads that I can pull out and see continuing into my life now.  But I also hear so many things that have changed.

Recently I was interviewed by a researcher who’s using my blog as part of her dissertation.  We talked a lot about why I blog and why I share what I do publicly.  One thing that struck me from that interview was how important it is to me to have mobility and how much I stress that in what I write about here.  That I can go and do so many things now, when there was a time that I couldn’t even take one step (a piece of that story is told in the recording that I link to above), is utterly remarkable to me.  I can remember not even being strong enough to take one step.  Not a one.  Even now, sometimes when I step out with my prosthetic leg I ‘feel’ what it was like not to be able to shift my weight onto the foot and propel myself forward.

I was just a bit younger than Catgirl is now when I re-learned to walk.  That wasn’t so long ago.

*Above: an old photo to illustrate a post about the past. Showing me and a toddler-Catgirl posing for the camera while on an adventure to the Marconi Museum (a funny story behind that: I thought we were going to a museum about the history of the telegraph. Turns out that the local Marconi museum is all about automobiles. We ended up enjoying the museum despite the shift in expectations…)