Thank you very kindly for this wonderful collaboration
Here is Colin’s Story – Many thanks to Barbara for instigating this project and giving me an opportunity to tell a bit of my story.
So it’s pretty much a miracle that I am still alive after the trauma that was my childhood, formative years and early adulthood. There were a dozen or more occasions when I should have died by accident, design or by my own hand. It’s a complicated story of abuse and neglect. I guess they always are – and that’s part of the reason why such stories continue to remain taboo.
One of several shitty things that happened was a life-changing brain injury incurred on my 13th birthday. I was cycling down a 3:1 hill at high speed, slammed on the front brake to avoid a cat and went flying through the air, landing on my head, much like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I woke up in hospital 48 hours later, comatose, concussed, and unable to see because of the extent my head had swollen due to the bruising. I was sent home after a few days without any warnings of the possible consequences of the injury. I was expected to just get on with things in the same way I had pre-accident. There was no explanation of what was to come – the psychotic episodes, the wild mood swings, the inability to concentrate or follow a train of thought effectively and the unreliable short and long-term memory that’s been a part of who I am ever since.
In many ways I’m lucky that my disability was not recognised. I knew from early childhood what a f**k-up Psychiatry is, as my mother was tortured by the b*stards and died as a direct result of ‘treatment’ and I knew to avoid it at all and any cost.
I grew up in a culture dedicated to controlling children with violence in as many brutal ways as possible. My working class schooling was predicated on violence and as children we were largely being groomed to join the forces, which was what my dad wanted for me. For someone like me under Thatcher’s rule that meant training in how to commit indiscriminate murder in Northern Ireland. Thank f**k for punk and the collective will of many in our generation to put two fingers up to the previous one.
I found a way through because of an innate creative will. Drawing, painting, writing and performing were at the root of my ability to endure – as was the Survivor Movement from my mid-twenties and later the Disability Arts Movement that became a lifeline to finding a way to support other disabled creatives like myself. I’m not a great believer in the NHS and have worked all my life to avoid diagnosis. But I do identify with having been disabled by the barriers society has put in the way of validating someone like myself who is disabled, neurodivergent and proud.
