What are your first memories of reading?
I have found memories in national school of the travelling library bus coming to update the library book shelves in each class in my wonderful primary school, St. Peters National school, throughout the year. We were allowed buy a book once or twice a year. It was pure magic. My National school really encouraged reading and we had special reading time in many of the classes as well as library book report to write up afterwards once a week.
I have been drawn back into books particularly over last few years. Reading and writing have taken on a new meaning. Initially for therapeutic reasons but also to advocate on behalf of those with disabilities.
Which book has been your greatest teacher?
“The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne. It changed my life when I was a teenager, my Auntie gave it to me and since then it has sent me on a whole other track. I go back to it re-read chapters every now and again. It’s my favourite book and I love it.
It explains how the law of attraction, which states that positive energy attracts positive things into your life, governs your thinking and actions, and how you can use the power of positive thinking to achieve anything you can imagine. I am naturally a positive person always choosing to see the good in situations.
In the story of your life, what’s been the biggest plot twist?
Biggest plot twist for me was becoming paralysed from the chest downwards in my late twenties and being forced to adapt to a new world where I required assistance to perform the most basic tasks.
What would people be surprised to find on your bookshelf?
Neurobiology 3rd edition: I studied neuroscience in college, and I love learning about the progress being made in that field. From time to time, I reflect on the most exciting research across the entire range of neuroscience and the most up-to-date views of current research on the nervous system. Maybe a cure for spinal cord injuries will be possible in the future by implanting a chip in the brain to control movement. Maybe wheelchairs will become more advanced or a cure for spinal cord injury will allow paralysed people to stand, and even walk again. Thirty years ago, who would have thought we would have access to the internet 24/7 in the palm of our hand, like an extension of our brain. I don’t dwell on it as the future for me is today and I must keep on living my day to day and try to stay as healthy as possible.
If you could take a leaf out of someone else’s book, whose would it be and why?
“The sixteenth round’ by Rubin hurricane carter. I read it three times after my accident, he was imprisoned for a crime he never committed and was tortured in prison for decades. I admire Mr Carters strength of mind despite the suffering he endured and the courage he demonstrated towards the difficulties he faced was remarkable. Like him, I cannot but imagine how my life could have been different.
Also Nelson Mandela. I loved his Autobiography “The long walk to freedom’, his story revolves around the theme of getting freedom after a very long struggle due to the courage of all the people who sacrificed so much for equality and peace in the country.
I find strength from reading about other people’s struggles and how they overcame them.
Many of the lessons these books teach us can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead.
What’s on your nightstand currently?
A Psychology book.This fascinates me, this evolutionary “survival of the fittest”, this drive that pushes us beyond the limits of safety and comfort to adapt to new challenges. It is an innate biological and psychological force that propels us forward.
The idea that humans will persevere against a difficult world and the human spirit varies according to every individual is remarkable. Victor Frankl, a Nazi concentration camp survivor said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” This indomitable spirit is in a person who withstood the worst misfortune in history with their sanity intact.
We’re reading a love story. What’s your advice for the protagonist?
Be yourself and someone will love you for you. I challenge you to replace the negative thoughts with something you admire about yourself (that has nothing to do with your body) when the negative thoughts lift their ugly head. The wonderful things that make you who you are: the person your family and friends love being around.
Sometimes it feels as if life begins and ends with what our bodies look like. But we are all more than a body, more than its size and its shape and its height and its weight. We are all wonderfully complex people and all the dimensions that come with that – plus or minus our accessories! Do not let anything or anyone, including yourself, reduce the sum of your journey in life down to your body!
What have you closed the book on?
Toxic people, people who try and bring you down, negativity or if you’re in the company of negative people not emotionally carrying their baggage and their negativity. You can try and help people, but you can’t save everyone. You can give advice, but some people don’t want to change, they are happy in their negative circle.
You can only read one book for the rest of your life. What would it be?
Something like “The alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho. It’s about following your dreams and although life doesn’t take the path you think it will, you can achieve your dreams in different ways.
What do you know of life that can’t be learned in books?
Most of what we learn doesn’t come from books! For example, how to think on your feet, how to react to many situations, how to become resilient, flexible, you need to use your mind and body to be proactive at challenging times. Can’t learn this from a book, you must live it.
What’s your happily ever after? – I really don’t think to very far ahead, a week at most.
I don’t know if this is a defence mechanism my body developed in response to my injury/accident. I don’t think we are hopelessly barrelled along by Fate but there are some things we can control and some things we can’t. It’s important to know the difference and, when necessary, challenge the idea that there is nothing we can do to change a situation. What will be will be, I don’t plan. And as “The Alchemist “reminds us although life doesn’t take the path you think it will but dreams can be achieved in different ways.