I am off to London tomorrow to see my girlfriend for a few days. I cannot wait, to be honest. Going down to Lyn’s makes me feel so alive.

We’ve been together for over a year now. I think we have an extremely stable, pleasurable relationship, and we both get a lot from it. Looking back, though, it’s funny to remember that I once thought that my life would be one of solitude. I once presumed, back at school, that because I had cerebral palsy, making fiends would be impossible, let alone finding partners. Now I wonder how I could ever think that. I look up at my bedroom walls and see the framed photographs Charlie gave me; or the montage I made of all my friends, hanging just above my right shoulder. How wrong I was.

I find myself wondering, though, how many other disabled people think like I did? At Hebden, I was shut away from the mainstream community all my life; I had no friends outside school. As a kid mum sent us to cubs, then scouts, where I was bullied. Thus I formed the opinion that I was and would always be something of an outcast, a feeling which I did not fully shake until South Cheshire College. Funnily enough, it was another group of outcasts – Goths – who befriended ,me at the student union. They accepted me, inviting me to their scary little performances: it was then that my attitude began to change. The trip to berlin also helped.

It was just before that trip that I made a particularly pessimistic blog entry, one which infuriated a certain Ms Young and Miss Caryer so much that they replied. I think that reply changed my life for the better. Those two crazies taught me that I wasn’t an outcast and that I could have relationships – I was just like anyone else.

They were right, of course. University drove that lesson home even further. In fact, if any of my friends knew I’d ever thought this way, they would be rather puzzled. Either that or they would tell me not to be so ridiculous. It was those days, then, that my life changed: I became myself.