The very first “serious book” I ever read was Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. I was eight, and after I was done with it, I requested my mum to make me a cape and a rag doll of D’Artanjan. My dad was then forced to make me a rapier, and he did so out of a twig, a wine cork and a bright orange plastic dessert bowl. For reasons not fully known to me, there are quite a few gaps in my childhood memories, but my dad handing me the rapier he made is one of the most vivid ones I have retained. I did not let go of it for weeks, and I think at that point my parents knew me well enough to see that there wasn’t much use in parroting that this was not socially appropriate everyday attire. The Three Musketeers is also the only novel I have ever actively dreamt about. I don’t remember now what exactly occurred in these dreams, but I remember meeting the four main characters and becoming a part of their group. As it often happens in dreams, I was much older in them than I was in real life. I also was not disabled and could keep up with the fighting.

It doesn’t take a degree in human psychology to understand the reasons why I was so deeply drawn to a story like this at that age. I wanted to be included and accepted, to have a group of friends to go on imaginary adventures with, I wished to posess the ability to stand up for myself and to feel like I hold some power against the bad guys. I had just started school and, never having gone to preschool, was now living through my very first real experience of the wickedness and cruelty of human children outside of literature. Even though I did attend a school that had separate programmes for kids with specialised needs, I was never part of one and was the only kid with a physical disability in my year. My mum, no doubt wishing to make my life easier and to save me from feeling inadequate, made me wear long skirts so “people would stare at my ugly bits less” and pulled me out of PE classes so I wouldn’t have to feel less than my classmates. The first made me angry. I think even as a kid, I realised that there is something deeply messed up about having to hide some parts of oneself in order to gain love and acceptance. My feelings on the latter are more divided. I am not sure what the right decision would have been, especially at such a young age. I don’t remember what I thought about it when it happened. What I do recall pretty vividly is that getting “special treatment” in this way only made the bullying and the snarky comments from my classmates worse. “Hey, why aren’t you coming to PE again?” was the loudest question in the girls locker room when everyone was grabbing their gym bags and I came in to get my coat so I could sneak away to the corner store for a bar of chocolate. I never knew what to say or how to say it in a way that would carry any real weight, so I stayed quiet. They all knew the answer; they just wanted the satisfaction of hearing me admit that I was somehow defective, and I had decided not to give it to them. I sometimes think about what could have happened if pulling me out of these classes would not have been an option. If I had to participate no matter what, if I had to lay all of myself bare and completely embarrass myself in front of my catty classmates. Maybe even potentially hurt myself in the process. Would it truly have mattered as much as I thought? Would everyone stop and stare and laugh, and would the sound of it reverberate through my bones and paralyse me and haunt me for the rest of my days? Maybe. Or, would they all just be so engrossed in their own pursuits of achieving physical excellence that they would barely notice someone who was really bad at everything but tried to do it anyway?

I believe that this experience was the first of many that made me think that in this life things need to be done perfectly or not at all. If you cannot do something flawlessly, you sit it out on the sidelines and let others have a go – the kids that are better and stronger and more talented than you. Already coming from a family of intellectuals with crippling tendencies of perfectionism, this was not a foreign concept to me and it stuck before I realised it. I began to deny myself the experiences within which there was even the slightest chance that my body could end up embarrassing me. School plays, musicals and anything to do with being on my feet in the spotlight, especially if it involved performing with other people. It ripped my heart out. I wanted to do theatre, and I wanted to sing and to dance and to be in front of an audience, but I couldn’t handle the thought of messing up on such a scale, of ruining the hard work of others and of attracting attention to my strange body when it could have been spent on something much more worthwhile. Around this time I also began to experience increased muscle spasms that appeared whenever I was nervous, which meant that, if I had to speak in front of the class, for example, the first thought in my head would never be. “What am I going to say?” Instead it was, “Where do I hold on to so I can keep upright? Is there a corner of a desk? Would it be too strange to ask for a chair? Would the spasms get so bad my knees will start to shake, and if so, can I stand behind anything so they can’t see it?” Simply existing in an academic setting became an endless shift at the anticipatory threat factory that I could never clock out of. What kept me going was the one thing that has haunted every former gifted kid since the beginning of time – the need for academic validation. In my head, my faults and strong suits were laid on a scale, and my life was a balancing act. If I just did well enough at absolutely everything else ever, it could balance out my deficiencies, and if I just got the math right, it would finally make me feel equal to other people. And so, every public performance that I could not get out of became an overcompensation. I needed to speak so well that my audience had no choice but to focus on my story more than on the malfunctioning machinery that was sent to deliver it. If I go above and beyond, maybe they won’t even notice my knees shaking. Before I caught onto this happening, I had unconsciously trained myself to constantly observe myself through the eyes of other people, no matter what I did or where I was. I had become my own voyeur, and I could not close the blinds anymore. I did not understand why every social interaction exhausted me so greatly, but I know now that it was because I was always performing. This is something I am still working on undoing. By then, my body was something that I believed was holding me back from experiencing life the way it should be lived. I know now it was not my body standing between me and the life that I desired; it was me and my shame. The fear of embarrassment and judgement. But that is not how I saw it then. And so began the split into two that I would spend the rest of my life repairing. My body, the one that embarrasses me, the one that my mother always told me should be hidden for my own good. And my mind, the one that tries to hold it all together and deals with the aftermath. My soul was left to bleed out somewhere in the cold, empty space between the two.

The larger consequences of such a split in my later life could make up a dozen separate essays on their own, so I will not touch upon them this time. What began the painstakingly slow healing process, though, as silly as it sounds, was making the decision to begin going to the gym consistently a few years ago. Exposing myself to difficulty, at the pace I could handle, on my own and with a trainer made me see my body and the things it was capable of in a completely different light. However, even if it was healing the psychological split between my body and mind, my sense of shame still persisted. I did not know quite how to begin to take it down; however, I knew that the battle with it would be a lot less simple and far more taxing.

The answer to this came about unexpectedly a few months ago. In fact, when I found it, I did not quite realise what exactly it was. I met a fencing instructor, and just a few minutes into our first meeting, as we were both admiring rapiers at the Fitzwilliam Museum, I ended up mentioning the first serious book I read as an eight-year-old. It turned into a longer conversation, and by the end of it I summoned the courage to ask if he thought I could be capable of fencing. He answered, saying he doesn’t see why not and that I should give it a go. It hit me then at that moment how badly I had needed someone to tell me something similar when I was eight. Instead of protecting me and pulling me out of harm’s way whenever embarrassment loomed around the corner, I needed someone to say, “Give it a go anyway.” Give it a go anyway. It will not kill you unless you give it power to. Yes, my body is different. Yes, there is a lot I cannot do in the same way as able-bodied people can. I do not possess the same sort of grace in the way I move. I would be lying if I said I didn’t care about these things or that I have never wished they were different, but this is how it is. This is how it is, and I will give it a go anyway.

My first session at the Cambridge University Fencing Club felt more like the most intense form of therapy ever invented than a sport. Under the fluorescent lighting, surrounded by about thirty students, a good chunk of whom had been part of different sports clubs for years, I found myself fighting with my mind and my emotions a lot more than I did with my startled body. My brain was working a million miles a minute. Never in my life had I felt more out of place. Most of the warm-up exercises I stumbled through the best I could, pushing myself to do it in the ways I knew how, even if it looked nothing like the blueprint. There also were some that I was completely incapable of doing and needed to sit out on the sidelines. I could feel the eyes on me, and so I talked to my inner kid constantly in my head. That eight-year-old was still in there, and she was both more excited than ever and utterly terrified. She told me she wants to do this as perfectly as D’Artagnan would, and I had to hold her face in my hands and say that I am very sorry, but we cannot. It made her sad for a minute, but then she saw a rapier. A real one this time, not one made out of twigs and wine corks. I told her that our failures don’t mean anything as long as we try. That she is still worthy. That she can do it anyway, that she can do it badly and it still counts. She wasn’t listening at that point anymore; she was just excited to hold a sword.

And I was right there with her. I was so emotionally and physically exhausted by the end of the first half of the session that getting some air in my lungs felt like a lot of effort. However, the moment our tutor finally asked us to suit up and I could actually put the mask on and pick up the blade, I felt a surge of power unlike anything I have experienced before. It has become the reason why I go back even as things have advanced and become more and more difficult. The source of this power could be the anonymity that the mask provided, or the presence of a deadly weapon in my hand, or the realisation I am honouring a secret, little dream I had more than twenty years ago, but no matter what it was, I was basking in it. I was pretty sure my opponent saw me making mistakes and executing my lunges with a form that was far from textbook, but I really didn’t care, even when I was losing points over and over again. There were moments when I won some as well. It was not all terrible, and there were things I did fairly well. I tried to hold onto them. My reflexes with the blade were good. I was a whole lot better at attacking and stepping forward than I was at defence and stepping back. As long as I could keep the shame out, I could keep going.

As the sessions progressed, things got harder. I found myself at war with my ego and what was physically possible for me. I wanted to be good; I wanted to do this like everyone else. I could not. I could not, and I needed to find a way to be okay with that, to remember why I was here in the first place. Excellence was never an option, but it was also never the goal. That was not why I started to do this. The goal was to meet my own shame on the piste as an eight-year-old and to find a way to win.

And I did. I went to the studio week after week, when every bone in my body told me it would be so much easier to just stay at home. If I hid away, I wouldn’t have to commute for an hour and a half in the rain. I wouldn’t have to come face to face with the fact that I cannot jump with one leg in the air or jump three steps backward within a second interval, or that running across the room makes me feel like I could fall and bash my head in any second, or that people asking me if I am okay is a very difficult question to answer. I wouldn’t have to face the fact that during every session, there was at least one moment where I caught myself feeling very small compared to everyone else. But none of it really mattered. The only thing that held any weight was that I felt all this and I did it anyway. I stood in front of this beast, I let my mask fall, I gripped the handle of my sword and I attacked. It was lousy, and it was not perfect, and yet I did it anyway. Over and over and over again. 

I have come back, just minutes before writing this, from my last session of this term. The points have been counted and the verdict is this – I believe that there will always be a part of me that will wonder what it would have been like if I was born like everyone else. I wish I could wrap this up with a pretty bow and say now with full confidence that this has utterly transformed me and taught me to love all of myself unconditionally and that I would never wish for things to be different again. There will always be a part of me that will wonder how my life, my character and my experiences could have looked and felt like if it were not for cerebral palsy. Don’t judge me too harshly for this, dear reader. I think it’s pretty human to ponder upon such things every once in a while. However, I never let these musings steal more than a few seconds of my time. After all, I am here, in this place, in this body that I have been given, either by God or some other higher power. None of this is an accident. This body is mine, and it is capable of so much more than I gave it credit for just a few months ago. It has carried me through this life brilliantly so far, and I make a conscious choice to be grateful for it every day. 

I would be lying if I said that shame and embarrassment have completely ceased to darken my doorway. I know them well; I have fenced them both week after week. But sometimes they sneak up on me still, when I am alone and there is no one around. When I have no sword and the rules that would be enforced on the piste do not apply. When they knock, I welcome them, yet when they cross my threshold now, they know they hold no power in this house anymore. I have won one too many times. They cannot touch me now. Because I have built this place of refuge with my bare hands, despite their best efforts to tear it down. And now they have come to bask in the light of the hearth I have lit. I ask them to sit next to it, I pour us tea, and we read The Three Musketeers together. Then, as the fire blazes higher and higher, I wait. I wait, and I watch them dry out and turn to dust on my living room carpet.