Podcast, Disability, Fiction

I learned something about myself today.

Last week, I recorded a podcast with the wonderful people behind Hidden Gems Books. It’s about disability in fiction, and my experience with portraying an invisible disability in a book. You can watch it here:

The thing is, I can’t listen to it. I’m too scared. This is new for me. I’m the sort of person who enjoys listening to themselves talk. I’ve listened back to my project on Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why multiple times, and I’ve done the same with the Doctor Who project I did last year. But I can’t listen to that podcast.

I don’t know exactly why, but I think it’s because I really care about disability generally, and disability in fiction in specific. I feel that the disabled community are being let down by art in general in a big way, and fiction takes a big slice of the blame there. And I loved being able to talk about it, but I’m worried I forked it up, or sounded like a know-it-all, or just jabbered on endlessly.

It feels as if this matters. The question ‘Is Sherlock is Garbage and Here’s Why a terrible video essay’ is both straightforward (yes, it’s terrible), and it also doesn’t particularly matter. Whereas disability in fiction genuinely does matter, and it’s possibly my first time talking about something that I know a decent amount about, but far, far less than I’d like to. I’ll have made errors, said the wrong thing, oversimplified…

But hey. At least I talked about it. At least Hidden Gems Books let me talk about it.