Long read: about 20 minutes (so grab a cuppa!)
A few weeks ago, one of my lovely Instagram followers asked me to share more about my origin story. It felt like it should be an easy task for someone who writes content and plans strategy for other people for a living, but the truth is that it’s much harder when you’re writing for yourself. There’s no external perspective, only that inner voice that’s always going to be your harshest critic. I tied myself in knots with lots of plans that I promised myself I’d come back to later, but never did.
Then one weekend, Idol by Louise O’Neill came into my life and offered me a new way to frame my story. A self-confessed bookworm, I’ve always found an escape in fictional worlds, but something about the world of Samantha Miller - a wellness influencer facing a very public backlash after publishing a “true” story about an intimate relationship that isn’t all that it seems - spoke to me.
Idol is a novel with lots to say about cancel culture, the role of influencers in the modern world, and the treatment and perception of women who make an allegation of abuse against someone with money and power. But what stuck with me was a section of the book that lasts only four pages where Sam has the only honest conversation of the entire story with her mother. She admits that she massaged the truth about her relationship with her parents to give herself an origin story that spoke to an Instagram audience of teenage girls looking for a female role model in their life that understands them and the challenges they face. Is making up your backstory for likes, fame, and money unpalatable? Absolutely. Yet we’re exposed to it every day. Sam manipulated her origin story to make it “Instagrammable” and in business, we make our stories “LinkedIn-friendly”. We don’t often take the opportunity to tell the whole story, just the parts of it that will get us maximum visibility. The algorithm teaches us that it’s better to dilute aspects of our stories with filler rather than tell it like it is.
When was the last time you saw someone post on LinkedIn that they renewed their GDPR training certificate? Instead of just telling you the facts they’ll tell you that they’re “delighted to announce that after years of commitment to data protection, they had the honour of extending their knowledge of GDPR in the very capable hands of [insert tutor or learning platform with thousands of followers for maximum reach].” There’s a time and a place to write for algorithms, but if you don’t tell your truth, you lose the impact that a well-told story has on the human mind. And that’s what I want this piece to be: a story with heart and without frills that tells the honest version of why Sarella Marketing exists without an algorithm in mind.
“Just Stick a Sign Around My Neck That Says ‘Cerebral Palsy Child: Health and Safety Risk’”
I think I was seven years old when I said this. I could make out that it was a big moment of realisation or that it was some sort of way of taking back control of my own narrative, but it wasn’t. In the head of my seven-year-old self, it was a very practical solution to the problem of my wheelchair posing a health and safety risk that the people around me kept going on about. If I had a sign to warn other people, then there wouldn’t be an issue. It’s safe to say that my suggestion was met with awkward silence and nobody talked about health and safety around me in quite the same way again, but it’s a moment I always return to in my head.
The memory itself is so clear, but what resonates with me now isn’t the reaction of the people around me at the time. It’s the fact it seemed like an obvious solution to a little girl who shouldn’t have known that there was such a thing as health and safety regulations. To me, that speaks volumes about the stories society tells disabled children about themselves. You’re a problem to be managed and fixed. The ultimate “fix” is to make you as non-disabled as possible so that your life is as “normal” as possible. You’re made to feel that if you don’t subscribe to that idea, you’re choosing to make life tough for yourself. I’m lucky to have had such supportive parents who advocated for me at every opportunity and an extended family that loved me for who I was, but it was lonely outside of our little bubble.
That’s why representation matters. I always felt that I was special but not in a good way. I felt like I deserved to be treated differently because I needed support. I longed to pick up a book, open a magazine or switch on the TV and find someone like me living a life like mine. Every single time I didn’t find that, it was yet more evidence of my difference.
So many times, I sent my parents searching for stories that included “people like me” and despite hours scouring the internet, they usually came up short. My mum is a great storyteller and she used to make up stories for me with disabled characters front and centre but it wasn’t the same. Those stories weren’t being told by my friends’ favourite authors or featuring regularly in their favourite TV shows.
When I did come across the rare character with a physical disability like Layla in the TV series Tracy Beaker and Princess Lindsey in The Tiara Club books by Vivian French, it felt like I’d been given permission to be myself. Yes, it was a brilliant feeling. But why should the little girl who understands health and safety rules better than some adults be forced to find stories that she felt part of? Why couldn’t she just be part of the mainstream story for once? Then 2012 came along and everything changed.
Meet the Superhumans
I was in my final year of primary school in 2012 and Olympic fever was in full swing. One of my fondest memories of that time is lining up against a barrier on the main road with everyone in my class to see the Olympic Torch Relay. There was a touch of magic about it - people noticed us, rather than the adults looking after us. I remember a woman with a megaphone going past ahead of the relay giving us a shout-out and us all cheering in response. I genuinely felt like I was part of something momentous and I was getting to experience it with them on equal terms.
It might be something about the hopefulness of that time, but when the Meet the Superhumans ad campaign landed to promote the London 2012 Paralympic Games, I felt able to have honest conversations about my disability with friends, peers and even grown-ups. The ad was the first time I’d felt seen and celebrated and it spoke in a language everyone understood: superheroes. The level of engagement with the campaign was like nothing I’d experienced before and I finally felt special in a good way. That summer I felt really optimistic about life and took a huge leap towards self-acceptance all because of one ad campaign and the two-week event it promoted. People often scoff at me when I say that marketing has a real role to play in helping people feel seen, heard and understood, but I’m living proof that it matters. Trust me when I say I’ve had more time to reflect on the messaging of that particular campaign, but we’ll leave that for later…
Surgery Stories
I wish I could stop on that joyously hopeful note, but life had other ideas! In 2013, I needed a life-saving operation on my spine and pelvis. The condition I had caused my spine to crush my internal organs and led to my stomach stopping working completely. Going through this type of thing is definitely something that isn’t on anyone’s bucket list but as a pre-teen girl, it had a profound impact on my body image and sense of self. Not only was I in a wheelchair but I was bent 88 degrees to the right (talk about accidentally invading other people’s personal space!) and had a feeding tube coming out of each nostril.
Weirdly, though, I felt more represented by the mainstream media. Stories like mine were all over the news and charity advertising campaigns and they invariably had happy endings. In the lead up to the surgery, it felt good to see that there were stories where everything worked out, but 18 titanium rods and a spell in ITU later, they just made me angry. I remember feeling a profound sense of injustice that these stories were just edited soundbites of a much bigger picture. It’s that classic question: why did nobody tell me how much this would hurt? I was fuelled by fury in the sense that I’d never been told the whole story of the people featured in these news items or ad campaigns, just the parts that make people feel good.
I now know that the iconic disability activist Stella Young coined the term “inspiration porn” to describe this kind of content because it’s designed to do one of two things - it either makes people feel good about giving a donation or it makes them feel more positive about disability in general. The trouble is that this type of content is often written to sell an idea about disability and need in a way that appeals to the non-disabled gaze. This is what I was feeling frustrated about, but my annoyance was just compounded by the fact that I didn’t have the words to explain why I was feeling this way.
So I did what I always do to escape the real world: I turned to books. Immediately after my surgery, I could only lie flat so I asked my mum to read to me. That was when I discovered the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series by the late, great Louise Rennison (admittedly not the first series I’d choose to read with my mum, but that was the only option available to me at the hospital library unless I fancied slowly bored to sleep by endless renditions of The Three Little Pigs).
Although she wasn’t disabled, I found a friend in Georgia. She was relatable and her voice was so similar to my own inner voice that I felt at ease with her. It was the first time I’d found a non-disabled character I actually connected with. To this day, I credit this series with helping me discover my own writing style and planting the seed that the pieces wrote didn’t have to take a serious, grandiose tone, even when the subject matter was serious.
The Jellybians
When I was eventually able to go back to school, my frustrations about the stories of disability with a perpetually happy ending and my newfound love of Louise Rennison’s writing collided and formed a rather eccentric alliance. I decided that if I couldn’t find realistic stories about growing up with a disability, I was going to write them instead. My obsession was pretty intense - which makes sense now that I know I’m autistic - but one of my English teachers was happy to let me indulge it. Mr P put up with me submitting my first wobbly (and sometimes downright weird) attempts at writing for every assignment for the best part of a year. Some of my most memorable plotlines included:
Aliens called the Jellybians who came to Earth, only to discover that the planet wasn’t accessible to them.
A girl who found out she was an emergency replacement for an injured swimmer at the Paralympic Games despite the fact she’d never been swimming before and had a maths exam the next day.
A woman who turned her sister’s wheelchair into a Christmas tree (obviously…)
I can’t find any of these stories now (I’m guessing they’re probably on my long-defunct school login) but I’m glad! Yep, they served a purpose but I’d just cringe to see them. They were the foundation of something bigger and more important, though: my understanding of authenticity before it became a buzzword.
I remember Mr P telling my parents at Parents’ Evening that one day I’d become an author. I doubt that he thought Penguin Random House were about to come knocking to find their next smash hit about a woman with a wheelchair Christmas tree, but I think he recognised that I had a story to tell in my own way and on my own terms. But at that point, the publishing part wasn’t something that had even crossed my mind. My stories were for me.
As a disabled teenager who’d just gone through major spinal surgery, I had so many parts of myself I needed to mask just to get through daily life - and I’m not talking about masking them to the outside world. I’m talking about internally masking my pain, my increasingly negative thoughts about my body, and my worries about the future just to keep going. Writing elements of my story in a fictionalised way gave me a safe space to explore some of my darkest thoughts that I wasn’t fully aware of or capable of acknowledging.
Looking back, those private stories shaped my personal definition of authenticity that I still use to this day. It’s a delicate balance of vulnerability and personality that creates that sense of human connection. It speaks to the sceptical parts of our brains, encouraging us to let our guard down and trust the author. That’s what authenticity means to me and that’s the biggest lesson I took from Mr P. If a story doesn’t mean something to you, don’t tell it. Writing is a form of expression and it’s doing it a huge disservice to churn out words for the sake of ticking boxes (something I’ll come back to later).
Hello From the Other Side
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before I started to crack under the pressure of being a teenager in the newly digital world. There was pressure to look a certain way, do certain things, and keep up appearances - all of which I struggled to do from my wheelchair. The mind can only cope with so much and I began to erase my sense of self until there wasn’t much left but a series of disconnected lines on a page. Reading, writing, and quite frankly, living, took a backseat as anxiety consumed me. I got the help I needed but the process of finding myself again took a lot longer than the eight week therapy blocks given out by the NHS at the time. I think it’s impossible to credit one single thing or person with helping me find my way again, but I wouldn’t be sat here writing this story if it wasn’t for Mrs B, Mrs G and the glorious library at my new school.
Moving school at such a turbulent time in my life seems like the worst possible idea on paper, but it was actually the best thing I could ever have done. The wonderful Mrs B and Mrs G worked through my feelings with me rather than just telling me that everything would be OK. They patiently listened as I vented my frustrations and even when the legendary “Sarah rant” reached peak teenage angst, they still gave me the support and space I needed. Up until this point, I’d subconsciously felt ashamed to get support in the classroom in front of my peers. It wasn’t that I didn’t need or appreciate the care - I did and I still do - but I felt like I was always “Sarah and the person providing the support” rather than just “Sarah”. They worked with me to develop strategies so that I felt more like myself, and that was more profoundly freeing than anything I’d experienced before. They even made care fun! I remember singing Adele’s Hello after Mrs G and I had to call Mrs B from the other side of the school to help me in the bathroom. It was the little lighthearted moments like this that probably didn’t mean much to them but meant everything to me.
At the same time, I rediscovered my love of the written word. The library at my new school was fully accessible to my wheelchair and for the first time ever, I was able to explore the shelves without support. I would have happily spent all day perusing the books rather than doing school work but c’est la vie, the school work had to be done too! With my newfound confidence, I even felt able to explore new genres, which was a huge achievement for my rather rigid, set-in-its-ways autistic brain. Who’d have guessed I was a crime thriller queen?! But perhaps more importantly in the context of this origin story, I also began developing a love of book-based research.
I’m right on the cusp of being a digital native, so all my skills were based around internet research. Don’t get me wrong, I always had access to books but it felt easier to turn to Google for help rather than ask for support to find books in a library that wasn’t built for wheelchair users. Now the physical barriers had been removed, I loved exploring big topics using a combination of books and the internet. For my English assignments, I wrote essays on topics ranging from the concept of designer babies to the 2014 Winter Olympic and Paralympic doping scandal and even the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; that timeless LinkedIn chestnut). I always made sure to include a discussion of the impact these issues had on disabled because it mattered to me.
The Twist You Weren’t Expecting
I guess you’re thinking you know how the story ends - the seed of my passion had been planted and I’ve been working towards making my dreams into reality ever since - but you’d be wrong. Presented in this narrative form, it seems like I was always going to gravitate towards a career in words. Despite Mr P’s prediction, writing for a living wasn’t on my radar until about two months before I had to apply for my university place. I genuinely believed that I owed it to the health service that had saved my life to pursue a career as a biomedical scientist to “give back” in some way rather than pursuing a career that made my heart happy.
There’s a lot of complex psychology to unpack here that I’m not qualified to explore, but I think this leads me nicely on to a realisation I made about the disability rhetoric at this time. There’s an expectation that disabled people should be grateful to be included. It’s almost as though society itself has given you a gift by just allowing you to live your life and now it’s standing there with an outstretched hand looking for compensation. I didn’t owe anyone anything for being myself and I sure as heck wasn’t going to be repaying an imaginary debt. Science was fine and seemed the ideal discipline to “give back” but what really lit the fire inside me was words.
Very unusually, I put my analytical brain to the side and went with my gut, deleting my science applications halfway through and applying for English courses instead. Again, this sounds like a clear-cut path but there were some monumental wobbles along the way. My old doubts and anxieties resurfaced - nobody would want to hear the voice of little old me! Society believes that disabled people should be grateful, not opinionated, and studying English involves sharing your opinion on absolutely everything (seagulls, stanzas, the rise and fall of Ethelred the Unready…) Some days, the thought of becoming who I wanted to be was exhausting and I’d decide to pack it all in to take the path of least resistance. I applied for courses in everything from administration to graphic design but my fabulous teachers and support staff were there to pick me up and steer me in the right direction again. I have to give a shout-out to Mrs H, Mrs L, and a second Mrs B here. Without them, I would have been reduced to a snivelling mess in the corner by 10am every day. I think we all celebrated when the email I’d been waiting for came through: I’d been accepted by my first-choice university.
“Hold Up This Bit of Paper to the Camera and It’ll All Be Fine”
That first summer after the acceptance email dropped into my inbox was a chaotic whirlwind. I know it’s intense for everyone but it’s doubly intense when you’re registering as a disabled student. You have to decide what support you need, explore assistive technology and apply for the funding. For me, I always knew I wanted to stay at home - not because of my disability, but because I’m a homebird - so I knew from very early on that I was going to select the remote learning option and have my mum as my scribe (employing my mum still seems wild to me all these years later but my goodness, did she earn those pennies scribing about Aeschylus’ plays that came straight from his dirty mind!)
Before the first lecture, I had got to the point where I could have recited the induction booklet from cover to cover. I knew which buttons to click to start the call, I knew all about camera and microphone etiquette and I even knew the number to contact IT support if I couldn’t log in. In a nutshell, I was ready for every eventuality - except for the one I was confronted with. I could hear the lecturer perfectly but he couldn’t hear any of the students. We could talk amongst ourselves but as soon as we tried to answer questions, there was nothing on his end. At one point, he addressed a question directly to me and thought I was ignoring him. That’s when the panic set in and I did the one sensible thing I could do in that situation which was, of course, to screech a garbled collection of words at my mum which vaguely resembled the phrase, “what do I do now?” Thankfully, she understood her assignment immediately and said, “hold up this bit of paper to the camera and it’ll all be fine.” She’d scrawled “WE CAN HEAR YOU BUT YOU CAN’T HEAR US” across the page in green pen. The lecturer noticed it straight away and my mum became an accidental hero for getting the lecture back on track.
I loved those first few months. I discovered that I’m actually a bossy boots at heart and quickly became the go-to spokesperson when I was doing group work. I’d also broadened my literary horizons and become comfortable with defending my point of view when someone disagreed (perhaps the single most important quality in an inclusive marketer). In short, I was chugging along just fine. Then 23rd March 2020 came along and changed my world.
CP, Lockdown and Me
For those of you who don’t know what’s significant about that date, it’s when the Prime Minister declared the first lockdown during the COVID pandemic in the UK. Initially, I was really scared because one of my parents had to shield. This meant that I developed a sense of hyperawareness whenever I so much as inhaled some fresh air, worrying that I was going to bring the virus into my home. But as we got into the rhythm of lockdown living, I noticed this strange shift happening: the world was becoming more accessible. Instead of volunteering opportunities and university societies being in-person, they were all moving online.
I really got stuck into life outside my usual bubble. I properly leaned into my love of books and helping other people do the same. In many ways, my disability was a footnote and I almost left it behind in those early days of lockdown. I helped unlock the joy of storytelling for a young person by becoming a volunteer literacy tutor and became the events officer for the literary society at university. Oh, and I booked Ian Rankin and Lin Anderson for events (yes, the Ian Rankin!) What I’m about to tell you sounds like the worst LinkedIn “humblebrag” ever, but far from the usual purpose of stroking my own ego, it’s the story that set the wheels in motion for Sarella Marketing.
My first task as events officer was to approach Scottish authors and ask them to give a talk to our society. Being the eternal optimist - and a systematically organised autistic person - I set up a spreadsheet and recorded the contact details for every author I could find and sent them a personalised email. When I included Ian Rankin and Lin Anderson on the list and presented it on a video call, I was met with a sea of raised eyebrows and a reminder to temper my expectations. I took the well-meaning advice but carried on anyway. For me, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Lin Anderson’s Dr Rhona MacLeod are the best characters crime fiction has ever seen. I’d lived every adventure with them and as weird as this sounds, they were part of my life. I knew that Ian was releasing A Song for the Dark Times and Lin was releasing The Innocent Dead in 2020, so what did I have to lose by contacting them to tell them how much I loved their work and inviting them to speak? It worked. It turns out that being woken up by a WhatsApp that said: Mate, bloody hell, you’ve just booked Lin Anderson and Ian Rankin!!! was the best way to shake off the morning slumber. I was so happy that I even resisted the urge to say “I told you so!”
The events themselves were brilliant and had an attendance like we’d never seen before. Listening to the separate talks by Ian and Lin, I felt so inspired to begin writing for myself again. But what stuck with me and began germinating was how they both talked about research being a fundamental part of the stories they told. Without a young Ian Rankin badgering the police at his local station, Rebus wouldn’t exist. And without her friendship with forensic soil analysis expert Professor Lorna Dawson, Lin Anderson wouldn’t be able to make Rhona’s love of the technical aspects of soil analysis an endearing and accessible part of the overall storylines of her novels.
I went away and wrote my first ever research-based essay that blended lived experience with facts. I snappily titled it “CP, Lockdown and Me” and explored what I perceived to be the world’s attitude towards disability, accessibility, and inclusion changing for the better. I spent months pitching it to different outlets and by the time it was published under a different title by The Mighty, I’d secured a remote marketing internship in the penultimate year of my undergrad degree with a health company in the USA. Things were looking up and I felt I didn’t need to carry the burden of feeling “different” any more. In a world where everyone had to be connected virtually, I was on a par with everyone else. But in a strange turn of events, I decided that instead of shedding my disabled identity like I’d been desperate to do since I was a child, I owned it and celebrated it.
Having the Guts (Literally and Metaphorically)
Let me explain a bit more and it might make sense (and if it doesn’t, then there’s not much I can do about it other than give you a mental image of me giving you a sympathetic look). My disability is an intrinsic part of me and I realised that I do things with my disability rather than despite it. For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to skip over the fact I was disabled. But I couldn’t. It felt wrong, like I was trading off a part of myself in order to meet the socially conditioned version of what I thought was normal. Even the thought of doing the very thing I’d wished I could do for years made me angry at myself. So, my new colleagues knew about my disability from day one despite the fact I could have hidden it.
I think it probably helped that my internship was related to bowel health technology and encouraging people to take up bowel screening opportunities. When you’re talking about all things poo-related with a group of people you’ve just met, admitting that you’re disabled suddenly feels a whole lot easier. But there was also an element of relevance. The type of Cerebral Palsy I have affects every muscle in my body so I’ve been screened for inflammatory bowel disease and coeliac disease more times than I care to remember. A few months before the internship started, I’d been hospitalised with a severe abdominal infection and was under investigation for ulcerative colitis. It was comforting to be in a work environment where everyone spoke about those icky health topics that us Brits prefer to awkwardly mouth about rather than openly discuss.
When my internship ended, I actually felt bereft and I had to ask myself why. It wasn’t the technicalities of marketing I was hankering after. I was missing the fact that my work was helping the company reach people it might actually help. It could have reached a physician looking to improve their bowel screening services, or it could have reached a bloke called Jeff who had been putting off his bowel screening because it seemed a bit gross. This was work that could make a real difference and I knew I had to take that forward in my own way. But where to start?
A mentor from my internship had recommended the book, Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box published by The Arbinger Institute. I’m someone who’s highly sceptical of business woo-woo and the blurb was giving those vibes, so I was looking forward to reading it as much as I’d look forward to eating a dry piece of toast, but I actually took an important lesson away from it. It taught me that I could pivot from my initial degree subject and still be respected in my chosen field. Why? Because the box I felt like I was stuck in only existed in my head. Just because I didn’t have a BA in marketing, it didn’t mean I couldn’t gain experience, then sign up for an MA in marketing and digital communications. So that’s exactly what I did. I signed myself up for multiple volunteer positions to boost my skills in different areas of marketing whilst writing a dissertation on the perception of cognitive differences in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This unusual combination of upskilling in marketing and critical disability studies meant that I was ready to continue my educational journey, even if it hadn’t taken the shape younger me expected.
The Not So Superhumans
I loved everything about my new area of study and would constantly search for representation of disability. My lecturers quickly learned that if I found an example of representation, I’d share my thoughts on it and if I found a missed opportunity for representation, I’d comment on that too. The net result was that I hardly shut up for two years and was probably responsible for at least 2% of global sales of Strepsils! I can count on one hand the number of authentic representations I found of disabled people just being there in marketing materials. Sometimes the examples I found were classic versions of inspiration porn, but I was rather startled to realise that some of the biggest brands featured a disabled person in their marketing materials just so they could shout about it in their year-end impact report. The idea that the presence of a disabled person in their content was a PR stunt to make a brand seem inherently “good” harks back to that idea that disabled people are somehow indebted to a non-human entity simply for including us. Reducing disability to a box to strategically tick whenever it was beneficial to them wasn’t actually showing a commitment to my community; it was a way of exploiting us. As soon as I noticed the pattern, I realised that brands needed to be guided on authentic representation and long-term commitment to disabled people. I just didn’t know how I was going to do that… yet!
The more I encountered this performative version of inclusion, the more I put the ‘Meet the Superhumans’ campaign on a pedestal. Every time I found an example of box-ticking, my internal refrain would say “at least we have the superhumans” until one day, I accidentally discovered a small but mighty collection of research that turned my opinion on its head. At first, when I saw articles claiming that the campaign othered disabled people by creating an “us and them” divide (implying that non-disabled people are human but disabled people are super humans for living with the challenges they face), I was pretty disgusted. It felt like an attack on the one thing that had brought me solace as a child and I took it as a personal affront to my memories and the emotions I ascribed to them. But the more I considered it, the more I realised that the critics had a point. Portraying high-performance athletes with a disability as superheroes did have shades of the inspiration porn I’d come to speak out against.
Although I’d made this realisation, I wasn’t ready to accept it. Yes, what the critics said was valid but so were my memories. I became fixated on finding a way to balance these two polar opposite truths. At the time, I was knee-deep in marketing and business theory books researching the effectiveness of the representations of disability in charity advertising on Instagram and I thought I’d find the answers here. I didn’t. I found answers in The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion instead. I was no fan of the stereotypes of autism it portrays and found the whole premise deeply uncomfortable. For a novel about a man clearly coded as autistic (even though the word is never explicitly mentioned) trying to find love to be produced by an author who doesn’t identify as autistic and openly admits that he didn’t conduct any clinical research during the writing process felt like a classic case of appropriation. The autistic experience had been reduced to comedy to entertain the masses and that setup felt disturbingly like the “freak shows” we thankfully left behind last century. I was angry and repulsed, yet I was left with one question: is a poor representation of the autistic experience better than no representation at all?
The answer is no. This poor representation perpetuates harmful stereotypes about autism and silences the voices of those with lived experience. Let me be crystal clear, I don’t think Simsion had malicious intent when he set out to write the book and that’s where things get interesting. He genuinely believed that he was representing the autistic people he’d worked with in his IT job and I actually find it heartening that he noticed the lack of autistic representation in fiction. The trouble was that he decided to speak on behalf of autistic people rather than adding his voice to the conversation about autistic representation in the arts.
And that was where the answer about the Superhumans campaign lay. The campaign put real Paralympians front and centre, making it feel authentic and relevant at the time. The criticism that’s grown over time is actually a good thing because it shows another positive shift in how we view disability. It was a collaborative example of considered creativity, meaning that both my positive memories and the criticism could be valid at the same time. It was everything that The Rosie Project wasn’t and this observation created the spark I needed to set up my own inclusive marketing strategy and content writing business.
The Rest Is History
Fast forward two years and I’m writing this from my desk on a soggy, grey October day. I could tell you about my portfolio and wax lyrical about why every brand should adopt my REAL Inclusive Marketing Method but that feels a bit like a LinkedIn performance. Instead, I’m going to take it full circle and return to the character of Samantha Miller from Idol. Now I’ve had time to reflect on the story, I think her fatal flaw was becoming too invested in her work. Everything she did related to her work, and her world became solely about her. She genuinely convinced herself that her story was a commodity but by doing that, she shrank her own world. I don’t want to be that person. I’m sharing my story for me and because I want to. So all that’s left to say is: here’s my unglamorous origin story. Take it or leave it. And don’t be afraid to tell your own.