Produkt

KlappentextLearn to love your imperfect, messy self just as you are. Ellen Keane spent most of her teens extremely uncomfortable with her limb difference and battling to hide her insecurities. It was only when she embraced her difference that she found her superpower. She started to believe in her unique abilities and gradually find the success that she had never dreamed possible. Perfectly Imperfect is for anyone struggling to accept who they are. With anecdotes from her own life, practical advice and good-natured humour, Ellen challenges you to let go of waiting until everything is perfect and instead embrace your imperfections and accept who you are, flaws and all. It might just change your life.

Ellen Keane is a four-time Paralympian, who won a gold medal in the 100-metre breaststroke at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. In 2022 she reached the final of Dancing With the Stars on RTÉ One. She is the recipient of a Lord Mayor of Dublin Award. This is her first book.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780717196173

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen

FormatE101

Verlag

Gill Books

Erscheinungsjahr2024

Erscheinungsdatum04.01.2024

Seiten256 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse3315 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.13406864

Rubriken

Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

Introduction

As I am finishing this book, I m about to begin training for my last Paralympic Games, Paris 2024. I m so excited to get started, to enjoy this final year in a world I have felt is my home for many years.

I m 28 now, and coming to the end of one massive chapter in my life: the swimming career I embarked upon when I was still a child, becoming the youngest ever Irish Paralympian at the age of 13 and winning a gold medal in Tokyo in 2021. But that said, there were many times in my life as I was growing up when I was struggling, and I had no one to talk to, and no one to turn to, and it felt like there was no one else who felt the way I was feeling.

Feeling alone made the difficult things I experienced so much worse; I believed no one had ever felt the same, this different, this other, not enough, and that made things so much harder. It was only when I began to speak out about how I was feeling that I learned I was not alone - far from it, in fact! In the greatest way possible, I wasn t special in the slightest - many people felt or had felt the same. That they were different, other, not enough. Ironically, my differences became a means of connection with others, a point of similarity, something I came to realise the more I shared about how I felt. Being open and vulnerable started to become something that brought comfort, rather than something scary.

If you are feeling alone, and different, and you can t find anyone in your world who seems to be experiencing the same thing, or you don t feel that you can, or want to, talk to anyone right now, I would like this book to be a comfort blanket for you. I hope that my story told here validates what you are feeling, and that this book is a place for you to turn to when you re feeling alone or conflicted. Hopefully you will be able to find something within these pages that might help set you on the right path.

I often get asked by people who also have a disability, or who might be feeling insecure about themselves in some way, what s the answer? How did I do it? How did I get the courage to start living a carefree life, and how did I learn to love my body?

At first, when people asked me these questions, I used to get a bit overwhelmed by the feeling that I had to have the answer. People were coming to me, and I needed to give them what was going to work. But, I came to realise, there is no one answer. Certainly nothing I could cover in a DM reply to an Instagram message!

Because the answer isn t straightforward. It was a slow process and there were a lot of factors involved. I went on a journey to accept my body, learning to accept myself, even discovering that I don t always have the answer, and that maybe I still have my own work to do on myself. It is an ongoing process.

Which brings us to this book. Rather than trying to answer each query individually, I wanted to put it all down here, a sort of guidebook to how I dealt with things, what I have learned works for me, and reflections on the times I struggled, so you can have it to refer to whenever you need, dip into whenever you find yourself also struggling.

Each chapter covers something that has been important to me along the way, a sort of building block, or something I needed to learn to deal with. At the end of each chapter are three challenges, small, medium and big, because this is how I like to break my goals up when I am setting them - building from the micro up to make larger changes. I would suggest picking a new notebook to use alongside the book as you read, to record observations, feelings or even changes in yourself you are noticing as you work through the chapter challenges. I hope by tackling these challenges, and using the notebook to record your progress, by the end of this book you will be further along on your own journey towards self-acceptance.

This book is a way of explaining how I got from feeling alone and isolated because of my difference to feeling like it is the best thing about me, my superpower. But it will also show the reality of my journey, because it s not like it happened overnight. There were so many highs - my gold medal, my time on Dancing with the Stars - but also, as you will see, so many lows. As I will explain in the chapters that follow, there is no quick fix.

I am not 100% all of the time, and I never will be. Who is? What I would like to do is humanise things, show you the truth of my story and how I came to self-acceptance, and to hopefully help you to realise that everything you need to do the same is already within you. I m not special. That s the most important thing for me: to make people realise I m not special. What I went through and what I did - everyone has those emotions, everyone has those feelings, and it s just about recognising them and learning how to deal with them. This book will show you how I recognised them, and how even the negative feelings, emotions and experiences I have had have all played their part in getting me to the place I am in now. Without them, I mightn t have had the amazingness that comes with everything else. I might have missed the best parts.

I was never bullied as a kid. A lot of the thoughts I had were my own internal ableism. And that was because I hadn t seen anyone who looked like me, so for many years I felt I was inherently wrong. Ever since I have learned to embrace my arm and my body, I ve made it my mission to put myself out there as much as possible, and to try and be a role model, to be that person for other people with disabilities to look at and think, if she can do it, I can do it. Visibility is so important.

It s not just disabled people who I ve connected with. It s anyone who has had any sort of insecurity, anyone who has felt like they haven t belonged. I want this book to be the person I needed when I was a kid, a teenager, or even older. For anyone who feels similarly, I want it to be that for you too, now, in the moment.

I know how bad the demons in your head can get, how paralysing thoughts can be, how you might not even recognise the extent of the negative self-talk you re subjecting yourself to. I want to highlight the power of the negative, but also of the positive things you can say to yourself. And to look at all the things that are in your control which you can do to make yourself feel better, the pillars of your life that will help you to love yourself.

I want this book to be nearly like a best friend that you can turn to when you don t have anyone else to talk to. I have a wonderful, loving family, but the thing about me and my arm is that I never told anyone that I was scared, or about the thoughts I was having. I m not sure, even if I had wanted to, that I could have; I didn t even understand exactly what I thought. I just knew I had to hide, rather than embrace who I was. And I knew I felt as if I couldn t be loved, that I was unworthy. These were all things that I kept in. I couldn t tell anyone because I felt like no one would understand. So I want this book to be something that you can relate to, and hopefully, a place where you will feel understood.

A place where you can find yourself, which means you don t have to turn to someone if you don t want to. You can turn to this book and rely on it, as you might a good friend who you can talk to. Sometimes there s only so much talking to other people we can do, and at the end of the day it has to come from inside you. I want this book to help you with that.

I ve gone to psychologists; I ve gone to sports psychologists; I have access to so many people who could help me. But often I have found my strength and inspiration from the books that I read. I want this book to be that inspiration for anyone who reads it.

When you have a difference, adapting to situations is a skill that you learn from a very young age. So when things happen now, and there might be a bit of panic, I m able to think outside the box a lot more easily than other people because I have learned there is always more than one way of doing something. People will often say to me, Oh, you ve overcome your disability. I hate that, because I haven t overcome my disability. The world isn t designed for disability, so I overcome ableism, every day.

Whenever I m telling my story, my life seems to naturally divide up into chapters. Pre-Beijing, and the thirteen-year-old kid I was at those first Games in 2008. Then the years up to London in 2012, a teenager, struggling to balance wanting to do the things that everyone else was doing with needing to learn what was necessary to look after myself as an athlete.

Then between London and Rio, learning how to better physically mind myself. Becoming a better athlete, stronger, fitter. But then realising in Rio that I hadn t been minding myself mentally. And finally, the years between Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 (its official title, although it actually took place the following year) when I really started to understand how to do that.

The chapter I m in now, I finally feel like I have all the tools. I m going to retire from swimming this year, after my last Games in Paris, and I m already looking forward to what comes next. Where before, a lot of my decisions were made for other people, or influenced by other people, at this point in my life it s as if I ve come full circle, and I m back to where I was when I was...
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Keane, EllenHynes, Liadán

Ellen Keane is a four-time Paralympian, who won a gold medal in the 100-metre breaststroke at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo. In 2022 she reached the final of Dancing With the Stars on RTÉ One. She is the recipient of a Lord Mayor of Dublin Award. This is her first book.

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