Adaptations I Learned Writing a Memoir With Cerebral Palsy
Freelance writer Christopher L.L. Vaughan shares his experience writing a memoir with cerebral palsy, including adaptations he learned in the process.
I’m reminded of why I wrote a memoir every time I twist my left fingers entering em-dashes, double quote marks, and parentheses on my MacBook. I’m also reminded why the manuscript took almost eight years to finish. I type with only my left hand since I have cerebral palsy of the right side. Stiff right fingers won’t cooperate with my keyboard as they’re usually curled into my palm.
I’ve tried pressing the shift key with my bony right index finger, but it freezes over the key lifting upward as if it were repellent. After years of peeling digits open with my left hand, I quit trying to type with right fingers spreading in impossible directions. Tense and aching, my arm lays in a familiar position on my spastic right leg. On the other side of the computer, my left hand is in constant motion crossing the keys.
My memoir is about this. Well, not typing, but the 30-plus year experience of accepting my disability. It was a slow process. I hid my C.P. for decades not knowing how to even tell best friends, because the disability is often invisible until someone asks me to shake hands. However, finding adaptations as a disabled writer helped me better understand my story and body.
I wasn’t comfortable talking about C.P. as I joined the workforce starting a job at a local newspaper either. Offering my left hand to shake became awkward. However, the exhilaration of typing breaking news headlines as fast as possible with one hand, trying to keep up with the other journalists and editors, made up for challenging moments. My right knuckles, tucked underneath a desk, scraped against a twitching leg in the center of the newsroom while I listened for emergencies over police scanners.
Following years of wincing when I had to boot up Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in grade school, I grew to be proficient at typing with one hand. I also began to open up about living with a disability. Meeting my wife Lisa, who inspired me to write more personally, was a turning point. I decided to spend less time on local politicians and car accidents and more effort crafting a manuscript that I completed a few years after the birth of my son Noah in 2021. That little boy would be the catalyst for me to embrace my disability entirely.
I took a new job at Condé Nast in 2016 and initially I wrote the book in the evenings. Finding a daily writing routine was difficult. I didn’t know where to start. I bought an IKEA desk that went unoccupied and a new laptop with a smaller keyboard but these things weren’t helping me draft the manuscript. A couple weeks into commuting to 1 World Trade Center, I had a revelation though. It was a long trek from home in Tarrytown, NY, and that time could be spent writing on my iPhone. It felt uneasy. Clicking letters on a mobile device wasn’t what real writers did, I thought. Never mind. I knew navigating the keypad with one hand was faster than typing on the laptop that laid unopened.
Unsteady on the subway, I tried working out how to take off and hold my backpack while reaching for the railing with one hand. The solution was wearing a messenger bag instead. Then, after failed attempts and bruises, I realized, if I guided my right hand with the left—those ever-clenching fingers would tighten around the pole in a vice grip. I didn’t balance well with a spastic right leg but I managed to put words in the Notes app every week day on a train barreling downtown. It was always in the middle of particularly creative passages I was sent flying toward my fellow travelers. Dusting myself off, I’d remember what ideas I wanted to get down, exiting at the Fulton Street station. I wrote the memoir on the Metro-North commuter rail into Grand Central Terminal and then the subway for years until the pandemic sent me indoors. I edited those sentences in bed at night, never sitting at that IKEA desk that my wife and I dismantled to make room for our son.
I figured out I needed to devote as much time as possible to writing no matter the setting. Observing my surroundings, I discovered adaptations that worked for me to finish the memoir even after my son arrived. I wrote my story. The memoir is about how I found acceptance for my disability after hiding it in adolescence while navigating family trauma with my sister who juggled raising me and caring for our mom struggling through mental illness.
Writing daily certainly has hiccups, especially recently experiencing pain in my left hand from overuse. Sticking to a strict writing schedule is harder said than done now that I’m a freelancer with a toddler. I’m no longer in my comfort zone being thrown like a rag doll while trying to switch a tiny keypad from letters to symbols in a train car. The coffee shop is a good place to write too, I suppose. For me, being a disabled writer means constant readjustment and I learn more about both sides of my body with every new adaptation.
Christopher L.L. Vaughan is a freelance writer who covers disability and parenthood. He recently finished writing his first memoir and has been in the media industry for more than a decade. His work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today. He lives in Tarrytown, NY, with his son Noah and wife Lisa.
