Redefining Disability Project ~ Post #10

Happy Tuesday everyone. Time again to answer another question from...

http://rosebfischer.com/2014/07/01/redefining-disability-an-interactive-blogging-project/

Are your leisure activities or hobbies affected by disability?

This is a no brainer for me, or easy to answer with my damaged brain. Heck yes! All my leisure activities are affected by my strokes.

I used to love to read and even some said I had a voracious appetite for the printed word. Reading for pleasure has gone out the window for the time being. When every letter has to be deciphered, each character has to be refreshed in my mind who they are, and having to reread every line about half a dozen times takes all the joy and relaxation out of reading for me. It is now a chore.

Writing was a way to earn money and telling stories. I absolutely loved writing stories as in novels and nonfiction. Word crafting was a joy. Not anymore! It breaks my heart to see all the red and green squiggly lines under what I'm trying to say. The grammar and spelling is worse than my young grandchildren. My writing is full of XXX(description of word I'm looking for and can't find).  Say the XXX I'm searching for is "banana." In the parentheses would be (yellow, fruit, slip peel, monkeys eat it). I can tell you all about the word except what the word is. As you can imagine, this gets very frustrating. I've got enough frustration in my life right now.

My illustrating has also fallen by the side of the road being right handed and having my tight hand nonfunctioning. My left hand had too many injuries in the past to do fine detail work.

In homesteading, I loved plowing my field (1/4 acre), mixing the compost, planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving.  I grew enough to feed my entire family and their families. Now I square foot garden in elevated raised beds. It's not the same.

I raised, butchered, and processed chickens and rabbits for the same bunch too. I raised Angora rabbits for their wool and spun it into yarn or swapped it for sheep's wool to spin. That brings me to another leisure activity that has gone by the wayside...

Needlework has been almost impossible to enjoy as I once did. I used to sit by my wood stove in the winter and do needlework. What kind? All kinds, knitting, crocheting, cross stitch, embroidery, and quilting. While I have learned to knit on a loom one handed, or hold a larger knitting needle under my nonfuncting right arm, it's not the same. I recently learned how to spin on my spinning wheel one handed. Wool, inch by inch is being made into yarn.  Thanks Linda!

You may look at these activities and think of it more like work, but not me. Sitting at the spinning wheel or sitting by the fire knitting melted stress away. Watching things grow from seed, caring for it, and then enjoying the fruits of my labor, to me there's nothing finer. Writing and illustrating, were a way to escape what I was going through into another world.

Has my disability affected my leisure activities? Heck yeah, it has, but in time I will learn a new way to get it back again. I am gardening, spinning and knitting again. I'm blogging instead of writing. I still try to relearn or learn something new every day. Do I miss my old life, who wouldn't? But new adventures await.