About

Thank you for visiting my blog. I will try to use this page to tell you a little about myself.

My name is Connor Scott-Gardner. Here is where I am supposed to write the things that define me. My job title, or area of research, or something else of note. But really, there is nothing. I have engaged in disability rights campaigning. I am transgender. I like research and I read many books, some undoubtedly more interesting than others. But really, there is no singular thing that I can pick out as a defining feature of who I am.

It is impossible for me to explain what this blog is without telling you what it once was, and why and how I created it. I started writing a blog in April 2011. I was 17 years old, a student in year 12, and I wanted to document my life as a young blind person navigating the education system in the United Kingdom. I wrote about my classes. I explained how hard I found it to study for exams. I shared my successes and my many failures. By writing and connecting with communities online I became aware that I was not just a blind person. I was a disabled person. This discovery changed the trajectory of my life as I began to reach out to people whose impairments were not the same as my own. I watched from the sidelines as they took part in direct action and refused to be silent in the face of so many injustices.

Of course this discovery did not change me overnight, but it did awaken a kind of awareness in me that had not existed before. I have continued to document my life since then, writing far more in some years than others. Not everything I have written in the past is something I would write today. Not all opinions expressed years ago are those I would voice now. However I refuse to erase these parts of myself, even if they are not representative of who I am today. The point is that they did represent me once, and that is important if you want to understand who I am now.

Why do I continue to write? The answer is I do not know. I write because I have always written. I share because I have a chronic need to overshare details of my life that others probably have little interest in. Perhaps I am simply a product of a generation raised on social media. There is a part of me that hopes others can learn something from what I write, even if all they learn are what mistakes not to make. \I like to share my travels, books I am reading, ways for making technology and art and culture more accessible. Sometimes all I am doing is sharing how I feel in a particular moment. For me, the most freeing thing about this blog is that it can be anything and nothing.