Ricky Buchanan & Amble Skuse
I interviewed my friend Ricky Buchanan who has severe M.E. and lives in Australia. Ricky and I have been talking and collaborating for a few years. She has taught me so much about how to live within the smaller circles which M.E. restricts you to.
Ricky talks about feeling like she is disappearing from the world, from her world. Every time her M.E. gets worse, she has to contract her impact on the world, contract how she connects with people and contract how much she can contribute to our conversations around disability. Her wisdom and perspective are being erased from our world, restricted to shorter snippets, fainter whispers.
Her words are a tape which is being recorded over again and again, erasing what was once there but replacing it with poorer and poorer quality of sound.
This layering up of her words reflects how fragmented your state of mind can be during an M.E. crash, and requires the listener to use extra focus and energy trying to decipher the various parts of her story
Her voice is disappearing from us as she tells us how it feels to be disappearing, her story is being wiped in a never ending tape loop. The machine noise grows to drown her out, just as the exhaustion and the fatigue drown out Ricky’s voice from our world.
For those who use screen readers, the text is available on a pdf here.
