: Ellen Keane, Liadán Hynes
: Perfectly Imperfect Embrace your difference, find your superpower
: Gill Books
: 9780717196173
: 1
: CHF 16.20
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 256
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Learn 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.

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 D