I was approached by Johy Campos of the fan page Ghost en espanol, who centre around news and discussion topics relating to my favourite band, Ghost, and translating those related articles into Spanish to post on their social media platforms of Facebook, YouTube and Instagram - reaching a Latin American audience upwards of 30,000 followers.
I was invited to share my experiences with the band which tie extremely closely to my sight loss story, from September 2018 to now, when my retinas detached and I had many complications and challenges to face in blindness. I was nervous to even address the request at first as I had never truly faced and reflected on what had happened to me, choosing to keep it bottled up and pushed to the back of my mind - hanging around me like a dark, heavy fog that I tried to ignore as much as possible very varying success.
I eventually came to starting to write the beginnings of my experience during the quarantine when things were very bad for me and I needed a distraction. The more I began to write, the closer I got to the day of my first retina detaching and living through that truly awful and stressful experience, alone, that I wouldn't wish on anybody. It was hard going back into my past, I had to take long pauses from writing and would have panic attacks, but when I calmed down enough to continue it began to be very therapeutic - like a self-directed counselling session. Eventually I had recounted the entire tale in 6,000 words and sent it to Johy so she could create a video for the channel and translate my story into Spanish.
I could never have guessed what would happen next.
Despite my original anxiousness and feeling hesitant to approach this task, it has now been composed into a beautiful video that has been viewed 48,366 times so far, has 3.7k likes and 263 comments. I amassed over 3,000 followers on my instagram reaching an entirely new audience of people who have been nothing short of supportive.
I decided to take my experience to Metal Hammer, making contact with online editor Dave Everely and magazine editor Merl Alderslade, who occasionally run reader stories. This is incredibly exciting for me to talk to people connected to a magazine I love so dearly and to build those contacts in the music industry that I would like to be situated in like illustrators like Sam Dunn.
Gathering a new audience and making new professional contacts, coming to terms with and accepting the tragic things that happened to me and using them for good has made me feel so much better. I now have big names in the industry like producer Tom Dalgety and music photographer Paul Harries following me!
...So what's next? Would I like to illustrate my blindness journey and what I can see now? Illustrate a range of materials for sight loss charities? A helpful guide? An inspiring tale? it's something to consider for level 6.
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