Posted on March 5th, 2026

There is a window in my room. On the days when my body refuses everything else, when getting up is impossible and the world has shrunk to four walls and a ceiling, I sit and watch through it. If the sun is out, I see people passing. Children playing. Ordinary life unfolding at a distance. It feels close enough to touch, yet completely out of reach.

This is what disability looks like from the inside. Not laziness. Not a lifestyle choice. Not a calculation about whether work pays more than support. It is a window. And sometimes, no matter how strong your will is, you simply cannot get to the other side of it.

I live with PTSD from military service, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder and acquired brain damage following a ruptured brain aneurysm. There are weeks when my body confines me completely. The world carries on without me. The isolation is not just physical. It reaches back into eleven months of hospital admissions and brings that darkness forward into the present.

What much of the current government narrative, often amplified by sections of the media, fails to grasp is this. I do not want to be there. Nobody does.

When the window opens, everything changes.

Episodic illness feels like hope with a countdown attached. Your body gives you an hour, perhaps two, occasionally a day if you are fortunate. In that time you try to do everything. Write. Think. Contribute. Be more than your diagnoses. Be a father, a husband, a writer. Be someone with something to offer and the ability to offer it.

You move quickly because you know it may close again without warning.

That is not laziness. It is urgency. It is someone fighting to take part in the world.

I write in those windows. When I do, something shifts. I am not a patient. I am not a claimant. I am not a list of conditions on a file. I am a writer whose work is read across seven continents by people I will never meet, people who found something in my words that mattered. In those moments I feel capable. Useful. Human.

This is where the system fails people like me.

The Access to Work scheme exists to support disabled people into employment. On paper, it sounds constructive. In practice, it is built around assumptions that do not reflect the reality of episodic illness. It assumes stable hours, predictable attendance and a fixed employer. It was designed for a model of disability that is static and a model of work that is continuous.

It was not designed for fluctuation.

It was not designed for someone who might produce meaningful work for two hours on a Tuesday and then be unable to get out of bed for the following week. It was not designed for self-employment as a way of managing health, which for many disabled people is not a preference but the only viable route into working life.

When support structures demand consistency from bodies that cannot provide it, support does not arrive. Instead, the limited energy available is consumed by forms, assessments and procedural demands. The brief window of capability is spent proving eligibility to a system that often begins from a position of doubt.

The prevailing narrative suggests disabled people need to be pushed towards work. That the obstacle is attitude. That pressure and conditionality will solve the problem.

That argument is wrong.

It replaces understanding with suspicion. It measures disabled lives against able-bodied standards and calls the difference a failing. It drains energy and dignity from people already managing instability that most decision-makers will never experience.

Nobody lying in bed watching life through a window is there by choice. Nobody who has felt the urgency of those opening hours is choosing inactivity. The desire to contribute is present. The capacity is inconsistent.

What disabled people need is not pressure but systems that reflect reality. Support built around capacity rather than suspicion. Self-employment frameworks that recognise flexibility as a medical necessity. Assessment processes that understand volatility, that a person can be bed bound one week and productive the next, and that both states are equally true.

We do not want to observe life from behind glass. We want to participate in it.

The world was not designed for us. It can be.

Recovery Planning Is Not Just for Mental Health

Recovery planning is often associated with addiction or mental health, but it is just as important for people living with physical disabilities and long term illness. In this context, recovery does not mean cure. It means living as well as possible within ongoing limitations, maintaining stability, managing symptoms, and reducing the impact of setbacks.

A recovery plan provides structure when health fluctuates, energy is limited, or capacity drops. It shifts the focus from fixing the condition to protecting function, independence, and quality of life.

How to build a simple recovery plan

Define what stability looks like for you. Be realistic. Identify early warning signs that things are worsening, such as fatigue, pain, missed medication, or reduced function. Decide in advance what helps when symptoms increase, including pacing, rest, assistive equipment, or scaling back commitments. Be clear about what does not help, as well intentioned pressure can cause harm. Finally, note who supports you, what help you need, and when to ask for it.

Why it helps

Recovery plans reduce decision making when capacity is low and prevent crisis driven choices. They support consistency during long periods where progress is slow or non linear.

Share your plan

Sharing your plan with those close to you helps them understand what you are doing and why. It reduces misunderstanding, protects boundaries, and reassures others that there is a clear, thoughtful approach in place.

Recovery planning is not about cure. It is about stability, dignity, and control.

Redefining the Man in the Mirror

I spent most of my adult life in environments most people would cross the street to avoid. The Army first, then private military contracting, then close protection. War zones. High risk operations. Situations where the wrong decision carried permanent consequences.

I was fit, strong and trained to operate under pressure. My confidence was not bravado. It was earned, tested repeatedly in places that stripped away pretence very quickly.

What I discovered after being medically discharged with PTSD was that civilian life was harder for me than any operational theatre. The ordinary rhythms of day to day existence unsettled me in ways combat never had. High risk environments made sense. Instinct had value there. The version of myself I understood was still useful.

Then my body began to fail.

Fibromyalgia came first. Doctors linked it to PTSD. I carried on as trained, pushing through, minimising symptoms, treating pain as background noise.

Until October 2023, when I collapsed at home and left in an ambulance.

The following eleven months dismantled everything I thought I understood about myself.

Stroke was ruled out. A brain aneurysm was discovered but deemed stable. I was diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder, a condition where the nervous system malfunctions not because of structural damage but because signalling between brain and body breaks down. Again, it was linked to PTSD. It seemed my body had been keeping account long after I had chosen not to.

Because the aneurysm was assessed as stable, I was transferred to a neurological rehabilitation centre to focus on FND.

On 3 April 2024, the aneurysm ruptured.

I was rushed to hospital and transferred to Addenbrooke's. My wife was told that survival of the transfer was uncertain. Survival of surgery was unlikely.

I spent four weeks unconscious in intensive care.

When I regained consciousness, fourteen years of memory were gone. I could not walk. I had significant hearing loss. I was blind in my left eye.

After further weeks in hospital and rehabilitation, I was discharged in September 2024. Eleven months after the first collapse.

I had survived something that should have killed me. What awaited me at home was something I was not prepared for.

I returned to a house I did not recognise.

To a wife I had no memory of marrying.

To three children I could not remember being born.

I have known fear in my life. Real fear, the kind that sharpens thought and triggers training. In those environments fear had purpose. It steadied me because I trusted my preparation and my capability.

This was different.

For the first time, I felt genuinely vulnerable. Not operationally exposed, but fundamentally unsure. I could not trust my memory. I could not rely on my body. There was no training doctrine for this. No procedure to fall back on.

I had been a man built for extreme environments. Now I was sitting in a home I did not remember, facing a family I loved without recollection, with nothing familiar to anchor me.

That loss of identity cut deeper than the physical damage.

Masculinity had never been theoretical to me. It had been expressed through function. Through responsibility. Through capability. Provider. Protector. The steady presence others relied upon.

I had never needed to analyse it because it had never been stripped away.

Now it was.

At the same time, the wider culture seemed locked in an argument about what masculinity even meant. Strength and discipline were increasingly framed as suspect. Self reliance was portrayed as emotional deficiency. Military values were often reduced to caricature.

I found that difficult to accept.

Not because I was resistant to introspection, but because those values had preserved my life more than once. They had enabled me to provide for a family I was now trying to remember. The men who shaped me, my father, my grandfather, the soldiers I served beside, were not destructive men. They were principled, disciplined and dependable.

The problem, I concluded slowly, was not masculinity itself. It was a distortion of it. A confusion of strength with aggression and of stoicism with emotional absence.

I was not willing to discard the foundations that had carried me through war and now through survival.

So I returned to fundamentals.

Loyalty. Discipline. Showing up. Doing the difficult thing because it requires doing. Being reliable.

Those principles did not vanish when I lost memory or mobility. They simply had to be applied differently.

Rehabilitation required discipline. Rebuilding identity required honesty. Accepting help required humility.

That last one was new territory.

The process is ongoing. Some days are controlled and productive. Others are heavy with what has been lost. I will not pretend otherwise.

But there is structure returning.

And much of that structure rests on my wife.

I have no memory of our wedding. In many ways I am relearning the life we built. That reality is painful at times, for both of us.

Yet her steadiness has been the constant. She stayed. She continues to stay. What I am rebuilding is not being built in isolation.

There was a time when admitting dependence would have felt like failure. It does not now. It feels accurate.

I am not the man I was before April 2024. That man exists in photographs and in stories told to me. Parts of him are permanently inaccessible.

What remains is a man who survived catastrophic neurological injury and chose to engage with the life in front of him rather than retreat from it.

The values I was raised with did not collapse under pressure. They adapted.

Discipline now means attending therapy and enduring frustration. Strength now includes vulnerability. Loyalty means committing to a family I am still rediscovering.

Masculinity was never eradicated. It was refined.

It was not the problem. It became the framework through which I rebuilt.

It took losing almost everything to understand that.