DISABILITY DECADE CELEBRATION! A Chat With Proper Journalist Kitty Aurora

[I’m handing over this post 100% to the incomparable Kitty. Do they have explanations why it isn’t appearing until now?? Damns rights dey do!]

Pre face – This interview was recorded in April and intended to be released in early May. I’ve been asked to write the story of why it’s late since it’s more “Kit bull” and apparently that’s entertaining.

In early May I finally got sick of my house with its hole in the roof and black mold and decided to hand the keys back. With no plan. My landlords are not good people and that’s putting it VERY lightly.
Having no plan I got rid of 90% of my stuff – furniture, the lot gone into a skip or charity or wherever else.
Then I got on a coach to Brighton just so I didn’t have to think about Manchester problems for a few days. I took part in a photoshoot for a mental health campaign. I went in the sea. I sold nine of my paintings while sitting near the pier.
I then booked a train and gig ticket for Reading as I knew The Gulls and Cam Cole were doing a South West UK tour which I was ecstatic to go and see once again so I could once again put my head in the speaker and dance for three hours.
This has lead to opportunities I’ll keep to myself for the moment.
I then got a tent and the various bits to go with it and ran as a crew and roadie known as “The Gate Pixie” for a ska/punk festival in Oldham called Strummercamp which was an absolute blast.

As I write this I’m currently home/cat sitting for an artist friend of mine before I once again pack up the tent again for 5 days to head down to Stonehenge for the solstice.

Kitty: Well, obviously when I met you, you already had your cane. So it’s not particularly something that you ask somebody about, like, excuse me, you appear to have a cane? You look pretty fit to me. I dunno what the deal is there, but it’s not something that you particularly ask and I just protect you at gigs, because if someone kicks the cane? We’re gonna have problems. I’m gonna fight people. 

Alex: Well, yeah, and it’s been 10 years now. I was in hospital for six months and then I was pretty much housebound for, like, 18 months. I was in a wheelchair for a while and how I can walk about now is basically through practice over the last 10 years.

Kitty: Do you wanna explain what happened then?

Alex: It was when I was living in China, in Xinjiang. It was May the first, very early in the morning on a Wednesday [ALEX NOTE: Wrong!] . I was late for work. Which, you know, despite all my drinking, work started at 11 o’clock. So I was really late for work.

My colleague came to my house to find me or to ask what was going on because obviously she couldn’t get me on the phone. My broken body was in the bush on the floor outside my block of flats, and my flat was on the eighth floor. The weird thing is, technically, I don’t know what happened because I don’t think I have any proper memory of it. I do think I have, um, PTSD over it. Because my memory from a lot of that time is, and not just the night itself, but a lot of my time living in China, that new job, which I’d worked at for like six months, a lot of that’s just gone. However at the same time, I do know based on my knowledge of myself and what I was feeling at the time. I did quite a lot of writing, a lot of which would back it up… But yes, it was a suicide attempt from jumping out the window.

Kitty: I can see why your brain would delete it to a certain extent then.

Not necessarily positively so, but it is interesting. So there’s obviously, there’s no sort of beginning of that. There’s only whatever you were feeling beforehand and however you used to be. And that obviously isn’t actually a person that I know the entire time I’ve known you. The time I’ve known you, you’ve been upbeat.

Alex: And back then, and for all my twenties really, I was an alcoholic. And also I still am clinically depressed, but in my twenties, I wasn’t medicating. I was self medicating with alcohol and looking back, I wouldn’t personally recommend that option.

I can see why your brain would delete it to a certain extent then

Kitty: So from there you’re in a wheelchair?

Alex: Yeah. Well, I kind of bashed my spine and I can’t remember what it’s called (cauda equina). I’ve lost feeling over a lot of my body. Maybe saying a whole third of my body is a bit excessive. I can’t move my right leg, so I’m just kind of dragging it around.

But I mean, this is, this is what it’s like today. First of all, in a hospital for one month on a life support machine. Tied to the bed, because they didn’t have any, like, porters to stop me pulling my own wires out. I do remember trying to pull out all my wires while I was in hospital. Because it’s quite invasive! Just waking up and suddenly you’ve got wires sticking out of you.

My parents were told, I can’t remember who told my parents, but somebody found the contact on my phone. Both my Mum and my Dad flew over, and they just kind of waited there. For two to three weeks, hoping not to hear that I died. Apparently there was one time when my parents were in their room in a hotel near the hospital, and they got a phone call at, like, two o’clock in the morning asking, saying that we needed to come to the hospital. And I think then they both thought, well, okay, this is it. And they got to the hospital and they just needed to sign something so I could get a blood transfusion. Obviously, it was a bit of a language barrier, they may have made it sound like it was far more of an emergency than it was.

Kitty: “You need to come in now immediately!” Rush all the way down there and it’s like, “Yeah, you know, can you sign this please? Cause you might be at Jehovah’s Witness”. It’s like, “Yeah, no, he’s not. There you go. Go on fixing him”.

Just thinking about, about the sort of point where you came back round again. 

Alex: I can remember little bits of the Chinese hospital. My girlfriend at the time and someone when I’m still in constant contact with, she was there. Pretty much the whole time. It was the new Game of Thrones season. I can’t remember if it was season three or four, I’d have to check the timeline for that! She would come and we’d watch Game of Thrones on her phone while she lay in bed with me. I can remember spots of the Chinese hospital. I can definitely picture it in my mind. And after about a month, I was well enough for the NHS to fly me back to Salford Hospital. And by that point, or at least after the first week or two, I can pretty much remember everything about Salford Hospital.

And then I was moved to Sheffield Hospital, because they’ve got a dedicated spinal injuries unit. And it was there that they kind of started to teach me to walk again. One of my vivid memories of the Salford Hospital is that I was told at one point by a doctor that because my injuries were so serious, I’d never be able to walk again. Which was a bit of a blow, I have to say. And that is the only time I can remember crying in all my stay in hospital. I remember in Salford Hospital, definitely, I was just very… I dunno if I was numb or it was kind of like shellshock, but I just had no emotion at all. Like, even the joke on the ward – like a friendly joke – as that I just didn’t smile cause I’d never smiled at anyone. I was just sitting there, still face. You can see all the photos of me from that time period, this blank face on. Which is weird, because I do remember that time and I don’t remember being like that at all. I was apparently sort of going through something. Something that, to a certain extent, you can’t even process, can you? Everybody around you is telling you loads of stuff and you’re sort of living in it. 

Everybody around you is telling you loads of stuff and you’re sort of living in it. 

Kitty : Yeah. It’s like none. You people aren’t actually living in what I’m living in. You are just informing me of it. Yeah. It’s  quite rare that you would get such a drastic change.

In your situation, it’s not like waking up and you are in France. It’s, you know, it’s like waking up and your entire perception of yourself and your entire abilities have been completely overturned!

Alex: Yes. When you are conscious enough to even consider the new normal, it’s, well, now what am I gonna do?? Who’s looking after me? What am I? What am I supposed to do from this point?

I remember I was quite happy in Sheffield Hospital and generally I’m quite happy at hospitals. Because you’ve got no responsibilities. You’ve got people waiting on you, you’ve got all the time in the world to do whatever you want. I don’t remember having a plan for the future, to be honest. I think my plan for a long time was just go back to China as soon as I could. I was like, just fix this up, sort this out. and then I’m going back to China, and I’m kinda still waiting on that. The main thing that stopped… the only thing that stopped me from going back to China is the fact that I get about 12 different medications each day! It would probably cost me 500 pounds a day without the NHS. Like I would love to go back there. The only problem is I can’t technically afford to! Because it would cost way more for me to remain healthy in that country than it does here!

Kitty: It’s not just a physical element of it, is it, it’s like the mental element that comes with something like that. 

Alex: Yeah. And I’m definitely, physically… I am, uh… pretty close to a wreck now! But mentally I’m better than I ever was, and sometimes it feels like every day is… uh… each day I’m… I feel slightly better than the day before. There were obviously some ups and downs here and there, but my general mental health now is completely the opposite of what it used to be.

Kitty: I think strangely enough that tends to be a conversation between like a few neurodivergent people. But if you’ve had some sort of shock in the middle of, you know, like, if you are chronically depressed and then you have some sort of shock, on the other side of the shock, your mental health seems to recover. Even though the middle part’s, like, insanely shit in some manner! Do you have friends who have kind of had similar shocks in their lives? Without naming names, obviously. Without naming names: yes .And with naming names: myself, yes. Yeah, but mine was, you know, like a really, really long time ago. Mine was, you know, within the last maybe three years or something like that. And it’s nowhere near on the same scale.

Alex:  Wait, you say three or four years is a long time ago, but here we are talking about something that happened precisely 10 years ago! So, three to four years, that would be what? Like 2000 and… God, like 19??

Kitty: It could be, that was like yesterday, so June, 2020. Apparently we might have had the same method. Because I was literally sitting on this windowsill. Whoever I was before I ended up sitting on this windowsill…. And what ended up happening turned out to mean who I am now. Yeah. Yeah. So the person that you know is not the same one from before that happened. So, obviously the story’s a little bit similar… Obviously I didn’t know you 10 years ago, I only know you after the fact.

Alex; I definitely feel the same. I wouldn’t say I’m a completely different person than what I was before, I think more that I recognise my worst qualities from before and I am trying to kind of battle them. I recognize them when they come up and I kind of pinpoint them and I try to eject them from myself. I’m never gonna just make myself a perfect person.

I recognise my worst qualities from before and I am trying to kind of battle them

Kitty: But I think at least recognising your worst traits is kind of the first step, isn’t it? 

Alex: I think the most major thing for me, probably even more major than the fall – not the band – although something that couldn’t have happened without my injury, is that I quit alcohol. Me quitting alcohol I think was the most important change in my life, and I sometimes think of it like they happened at the same time. Like, as soon as I had the accident, I decided to quit alcohol because obviously alcohol played quite a big part in the accident. But I didn’t quit drinking for another three or three years after the accident. I wouldn’t drink every day cause I couldn’t afford it, but I would have hideous nights drinking. I’d still do stupid stuff. I’d fall all the time. Cause, you know, I’m kind of disabled and given alcohol’s messing with your emotion neurons, it makes walking and stuff quite difficult. And also I kind of wish that I’d given drinking on that day because that’s a great story! Someone asks why you stopped drinking and you could just say, “Cause of this!”. Whereas I don’t really have a story like that. It just kind of petered out and I thought, why do I just not do this anymore? And that was it. And I didn’t even mark the day or anything.

And the fact is everything I have now, everything I’ve achieved now, happened after I quit drinking. That’s when everything started. It was after I quit drinking that I started volunteering with charities. It was after I quit drinking that I decided to become an immigration advisor. Everything that I am now is because I’m sober and I do kind of think if only I’d quit drinking while I was fully able bodied I would be fucking king of the world right now!

I’ve got to not to play on what ifs: what if I’d done that; I’d have been able to… It’s, like, well yeah, but also you sort of make yourself sad. Thinking like that as opposed to: I did do it it from that point and now how can I get better still. If I did something different ten years ago, I’d be somewhere else right now. Whatever I did in the past, including my injury, has brought me to this point and I’m generally pretty happy where it has brought me.

Kitty: Shit just doesn’t need to happen. A lot of people try to explain it with tarot. They’re like, oh, it was probably this really shitty thing that was supposed to happen to you so you can get here. No, not necessarily. The shit thing does not need to have happened. You don’t need to put a positive spin on everything. You can say that something shit was a shit thing that happened. And no, it didn’t need to happen. It didn’t deserve to happen. And yes, it might have altered whatever your path was into what it is, but that doesn’t mean that it was good. It’s like “Oh, everything happens for a reason”. Yeah, but not necessarily. Yeah, you could have achieved what you have done without that happening, that trauma’s not made you any stronger than you have. You’ve done that. 

Alex: Some of my friends say “It’s so amazing how strong you are.”  I’m always like, you’d do it. You’d do exactly the same. I’m not particularly strong. I’m quite weak willed and, you know, I’m, very lazy. It’s one of the things I hate about myself. I believe that people underestimate themselves and if you are put into this position, You would also eventually work past it.

People say “It was probably this really shitty thing that was supposed to happen to you so you can get here”. No, not necessarily. The shit thing does not need to have happened. You don’t need to put a positive spin on everything. You can say that something shit was a shit thing that happened

Kitty: Yeah. I don’t think people realise how strong they’re, until they get put into certain positions. You shouldn’t have to lie, be fighting constantly, mentally or physically, but I think it sort of does become an attack. You sort of end up surprising yourself when people are coming up to you saying things like that. You’ve done this, you’ve done that, you’ve done the other thing. When you’ve actually sit back, you think, fucking hell yeah, I did.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And you did.

Kitty: Cause this wouldn’t have been a story I would’ve expected from you, you know, like the day I met you, for example… Not because obviously you didn’t know me well enough to start telling me this story at that point, but, oh yeah… It’s almost a recovery story. And from sort of your demeanour, you wouldn’t think that you’ve got one of those, you’ve always been insanely chipper and very well grounded. 

Alex: Um, from the outside anyway! From the outside. I guess it’s a bit of a cliché. I’m gonna feel sick just saying it, but it’s true. It’s not that I have more of kind of love for life now, it’s not like I treat every day like it’s a blessing from God. It’s more like I used to be incredibly anxious when I was younger – it’s one of the reasons I drank so much. And I had no social skills when I was sober at all. I was so scared of embarrassing myself or saying something stupid, or making myself look stupid. And I think after the injury, I kind of got the perspective that it doesn’t really matter. There are tiny things that don’t actually, honestly matter. It doesn’t matter what this person thinks of me. It doesn’t matter if I am looking like an idiot. At the end of the day, that’s not gonna actually do anything. So I wouldn’t say it’s improved my confidence. It just kind of lessened the amount I care about what other people think about me. I think compared to my former self, I’ve definitely got more of a sense of what real problems are. You know what I mean?

Kitty: Well, you don’t need to bother with them particularly, do you? You could probably, you could probably smell the anxiety on me when you first met me, if I’m being brutal. All I thought was that you were just very bubbly. So that’s obviously how you combat your anxiety. I combat it myself hoping no one notices me. But then I’ll sort of try and find at least one person in the room who I think is a little bit odd.

Alex: I hate small chats with strangers where it’s just the same three questions. “Oh, how did you get here?” “Oh, really?” That’s one thing I’ve never learned to do, because that falls into the don’t give a shit category for me. So it’s hard to get my motivation to kindly engage in small talk with people. Yeah, I don’t like it.

Kitty: What was mine? I think mine was probably banging on about that bloody CD. “Have you heard of Cam Cole?”, “No, I’ve not”.

Alex: It almost definitely was, and then I found him on Bandcamp and followed him. Then I asked about your tattoos.

Kitty: Um, yeah, I think that was it.

Alex: So there you go. We didn’t, we didn’t even go down the small talk route. We went straight to Cam Cole and tattoos, Instant kitty.

Kitty: Yeah. There you go. That links to my story though. When I was sitting on a windowsill, I wasn’t drunk. It was three o’clock in the morning. 

Alex: Yeah, I imagine mine was around the same time. Give or take a couple of hours.

Kitty: I did a bit of a… I did a bit of a lean… Alexa was on shuffle and I wasn’t really paying it any attention. There wasn’t really anything on, it was just noise at that point. And then for some reason it turned itself, I have no idea why, but it did and ‘New Age Blues‘ started playing. And I looked up, Literally it was up there at the time, there was a note stuck to the wall and the album cover was pinned next to it. And that’s when I decided I was gonna be an illustrator.

Alex: Oh, wow. 

Kitty: Because of what that note said. It was something like ‘your atoms are beautiful and full of kindness, don’t let them turn into anything else’.

Alex: Yeah. I do remember seeing that on a lot of your iconography. That’s like a common kitty quote.

Kitty: He said it to me before he’d even actually even spoken to me at all, but that was why I got off. Climbed down from that point and I shut the window. Whereas obviously, people’s stories are gonna be different, aren’t they? Like your story’s different to that.

Your atoms are beautiful and full of kindness, don’t let them turn into anything else

Alex: I do kind of have a music story though! Uh… this is gonna be a spoiler… [ALEX NOTE: Lol, nope] I’m gonna do the best songs of the last 10 years, and this will be number one.

It was about 2017. Wow… So this would’ve been… four years after the accident? About four years since I was forced to come back to the UK, and I went to a gig for the first time since. Because in 2016 there was an album released by The Hotelier called Goodness. And it… it just… it just injected itself into my heart and my nerves and my brain comprehensively. They announced that they were playing a gig in Manchester supporting… another band… I can’t remember who this band were. Probably, like, the biggest band in the world, but I just can’t remember (Cloud Nothings. I’m a bit out of the loop, are they they biggest band in the world?). So, not only was this the first gig, four years after the accident, this would’ve been one of the first times I’d been out to any, like, social event. First time going out into the city after dark! I went on my own, cause I’m happy to go to gigs on my own, and most of the people at Gorilla were there to see whoever the main act were. I’ll look into this one time maybe and work it out [ALEX NOTE: I did. Cloud Nothings]. But there were maybe 30 people at the front of the stage who were there for Hotelier. Cause Hotelier, they have a bit of a small but rabid following. But they’ve not released an album since ‘Goodness’! I imagine for a lot of UK fans like me that would have been their first chance to see them live. And it was just… it was a religious affair to me. It just, it was just so amazing!

Then one of the songs they played was a Soft Animal. Which… which is such a tune. One of the greatest rock songs released in my lifetime. And it just all came together, the crowd and the music and this band that I love. Then for the chorus of Soft Animal, the rest of the band sing “Fawn, doe, light snow” as backing. And then Christian, the singer, he comes to the microphone and he sings lines “Makes me feel alive, makes me feel like I don’t want to die”. And I just broke down crying. It was just a beautiful moment. That album, and in particular that song, is kinda the song of my… of my recovery, I think. So I guess in a way, Hotelier specifically had impact. 

Can I ask you your question? You identify as non-binary? Is that something you discovered after what happened in 2020?

Kitty: Yes. It was after my assault and after nearly going out of the window. It was only when I thought about it again, it’s off the back of that note. What it specifically said if you take it literally is ‘atoms’. It didn’t say ‘you’re a man’, it didn’t say ‘you’re a woman’. It didn’t say anything like that. It just said ‘atoms’ on it.

And off the back of that… um… This is gonna sound stupid… but you know the God entity out of Futurama? I don’t believe in God, though. I don’t believe in anything like that. I’m aware that I believe in tarot, but my thing with it is a little bit complicated. As opposed to other tarot readers, who are like, “It’s love and light and all these Gods exist and et cetera, et cetera”. I believe in aliens if you were to ask me the question at 3am.

“You do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”. The note and that quote gave me “hang on a minute, we’re from up there. Whatever I live in at the minute, I’m just in this so I can decorate it and do it. Great. And apparently I need to look after it and give it water, food and everything. There’s also a bit of me that is gonna leave at some point. The bit of me that actually isn’t gonna decay is gonna fuck off somewhere into the atmosphere. When that bit does fuck off into the atmosphere, why would it it have gender. It’s not attached to a body.”

Alex: Seriously though, when you die, the first thing that happens is JK Rowling  comes and checks. That happens. What do you have? Check the bones. 

‘Goodness’ just injected itself into my heart and my nerves and my brain comprehensively

Kitty: It’s alright. Speak to any archeologist. They don’t give a shit what gender your bones are. They just like bones. “These are great and, speaking as an archeologist, we don’t give a shit what gender your bones are. We just happy to find some bones“. They don’t care about what gender they are. Doesn’t matter. Also, they don’t tend to bother a lot. Cause it’d be really, really confusing anyway. Because if they took my bones, they could be the bones of a 13 year old boy. You know, height… about the same amount of tits. It makes no difference.

So, I think you’ve got a lot of stuff here. It’s not really an interview, it’s more like a, um, conversation, isn’t it? 

Alex: Yeah. I think it’s gonna make a more interesting article just about topics in general. 

Kitty: Yeah, it’s something slightly different. You went through a sort of a mental health and a physical health journey. From the beginning to sort of where you are now, and that’s changed a lot of things about you as a person that you, and you might have gone in a different direction if you did this yourself..

Alex: Kitty. Any, any, any closing statements before I try and work out how to send you this 

Kitty: What do you think is your long-term aim? Like, what would make you the happiest now, um, from the point that you’re at?

Alex: Um, well that, that’s a really good question…

[COMPLETELY UNPREPARED TO ANSWER. TAKES A LONG TIME TO THINK OF AN ANSWER]

I… I don’t see myself getting any better than I am now, and it’s quite likely the other conditions gets significantly worse. My long-term aims are to just keep existing and to just… I don’t wanna say ‘take each stay as it comes’, but… It’s such a good question! My long term aim is to continue what I’m doing, but to increase it and get better at it? I want… I want… I want to become an immigration lawyer, but at the same time have enough time to work even more on my blog to write, you know, 10 pieces a week of nonsense and brilliance.

Actually, the long term goals are the overthrow of the capitalist state. That’s my long term goal. Anything else is meaningless in comparison.

Kitty: And as it turns out, you’re really good immigration law. I think when you’re on the other side of this and you’re running your mental debug programs. Trying to become sort of a better version of yourself that you are happier with. It’s sort of finding what you’re good at and what you enjoy, and then just following those. 

Alex: Yes, I want to find more things that I enjoy doing. Yes. Or to do things that I enjoy even more. One of the two.

That’s a good closing statement.

I want to find more things that I enjoy doing. Yes. Or to do things that I enjoy even more. One of the two.