My name is Annette Leishman. That is the name I was given at birth. Some people know me as Annette Purton. Big mistake to change your name when you get married. Especially for someone like me because I just wasn’t the ‘marrying type’ according to my mother. After a couple of failures and name changes I began to see she had a point.
Both my first name and middle name have never changed. They have always been Annette Mary although I get called Annie, Nettie and Net which I don’t mind at all. My brothers used to mostly call me ‘she’ because being the only girl in the family it was easy to identify who they were talking about. Why doesn’t she have to go to bed yet? I’m not eating that if she’s touched it. She’s looking at me again. How come she got the best one? She’s got more than me ……
As a child I bumped into things a lot. The adults around me said I was clumsy and awkward. My parents used to say I had a lack of coordination. I thought I was just hilariously funny. As an adult I discovered that I had been slowly going blind my whole life when I was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). Suddenly I was labelled disabled.
These days life has come a full circle because I now have three little grandchildren.
I’ve dabbled in writing from a young age and tried a variety of genres over the years. In 1991 I wrote a childrens’ book that was accepted for publication. However, it didn’t make the best seller list because the publishing company changed hands at the last minute and had to renege on the contact. So my book went to the scrap heap and I never had the joy of seeing it on the shelves in the book stores.
Over the years I’ve had several contributions to the local rag published. These have mostly been about my experience with diseases. And then there’s the online family support group for people with RP (aka RPers). My regular contributions have promoted me to a ‘Conversation Starter’ which pops up automatically when I make a new post. Then the comments start rolling in from RPers all over the world who’ve had similar experiences. It’s helpful, informative, supportive and oh so blissful because you realise you are not alone in this journey.
But my life changed when I discovered blogging. I read heaps and heaps of blogs. Personal blogs, business blogs, cooking blogs, travel blogs, single dad blogs, shoe blogs, makeup blogs….. People were writing about anything and everything. And that’s when I said to myself stuff the book and decided I just had to get in amongst the bloggers.
All my stories are true because I don’t have enough imagination to make them up. Some of my blog posts, especially those about my grandchildren have been inspired by musings about my own children which I wrote in the 1980s. The personal blog is my personal favourite because it has given me the ability to write about anything and everything. For me, this is true bliss ability.
