Breaking my neck was obviously a crisis in my life. Because of it readers write to me about crises in theirs. Many are disabled and see parallels or echoes of their problems in my accounts, particularly struggles with bureaucracy, and for resources. Often, however, they are writing because they say it is the first time they have recognised something of themselves in a national newspaper. That can't literally be true, but clearly it is uncommon enough to be noteworthy.
But I also receive emails about life crises in general, marital crises and the great, midlife crisis, as if I were some sort of expert. Of course, I am not. Yet people have written to me with the most intimate details of their lives - I cannot betray confidences by saying more than that - and I have responded as best I can: something I have found, for instance, is that the only way to make progress in one's life is to be as honest with yourself as you can be, no matter how painful such thoughts are. Because self-deception leads you into a cul-de-sac from which it is difficult to escape, whereas honesty at least gives you the possibility of change both for yourself and for others.
The instincts of the people who get in touch with me are right in at least one respect: facing one big crisis is rather like facing another. They all force you into a different state of consciousness, so that you can no longer look at the world with the same eyes. My crisis point opened me to new experiences that forced me to re-evaluate my life -I think people sense this and feel it can help in a re-evaluation of theirs.
Something that has been intriguing me, though, is that when my writing goes beyond crisis, and steps into the even more uncomfortable areas of death or depression, I find I'm on my own.
Maybe it is typical English reticence or maybe a fear of contamination by contact, but it happens whenever "dark" subjects are mentioned. When I write about things that are "lighter" or more upbeat, friends phone or email from home or abroad and readers respond in ways that are sometimes extraordinary.
I can be writing about the most everyday events such as going to a restaurant on an anniversary or the workings of a piece of technical equipment and, because people know that I am doing so from the point of view of someone whose body is, more or less, wholly paralysed, the subject matter is imbued with an interest out of proportion to the content.
When the subject is slightly edgy, like sexuality, strangers inundate me with emails, sometimes of the most confessional kind. I don't know if it's the discussion of sexuality itself or whether it's because I'm disabled and people are either curious or inspired, but I become cast in the role of Agony Uncle. Maybe it's because the topic still interests me at the age of 63, but surely that can't be a surprise in this day and age?
My friends seem to have been freed up by my writing; before I started, they seemed to be frozen, fearful of saying anything that might offend. Now we talk normally as friends do - though not about sexual matters. But then, groups of men together may talk about sex but rarely personally, and mixed groups are even coyer. (When they're together, the women I know talk about everything, and most certainly about sex and sexuality: it makes me wish, sometimes, that I was a woman - it seems so free.)
The first time I mentioned death or depression, I thought I had done so in a rather upbeat way. When I was likening my encounter with death in Bolivia to that of Joe Simpson in Touching the Void, I told of how thoughts of my family encouraged me to stay alive and how chuffed I felt not to find myself fleeing to the cloying embrace of religion, but staunchly maintaining my atheism as death approached. The least I expected was a tirade from the evangelicals (no, no, it's too late now!) but there was total silence. I did, however, receive a welter of emails correcting my lousy Spanish.
My recent column after Christopher Reeve's death, touching on depression and thoughts of suicide, prompted a single email from a friend who said she "liked it but it was rather sad". Oh, and one other, from a friend of Miss B, the woman who had her life terminated in 2002 when she asked for her ventilator to be switched off. I was glad to receive it. Perhaps only when you have been close to death yourself?
