Jess Quinn: How writing my memoir helped me overcome the most challenging years of my life

This book was supposed to take a year, but it ended up taking two and a half because of what I was experiencing with my legs.

When I began writing, I was dancing a lot, plus doing almost two hours a day of training. I never considered myself to be ‘disabled by my disability’ until the past couple of years. Then, I injured my good leg and – as you can imagine – my life became really challenging.

To make things worse, as soon as the injury started getting better, what I have left in my prosthetic side started swelling. For about 18 months, I couldn’t put on my prosthetic each morning. Some days, I couldn’t put my leg on at all. Because of that, my good leg – which was only semi-healed – began to flare up again.

Going through chemo and losing my leg as a child was difficult – but this experience was so much harder because I knew exactly what the implications were.

I was living in LA at the time, and I had to come home to New Zealand because I was feeling so horrible. I couldn’t work, I gave up public speaking, and I was constantly in a state of ‘My life was hard, my life is hard.’ Each night, I was going to bed stressing about how my leg would be the next morning. These challenges became a large portion of the context for my book.

I’m not a very good crier – I often joke that my tear ducts are broken – but those emotions manifest in my body in different ways. During the writing process, I noticed the trauma of my experiences from childhood coming up again.

I’ve learned a lot about the way our brain can manifest things in our bodies. If we’re constantly living in a state of ‘I'm broken’, that's going to present physically. With that in mind, I’ve slightly pulled back a little bit on the way I speak about my leg. I’m trying to balance being realistic and authentic on social media, but also trying to be more positive for myself.

I’m doing better these days, though. I’m able to walk the dog around the block and know my leg is going to go on most mornings.

Part of my desire to write this book was because I don’t see adversity as something like, ‘Check, I’ve had my one big challenge in life.’ We all go through so many ups and downs at different scales – we’re all a match for our own mountain.

Adversity should be seen as an obstacle, not a roadblock. Often, we get hit with something and it completely stops us – we plummet and don’t know what to do. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a part of life. 

When choosing the cover for my book, I almost didn’t put my leg on it – because I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as an experience people couldn’t relate to.

We need this level of representation, this range of experience, to be shared openly. While it’s great to see conversations about diversity evolve – to see different kinds of bodies on billboards – you need to have people with different cultures and experiences working behind the scenes to shift the paradigm.

Young people won’t aspire to be something great if they don’t see someone like themselves doing it – and I’m hoping to be part of that change.