Hi all, for a couple months now I have been n blogging on my site, but today I am going to tell you who I am.
Hi everyone I’m Layne Dixon, 17 years old and living with cerebral palsy. Most of you know me through social media, but some of you know me for me. So here it goes; I’m an athlete, a blogger and I’m currently a school student. Living with cerebral palsy doesn’t stop me from what I want to do.
With having a physical disability it is challenging but it’s also rewarding. Through the tool of social media I have engaged with so many people, from different sports to being models to anything really.
So why did I get into blogging?
I don’t think the disability community isn’t getting heard enough and I want to make that change. Through meeting these people over instagram I see that they all have one thing inn common, they are all showing that we as the disabled community can do anything. And I wanted to do that too, so this is when I started using social media as a tool to communicate with people, and to tell people about the issues within the disability community.
The things that engage me is the issues within the disability community as they do get me upset. But there is a story of why I get so engage with disability issues, and this is through school.
So now, I am going into year 12 with a great group of friends, but it wasn’t like this before. For the past 8 years I have felt anxious and worried about opening myself up to strangers which are my peers within school. And this is because they wouldn’t let me sit with them at recess and lunch, and they wouldn’t invite me to anything outside of school. Not a thing. For weeks on end I was sitting alone because everything just got to awkward within school.
Due to my experience I want to educate you on what it is like to be disabled, and this drives me to do the work that I do. The disability community needs to change for the better and it needs to change now.
What sport do I play?
Since the end of 2016 I have been doing athletics. This started off for me as a runner, but over a matter of weeks I have become a seated thrower. I was originally in a a running group with a bunch of other people around my age with disabilities. But not long after I joined the group I was getting bullied, by people like me. So I stopped that.
When I got classified in October to compete as a runner, the classifiers asked if I wanted to do something else. They took me down to the shed where all the equipment was, and they were discussing with me about throwing. There were two classifiers and they could see that I had the potential to be a seated thrower. So within the next couple of weeks I got re-classifed to be a seated thrower. And then a couple months after that I quit the running that I did with people who also have disabilities.
So where I am today. In November of 2017 i started wheelchair racing, as it was a way to build up my strength for throwing. But what I didn’t realise was that I fell in love with the wheelchair racing. I had to stop this at the start of 2018, and this was due to me freaking out about year 11 at school. Everyone said is would be crazy and it was, but if I went back in time I would have continued wheelchair racing.
Para athletics is a very small in Australia, but it’s very small where I’m from, Western Australia. Living in WA is fine, but when it comes to sports it’s a nightmare. This is due to the lack of information myself and the coach receive about the sports that I am in. I am currently an Australian record holder for javelin, shot put and discus.
With being a para athlete you have to get classified. This is the category you compete in, every sport has this for disabled people, and it’s to even out the plane field when it comes to competition. In athletics there are 57 different classifications, these classification are split into two for T with track and F for field.
My classification is F33. This means I am classed in the cerebral palsy classification as a seated thrower. I can do wheelchair races as a T33 because it’s the same classification, but I can’t compete in one night with two different classifications.
Since I started in 2016 I have created Australian records within the under 18’s and under 20’s category for F33 as a female thrower. My ultimate goal is to one day go and represent Australia in the Paralympics, but for now my goal is to compete as an open which is an adult athlete at nationals in the beginning of April.
If you like this post then please like and subscribe as I will want to make more blogs about me. Keep up to date with my site as I will blog about myself and disability issues that we face today.
If you like this content then you can follow me on my social media account’s
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