Why Go Anyway

Most accessibility writing is built around a single promise: we’ll make it easier. Easier to get in, easier to get around, easier to manage. And that work matters. I’m not here to knock it. But somewhere along the way I noticed that “easier” had quietly become the only goal, as though the best version of any day out for a disabled person was the one where we felt the least.

I’m Alan. I’m a British writer, I lost my sight in 2018, and for years I let that fact decide what I was allowed to want. The loud, sensory, physically demanding days felt like they belonged to other people. Motorsport. Marathons. A mountain in Norway. Not out of any rule anyone had set, but out of a quieter assumption I’d absorbed: that difficult and disabled didn’t go together, and that wanting the hard thing was somehow asking for trouble.

Then I started doing them anyway. And what I found surprised me.

The difficulty wasn’t the part to be engineered away. It was the part that made it mean something. When I ran the London Marathon, the hardest work happened in the months before: the early mornings, the aching legs, the voice whispering you can’t do this. The medal at the end mattered precisely because of all that.

None of this means leaving the barriers in place. A barrier blocks people for no good reason and ought to come down. A challenge asks something of you, and that is the part worth keeping. Most accessibility work stops at the first. Go Anyway is interested in both.

That’s the idea behind Go Anyway. Not “here’s how to make hard things easy”, but “here’s how to go and do the hard thing, eyes open and properly prepared, with the difficulty counted as part of the experience rather than treated as a reason to stay home.”

So I document the attempts honestly. What the barriers actually were. What I got wrong. What I’d do differently. Where the joy was hiding, and what it cost to reach it. Every accessibility detail here is checked against the organiser’s own information before I publish, because false reassurance helps no one. But the reflections are mine, and your day may look different. That’s rather the point too.