Planning your debut on to the international sporting stage, making a schedule so you know where you’ll be every day for a year of your life, making sure you hit qualifying times and overcoming a burst appendix in six weeks so you can achieve your dreams. This is how all 12-year-olds spend their time, right?
For gold-medal-winning Paralympian Ellen Keane, this was her normal. Bursting on to the scene at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the 100m breaststroke, she became Ireland’s youngest Paralympian. She didn’t medal that year but it set her on course to winning bronze in Rio in 2016 and then gold in Tokyo in 2020. This summer, she is looking to compete in her fifth — and final — Paralympics in Paris.
Keane was born with an underdeveloped arm and therefore competes as an amputee at the Paralympics. While her story may seem entirely unrelatable to most, Perfectly Imperfect is a good reminder that whether you’re an elite athlete or someone just trying to get through the week, there are a lot of struggles that are inherent to being human rather than what you do with your life. Through her own experiences of being a young athlete, Keane offers insight into how she overcame some of the bigger challenges in her life which range from things like qualifying for the Paralympics to feeling like she couldn’t fit in. The end of each chapter has three challenges for the reader — small, medium and big — which are inspired by the obstacles she talks about in the previous few pages. She recommends using a notebook alongside reading the book and the challenges are a practical addition to the book which helps reinforce the advice contained in it.
An overarching theme throughout the book is Keane’s acceptance that her body is different to others and respecting rather than hiding it. Despite being a swimmer leaving you completely exposed, in the pool was the place she says she “never felt the need to hide myself”. It was her sanctuary.
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“But I never felt the desire to hide who I was, or to conceal my body, in the pool. It was the place that showed me I could be confident, strong, make friends, achieve things, speak up, laugh, even when I felt I couldn’t do these things anywhere else in my life. At times it was like living two different lives or being two different people.”
Despite the comfort she has found in the pool, the book shows it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. She admits that 13 was probably too young to start her career in the pool and it meant there were a few years where she felt like she was floating in an abyss, not understanding why success wasn’t coming as easy to her. She describes how her changing body made her move in the water differently. Often, coaches didn’t know how to train someone with one arm so she lost time in her development. People started othering her because of her arm and she didn’t know how to deal with that so she hid from it. She let herself stay in relationships because she was worried about people leaving her, unable to see her self-worth because of how people were interacting with her.
The honesty with which Keane approaches her own story makes you want to listen to what she has to say. Most people would raise an eyebrow at taking advice from a 28-year-old. But Keane’s candid assessment of her own experiences and her upfront way of dealing with them makes her a sympathetic character and you find yourself implementing parts of her challenges in your daily routine. These are as simple as cooking yourself a meal that makes you feel good to the slightly more difficult ones of confronting something that makes you feel uncomfortable and stepping outside your comfort zone.
Considering the time of year, this is a good book for helping guide you on any new year’s resolutions you may have or changes that you are looking to implement in your life. Keane is eager to stress that you don’t need to make sweeping changes in one go. You can take things slowly and build on your progress because altering how you operate your life is a big thing and an all-at-once approach will likely only lead to things not changing.
As well as quotes designed to inspire and the challenges at the end of each chapter, Keane also writes to her younger self and in the final section of the book she writes a letter to her future self. These moments of reflection are personal and feel like a healing and forgiveness process for Keane. In her final letter, she writes that her biggest fear in life is not growing. Her mantra is: Be the person you needed when you were younger. This final letter feels like a commitment to holding herself to account when she does eventually finish her career to keep growing and is a call to the reader to do the same.
