The Blue Hole
Why did you publish this memoir?
I needed a method of dealing with: Rumors. Gossip. Hearsay. Tittle-Tattle. Speculation. Stories. Grapevine. Scuttlebutt.
Read my memoir. Your questions and your assumptions will be answered.
People only can guess how I coped being 15 years old, then what it was like, and in a blink-of-an-eye, being totally paralyzed. People think they know what my life is, everday, living with paralysis. My book provides awareness what surving a severe spinal cord injury is like.
People hear rumors and there are quick to assume the sex abuses I went through.
Many people are quick to judge me based on bits of information they have heard. People often make quick assumptions about me.
A Memoir is about information from years and moments in someone's life. This is not my entire life as a whole. I was 15 years old when my life changed suddenly, and dramatically during July 1972.
Writing this memoir has focused on events of my life weeks before my injury, until early 2013.
This memoir sheds light on what I have been through, paralyzed for life, and the sex abuses and phisical abuses that happened after my inury.
This memoir sheds light on sensitive topics. With this book I want to clarify once and for ever, what it is like being completely paralyzed. Always reliant on a powered wheelchair for my mobility. The abuses that happened after my accident.
Me, just before July 1972.
My hobbies were fishing, hunting, shooting firearms, trapping, snowmobiling, camping, hiking, and any activities that involved being in the forests of Vermont.
Dan. Who are you?
My birth name is Dan Joseph Gilman, born in Rutland Vermont on October 21, 1956. Rutland is where I have lived my entire life, except for my stays in rehabilitation centers after breaking (fracturing) my neck, at vertebra 4. There are 7 vertebra in our neck.
The schools I went to were all in the city Rutland Vermont. Southeast school kindergarten through grade 3. Lincoln school grade 4 through grade 6. Then Rutland Junior High School, and in 1974 I graduated from Rutland Senior High School.
Before my injury, I ventured throughout Rutland county, walking, hiking, and riding my bicycle searching for what life offered to a curious child as me. The forests, and mountains surrounding Rutland are just as beautiful after my my injury, as before my injury.
The 1960s were a time when a child as me could play, and not fear anyone or anything.
