Open Mic Friday! featuring Cathy John and Look into My Eyes

Happy last Friday of April, cherished friends, and welcome to the Open Mic!

Today I am truly, truly honored to introduce you to my friend Cathy John. I met Cathy in college when she was studying abroad at Berkeley.

There was a small group of us who would get together every Friday night for dinner and conversation. I remember, one lamp-lit evening around our friend Ying’s kitchen table, talking about what we wanted to do in the future. Cathy spoke about the power of the media to affect people and make a difference, and said she wanted to be involved in that.

I’ll let her tell you about Look into My Eyes.

Look into My Eyes, Freddie Yauner (Northumbria Design School), Paul Robson, Cathy John

Look into my Eyes is a book, a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ story, designed to evoke the uncertainty and constant decision-making involved in living with Multiple Sclerosis.  The format, in which the reader makes a choice about how the narrative should preceed at the end of every section, also mimics the way in which MS is not a straightforward condition to ‘read’ and puts the reader in the place of someone with MS hopefully creating a deeper empathy. The book was designed (brilliantly) by Northumbria Design School and I wrote the words. I was diagnosed with Relapsing/Remitting MS in 2010 at the age of 30.

Click on the above image or go here to read the book online. You may also visit its page at Northumbria University.

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Cathy John is a freelance writer and blogger.

Find her online at lickingthehoney.org.