KOCHI: “I remember my disability growing more and more evident as I entered teenage. My legs began to crumple and it was getting hard to move around,” remembers Meera Menon. She was diagnosed with a condition called ‘Spina bifida’, a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord don’t form properly. But Meera was not one to surrender in front of life, or a disease. She is now busy pursuing her PhD in visual communication and has her own YouTube channel named ‘MeeKa Unwinds’.
Her father has always been Meera’s support system. He wanted her to stand on her own feet and fulfil all her aspirations. She recollects how desperately she wished to be part of a school assembly or go out to the playground during recess. “I was carried around everywhere and had to stay inside the classroom during assemblies or playtime,” she said. Meera received the UNICEF Young Achievers Award in 2009 and the KPCC Samskara Sahiti award for her compilation of poems named ‘Oru Hrudhyathinde Yatra’.
“I always wanted to pursue a career in journalism and joined Manipal Institute of Communication for my graduation. After finishing post-graduation, I did many internships at The Times of India, The Indian Express, Kairali People and The Week. I had worked as an instructional designer at Cognizant Technologies in Bengaluru.
Later, Meera got married to her best friend, Kamal, who taught her to admire herself the way she is. They were blessed with a baby girl in 2019 and named her Vrishti. She also served as a guest faculty at Amrita School of Arts and Sciences, Kochi. It was then that she decided to pursue her PhD on ‘Representation of disability in Malayalam cinema’. She received the Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship for her research programme.
Meera’s YouTube channel ‘MeeKa Unwinds’ discusses pregnancy and parenting as well as her personal vlogs. She shares plenty of content on social media that discuss how to handle anxiety during lockdown period. She is also a part of a Facebook group that discusses motherhood and the importance of sharing breast milk to mothers who are suffering from shortage of breast milk.
“I was concerned at first because sharing your breast milk is not a common concept. Many believe that this would affect their infants. This is a misconception. Kamal and I share a close bonding with the baby who shares my breast milk with Vrishti. It’s a delight being a baby’s ‘milk mother’, she said. Meera aspires to fulfil more of her dreams, standing strong, just like she fulfilled her dream of standing in a school assembly by taking part in the Republic Day parade during her graduation.