Tilly Lockey, 19, lost her hands to meningitis as an infant and has since become a motivational speaker, prosthetics tester, and musician. She shares her journey from Newcastle to Bristol, winning a CBBC singing competition in 2021, and working on original music with her band while managing ongoing medical operations.
Chapters
Get ready with me as I tell you facts about myself nobody asked for. Yay! Introduce myself. So my name's Tilly, I'm 19 years old, and I'm originally from like Newcastle, Durham, up north sort of area, but I recently moved down to Bristol. I feel like my accent sort of flips around a bit, but as soon as I'm back home I go like proper Geordie again, and I really don't want to lose the accent because up the Geordies. The big one I should probably address is the fact that I have no hands. I wasn't born without hands, I had them when I was born, and then I lost them to a disease called meningitis when I was 15 months old. I was in just normal public school up until the age of about 13. I think it was my second year of secondary where I had an operation on my leg which took me out of school for 6 months, and when I got back, from that point onwards, I took myself out of school to focus more on my career and my health. I took up online school. I loved online school, it was such a good decision for me. I actually ended up being able to sit my GCSEs a year early, so that was a win. I actually started on social media doing makeup tutorials, and the only reason I ever got into doing that was such a domino effect. I broke my arm, this arm, and so I only had this arm, and then I started doing my makeup. And if I hadn't broke my arm, I don't know whether I would have started doing makeup tutorials because I don't know whether I would have even tried to do it with the hand, which is weird. One of the hardest questions for me to answer is honestly like, what do you do? Like, what is your title, kind of? Because honestly, every day is something different. I started working as a motivational speaker when I was probably about 11 years old, but I did my first proper presentation when I was 14 in Mexico. I've been helping to develop prosthetics ever since I was about 6 years old, but these ones in particular ever since I was 9. That basically means I go in and test the tech, give feedback, and I have decent input into how the prosthetic comes out at the end, which is pretty sick. I've done a bit of TV in my time, which is really funny in the comment sections because I feel like people know me from like 10 different places, or they're just like, you look really familiar. To name a few, I did Davina McCall's This Time Next Year when I was 11, I want to say. I did a CBBC singing competition in 2021, which I actually won. Surprise! I reported the news on Sky for a little bit. So yeah, just a bunch of random things. Off the back of winning the CBBC singing competition, I do have a band. I know, just when you thought I couldn't get any cooler. I'm kidding. We have a band and we are currently working on original music, which is a lot I've genuinely never had a lot of friends, and I literally put that down to having 3 amazing sisters. They are actually my life. I love my sisters so much. Anybody who knows me knows I never shut up about them, and now I've moved out, I like miss them so much every single day. They are the best people in my life. Seriously, I love yous. My life has been pretty chaotic with operations and things like that, but I am the middle child, so yeah, what can you expect?
