Rock You Like a Cerebral Palsy Hurricane

Different things motivate different people to live and act accordingly. For me, Cerebral Palsy is a pretty major reason for why and how I live and act in this world. Living with CP gives me a different lens for how I see things. I'm not alone in that lens, but each one of us who lives with CP has our own context. 

I've noted in other posts that I've had to modify various activities throughout life. I've also gone without doing certain things. One skill I taught myself with a modified technique, was playing the guitar. My finger dexterity in the chord hand is fairly limited from my CP. I learned pretty quickly as I was first embarking on how to play the guitar, that making traditional chord structures was not only difficult but often painful. So I learned how to play differently. Much like I learned how to live. 

How it started – My dad had me behind a drum kit around the time I was 4 years old. Music is in my blood, it's in my soul. I loved playing the drums, but as I got older, I wanted to be the front man, and play the guitar. My dad helped me get my first guitar when I was 13. Learning guitar is a difficult and sometimes painful skill for anyone. Learning how to put chords together when your fingers refused because they just don't move that way, was very defeating. Until one day, I was practicing, and I stumbled across a method that would change the way I played for good. 

Where it went – In my teens, I learned how to structure chords in a way that I would later learn was called shape chords. I emulated the chords I could make with my hands to create the chords I couldn't make. For the most part, all of my chords are an E minor, but when you shift them to a different key on the fretboard, you get the sound of other chords. 

Using this method, I went on to learn how to play the guitar for hours at a time. I went on to write hundreds of original songs. I went on to create a musical persona for myself during college. Songwriting was my journal, and according to one old friend, it was a window to my soul. I told you the audience, everything and nothing about the journey that I had taken to survive. I wrote songs about love. I wrote songs about loss. I wrote an album called Of Loss and Love. I wrote songs that showed you my lens to the world. I wrote songs about the mysteries of life. I wrote songs about the heartache and pain that I endured. 

How it's going – Most people that knew me back then knew that I played modified chords on my guitar. It wasn't really a matter of why I modified the chords. People just seemed to look past that. They saw that I was trying to create music. However, I often ran into “how come you don't play it this way or how come you don't play it that way” type of questions. I took those questions as more of criticisms for my lack of playing ability than as an opportunity to explain that I modified the technique because I physically couldn't play the chords the way they were intended to be played. Yet, I've written more original songs than most people I know. Like my playing ability, my songs have not come without some controversy. I spoke my mind deeply and truly in my songs. I found that wasn't always welcome. I told you exactly who I was in my songs. I told you exactly who you were in my songs. I told you exactly who God was or wasn't in my songs. I told the stories that I've shared earlier in this blog but in veiled ways. I left a few stones unturned. 

In my late twenties and at the start of my professional life, I began to self-censor my songs, primarily because people told me it was in my best interest and because I was tired of feeling the criticism. At the time, I was working in ministry and I think my songs received greater scrutiny than they would today. I have great respect for professional artists and musicians who put themselves out there exposed to the criticism of the world because it is incredibly hard to take when you create something and people criticize it or worse they just don't care. It was in fact the deepest criticism my music had ever faced that led me to put my guitar down for most of the last decade. 

The criticism that led me to put my guitar down wasn't about the content of my songs, but about how good my songs were or were not. And that, unfortunately was about my modified playing technique more than anything else. I also took that criticism to heart because of where it came from. I'm not going to share that here, but if you're ever thinking how you can make a difference for someone in your life, know that our words matter. 

At one point in time, I was as defiant as they come, and my music was a window to that almost every day. But, life wore out my confidence. I literally sang that line in a song that most people have never heard. To this day, I love music and I will occasionally dabble in writing, but it takes a lot of courage just for me to share this story with you now. Because, for me, music was how I told my story and how I overcame part of my CP.

If there's a story you'd like to hear, or a question you'd like to ask, I encourage you to drop it in the comments, and stay tuned for what's to come.