The Power of Love is for Everyone

“The power of love is a curious thing, it makes one man weep, it makes another man sing” (Power of Love, Hewey Lewis and the News). 

I've had three or four drivers in life, the first three being love, courage, and creativity. I'm going to use a lot of courage and a little creativity to talk about the former as it relates to living with Cerebral Palsy. 

Love is without a doubt my number one driver in life and I don't say that in a cheesey or mushy way, but very seriously. As a human being, I understand that a lot of people see with their eyes first and, whether we want to or not, we assess impressions of people based on what we see. 

As a kid growing up with CP, I saw the way people looked at me differently and I worried a lot about how that would influence my relationships with others, especially in the ways of love and attraction. Being told that someone took interest in me out of pity in the seventh grade didn't help that internal anguish. 

It's taken me the better part of four decades to begin to understand this for myself. Love is extra important to me because it's something given, not earned, and it means you matter. But, as a kid, chasing love was about belonging. As a teenager, chasing love was about acceptance (and possibly hormones). And since then, it's been about belonging, acceptance, and being seen. 

I think I've reached a point of recognition that I'm not going to become the chiseled badass I am in my mind, like that of my pro wrestling heroes. But, a lot of male stereotypes revolve around power and strength. For me, that's in my perseverance rather than my body. 

The youth today would have probably described me as a “simp” in my teens and twenties, except we hadn't abandoned words just yet. I say that because I grew up looking at common relationship challenges and thinking I understood that the solution to those things revolved around equality. Imagine my surprise when I learned that life is a little more ridiculous than that. But, to me, equality and love were the point of everything. 

The world would probably never see me as an equal to a non-disabled person, but a lover could, or at least that's how I internalized love for a long time. Regardless of how my perspective has changed, living with Cerebral Palsy and navigating love has been its own challenge. 

Those challenges came in the form of my awkwardness about how my movement is perceived. There's the self-consciousness about the clothes that don't fit right (see an earlier post). There's the fact that by default the other person has to drive for me – that's a classical gender role killer. Then you throw the typical stuff like personality and such on top of that. 

I never wanted to be anyone's knight in shining armor but boy oh boy did I ever understand that bumbling awkward guy who against all odds gets the girl in the romcom movies. That's how I saw myself for a long time. Way longer than I care to admit. 

What's the point of telling people this part of my story? One doesn't have to have CP to be awkward in love and relationships. A lot of people deal with that. In some ways, living with CP forced me to navigate outside of classical gender roles whether I wanted to or not, but I found that I don't care for them because as a man living with CP, I don't want to pretend to be someone that I'm not. I like the ideal of partners and teammates over provider and protector better because the latter comes with performative implications that don't fit me. Oddly, as a father, I feel that provider and protector thing in overdrive and it's only in fatherhood that I've ever felt that. 

Falsely and foolishly, I chased after love for a very long time trying to meet an unmet need for belonging, acceptance, and being seen. A lot of that stems from living with CP and feeling different from others. A lot of that stems from the intersectionality of ACE. Sometimes, life tells you to believe that you're not worthy of something. I've been reframing that for myself for a long time. 

But, I live with CP, I've had love in my life, and as the song says, “the power of love is a curious thing.” Curious indeed. But, I know this to be true, the power of love is for everyone. Love is the number one thing that once drew me to the Christian message before I left it. Love is the number one thing that brings out the best in people. Love is the number one thing that matters to me because it's taken work to learn to love myself in light of my CP instead of in spite of it. Love is the number one thing that matters to me because giving and receiving love is the one thing that makes everything else human beings have to navigate tolerable to me.