Living with Cerebral Palsy and Intersectionality

“Scars remind us the past is real” (Papa Roach, Scars). I've got a few scars from over the years. Some with real stories and others with footnotes. One time, I was riding the Alpine Slide. It might have been the only time. I flipped the sled and was under it on the slide. The fiberglass slide left me a few scars. I got lucky. There's a scar that goes from one ear to the other and is the story behind Poker Face Off of the Man in the Box . This one makes every haircut interesting. Recently, I didn't see a curb because of my depth perception issues. I walked right off of it, yelled “oh, shit,” and hit the ground. I got some road rash but it probably won't scar.  Surgery number nine left me a scar that reminds me to take care of my health even when it scares me. I had an injury that I didn't acknowledge for like five years. Then there's my Lucky Number Backwards Seven that I shared last week in I'm a Slave 4 U on the Yellow Brick Road . And finally, some scars a...

A while back I did a survey of what people wanted to learn about from my stories and the hidden impacts of life with Cerebral Palsy were the clear winner. “I've been traveling on this road too long, trying to find my way back home” (T. I. and Justin Timberlake, Dead and Gone). There's a part of the old me that's “dead and gone” and the rest is simply hidden. Why are parts of me hidden and what is hidden? Masking is a big thing in the disability community. Many of us learned that we've needed to hide parts of who we are to be accepted in a world designed largely by and for non-disabled people. I am no exception to that. Even in speaking and writing pretty openly about my experience, there's still more of me hidden than not. There's still more of my daily existence that has hidden elements at play. Masking is part of creating psychological safety for myself and trying not to make people uncomfortable with the real me.  Between high school and college (...

Recently, I watched the 2024 film Out of My Mind about a young girl with Cerebral Palsy who couldn't speak or walk. There's definitely challenges there that I don't face because I can walk and speak, but the movie hit on some important points and invoked a lot of emotions.  The battle to be heard when you have a disability, whether you can speak or you can't, is very real. Without spoiling too much of the film, which you can watch on Disney sources, there's a couple of scenes that I'm going to pay attention to here.  First, in an early scene, Melody's goldfish jumps out of the tank, but she can't communicate that, and so it looks like she just made a big mess. She tried to communicate to the best of her abilities using the tools she had, but her dad didn't want to hear it.  I found my blood boiling watching that scene. I could feel what it felt like to be misunderstood and unheard. And I think this was important because her parents were her biggest a...

Glass half full or half empty? Fuck the glass. It just doesn't work like that for me. It's neither, it's both, the glass has broken, and I carry the gifts of fullness and despair. “When everything's made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am” (Goo Goo Dolls, Iris, 1998). I haven't given up on the pursuit of wanting you to know who I am for over four decades because there's something deeper than the glass in my head.  It's not easy to wake up in my body or even my mind every day. It's not choice and it is choice. It's not resilience and it is resilience. It's for sure survival. “Ain't it funny how the night moves?” Yes, Bob Segar, it is funny how the night moves in waves of flashbacks of full and empty, good and bad, love and loss. It's not my aim to speak in riddles but to paint a picture of why I bluntly forego the glass, of why I want you to know who I am, of why the battle inside makes not giving up both a goal and an obstacle...