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A lot of living with mild cerebral palsy comes down to simply trying to navigate the world and do the things you want to do.
Go to the store.
Get your groceries.
Move through your day.
Stay active.
Do the normal things that can sometimes require a lot more effort than other people realize.
In this episode, I’m talking about why I do not think we need to minimize those challenges by telling ourselves that somebody else has it worse.
Yes, there are people who have more significant limitations.
There are also people who appear to have fewer.
But constantly comparing experiences does not really help because none of us fully knows what somebody else is dealing with.
You can be grateful for what your body allows you to do and still acknowledge that some of this is hard.
Those two things can exist together.
I also talk about why I have become much more comfortable sharing my cerebral palsy publicly. For a long time, I did not want to talk about that part of myself very much. Now I share the stiffness, the mobility challenges, the wins, the step counts, and the moments where something simply goes better than expected.
Talking about it has become an outlet for me, but it has also connected me with other people who understand experiences I spent a long time thinking I had to navigate mostly on my own.
And when it comes to movement, I want to encourage you to keep exploring what being active looks like for you.
That could mean yoga in bed.
It could mean chair yoga.
It could mean walking.
It could mean going to the gym.
The important part is working with your body instead of constantly trying to force your body to do what you think it should be able to do.
That is something I am still learning myself.
I spent a lot of years trying to overpower my body. More recently, I have been trying to work in alignment with it instead, and I feel less beat up because of it.
We are all just navigating this.
Your version is going to look different from mine, but I hope hearing these conversations reminds you that you are not navigating it by yourself.
