I Don’t Know How To Tell You This

Or, how the one thing that held me back opened me up to new love.

Do you keep a lot of secrets? I’ve always described myself as a very open book, but that’s evolved over time. There’s one thing I used to barely talk about at all, but now you might say I never shut up about it.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I am living with a disability, and that affects my relationships. A lot. I have cerebral palsy, which if you didn’t read this post on my love for my heating pad, is a suite of issues that can present itself differently for every person that has it (thanks, annoying congenital disorder). For me, it’s a nagging cocktail of fatigue, muscle pain, stiffness, and sometimes, loss of movement altogether. I have this gnarly trio of scars on three of my knuckles. It looks like I punched somebody out, which would be much preferred, but it’s because I straight up lost control of both legs and fell. On gravel. What was I saying?

Right. “The palsy,” as I call it, has always made things hard, but it’s gotten exponentially harder over the last decade. Up until high school, I was in a very controlled environment. It was a small school, I was still going to physical therapy regularly, and most of the developmental issues I’d had with walking and balance had been corrected back in preschool. I’ll further explain this by saying that I’m…