For those that follow me here on The Mighty, you know I love using quotes or lyrics in my pieces. Recently while looking on Pinterest I came across this quote that truly struck me: “Time will not heal everything, but acceptance will heal everything.” And if you think about it, that is true for pretty much anything that happens in your life. Granted, acceptance isn’t that easy for everyone. It wasn’t easy for me. But I never really had trouble accepting the fact that I had CP. I got that part pretty quickly at a very young age.
What took me a long time to accept was that my path wasn’t going to be exactly as everyone else’s.
But I can honestly say in the last two years I have learned to accept who I am, and that is someone I worked damn hard to become. For me, it has been an emotional shift.
I am not ashamed to say that lately, I have been feeling quite frustrated and fearful by how drastically the pain has changed my body — not to mention its frequency, and intensity. Because of that, I have felt like punching acceptance right in the face right along with my CP. Why is it we are told to live our lives just as everyone else and don’t let our CP stop us or slow us down when in reality it can do just that? Why don’t the medical professionals warn us that the hurdles we may face would most likely include our very own bodies?
Please, don’t take this as if I am complaining or ungrateful for the ability I do have. I just wish sometimes I could have the choice of accepting what is rather than not having a choice at all. If you think about it, time does play a role in the healing right along with the acceptance because if we aren’t given the time to heal, then how can we ever truly accept what lies ahead of us?
They also say acceptance is easier to grasp when you aren’t given the choice. I personally disagree. I do have a choice. But not accepting my CP was never something I thought about.
Growing up, I looked at my CP as a happenstance. It was something I just had, and because of that I had to things differently than the “average person.” Now I don’t see my CP so much as a happenstance but rather one thing of many things that make me who I am. So, instead of spelling cerebral palsy as c-e-r-e-b-r-a-l p-a-l-s-y, I spell it as a-c-c-e-p-t-a-n-c-e.
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Thinkstock image by Thomas Northcut
I am the founder/writer of the blog, The Abler. Head Admin of the official FB Group for the Abler Blog. Poet/ YA writer
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