My name is Samara. At the tender age of 3 years old, I was diagnosed with Spastic Hemiplegia CP– Cerebral palsy that affects one side of the side of the body. Growing up, I had foot pain, soreness, and muscle spasms. I did countless hours of physical therapy as a child. During my teenage years, the pain in my legs only got more annoying as time went on. By the time I was in my 20s, I knew I had a lot of damage in my feet. I could never flex my left foot, and my right leg was always overcompensating for my left leg.
At the time, my doctor was one of the only top 5 sports/medicine doctors who understood the condition of cerebral palsy. This point highlights a woman with Cerebral Palsy, and I wish people would realize that it doesn’t get better or worse but that it changes over time and that these so-called changes can affect our bodies and muscular systems.
As an African American woman in the disabled community, I also got such strange, intimate questions from men, like can/could I have children, which the answer is yes, probably just in a different way, whether that is becoming pregnant and having a C-section, using a surrogate, or adopting.
As a woman with a disability, we need to normalize disabilities in all types of Media by having disabled women portray themselves or having them on sets to help the non-disabled actors/actresses portray them correctly.
Another point that growing up with CP has taught me is beauty. I am tired of not seeing beautiful women who happen to have Cerebral palsy and look like me. In many other countries, women, children, and people may suffer from other forms of Cerebral Palsy as well, but it may go unnoticed, which is very sad because they deserve care and to feel like they matter.
My point of this narrative is to understand what it is like to be a woman suffering from this condition and the growing pains of being a woman. To help shed some light on what being a disabled woman means and why we need to change the perception of beauty and disability.
In the end, the growing pains I experienced taught me a lot about myself but more about the world we live in, where we have to continue to grow as a society embracing disability on all levels.