Blog written by McKenna Strange
Growing up with a disability is not easy, but it has shaped who I am today. My name is McKenna Strange, and I was born with spastic cerebral palsy. This affects the way I walk by causing issues with balance, coordination, and muscle tightness.
As a kid I was constantly bombarded with questions like, “What’s wrong with you?” and “Why do you walk like that?” This stuck with me for a long time and shaped how I viewed myself. I was labeled as disabled and given an identity that caused me to view myself as different and limited, but I also have an identity that I claim for myself and define what having a disability means to me. I’ll take you through my younger years and how a label was placed on me. Then I’ll share about how I came to define my identity for myself and how my disability shapes my life now.
As a kid, the identity of being “disabled” was placed on me by others. Every day, I had reminders of how I was different – through stares, questions and constant curiosity about what was “wrong” with me. This idea of being different seemed like it was a bad thing because I wanted to fit in with everyone else. It seemed like my disability was the most interesting thing about me to others, and they were just dying to know what was wrong with me.
This led me to ask myself: Why am I like this? I felt others saw me as less capable and made these assumptions and treated me the way they thought was best. The identity others gave me began to harm the way I saw myself. But as I got older, things changed, I matured and so did the people around me. I wasn’t constantly asked, “What’s wrong with you” so I got to figure out how I function in the world with a disability.
In my junior year of high school, I started to view my disability as something I claim and define for myself. I had several surgeries that helped me become more independent. I didn’t have to constantly worry about my disability, and it gave me time to figure out how I wanted to live and move through the world with a disability.
My disability shifted from an identity that seemed to consume my life to something that made me who I am today. Now, I feel free to view my disability in my own way. I prefer to make light of my struggles rather than to view it as something that weighs me down. I make jokes, I decide for myself what I am capable of, and I define how I live with cerebral palsy. My determination, strength, and perseverance come from my disability and how I choose to react to it. My disability is not something that can characterize me, it’s the result of having this disability that I am who I am today, not because someone placed an identity on me or decided that identity for me.
It’s important to reflect on how identities placed in us by others affect our view of ourselves and how we interact with that identity. I want you to take away the idea that we don’t have to take on the identities placed on us, but we get to define what that identity means for ourselves.
