The Gift Of Limits

It’s hard to ignore how many quiet battles are being fought behind ordinary smiles. I’ve watched people I love walk through things they never would have chosen. Burnout that makes getting out of bed feel heavier than it should, or test results that change the tone of a household. Bills that don’t shrink no matter how careful you are. The slow grief of watching someone’s body betray them, or the helplessness of loving someone you can’t fix. Sometimes it feels like everything is pressing in at once, trying to smother peace.
Growing up with a disability, I struggled with the why of my situation. Why did I have my disability? Why couldn’t I be a normal kid and do normal things with my friends? Why did I have limitations? Why did I have to grow up faster than my peers? Why why why…
It wasn’t until after I graduated high school that a thought occurred to me. I was retelling a story of an unpleasant experience I’d had in school when I made the observation that “If I hadn’t had my disability, I would have straight-up punched them in the face.” My mom looked at me, trying to see if I was joking. I wasn’t. I told her, “If it wasn’t for my disability, I would have been impossible.”
My disability required me to do a few things. It forced me to accept limits early in my life. It made me negotiate with my own body. And it quickly stole the illusions of invincibility. While kids my age were reaching that “rite of passage” where they got to “act first, think later”, I was stuck thinking through every decision I made before I made it. For a number of years, I resented my friends who had that privilege and didn’t appreciate it. Because while they got to believe they could power through anything and everything, I had to learn to work within reality’s confines.
As I began to look at life through the lens of my disability I started to see characteristics that I had to learn. While peers were forcing challenges aside, I was having to be patient until the problem went away or I could find another solution. While peers could flit from one thing to another to another, I had to weigh and measure my limited energy level while simultaneously learning that resting to reenergize wasn’t laziness, it’s self-care. While peers could deal with the physical consequences of forcing a situation, I was learning that control is usually a story we invent. While peers were able to bounce back from mishaps and stupid accidents, I was busy learning that not all pain is fixable, some of it gets carried through life. I don’t regret those lessons… now. Some of these lessons come with age. I had the privilege of learning them early, before they altered my life irrevocably.
At the core of my disability, I’ve learned that there are so many things I will never have control of and I need to accept that. Speaking of things I will never have control of? My body is at the top of that list. It has boundaries, and where some may be able to ignore it or push those boundaries back another day, I have to listen to them. No matter how inconvenient it may be. Sometimes that looks like adjustments, sometimes it looks like rescheduling or cancelling. But most importantly, my disability has taught me that time matters. Whether it’s making the most of “good days” when I get them, or restocking my energy reserves when I have to, time doesn’t stop for me. So I need to use it wisely, especially if I don’t want to always feel like I’m falling behind the rest of the world.
I’d love to say that I learned how to handle all of these life lessons on my own but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was blessed enough to be raised in a family that gave me a firm foundation built on faith. Without that faith, my disability would have felt like a pointless, sadistic twist of fate. While some may think that faith is a crutch, or that it makes all your problems disappear, I came to learn that it simply gave suffering context. Accepting that I am not in control of everything became infinitely easier when I stopped believing I had to be. While my disability taught me limits, my faith taught me trust.
Maybe that’s why when I see people around me wrestling with what they can’t change, something inside me breaks a little. I hope they come to see that limits don’t mean they’ve been abandoned. That suffering doesn’t mean they’re alone. My disability didn’t make me strong. It made me dependent, and in that dependence, I found something steadier than control.