World Cerebral Palsy day - 6th Oct 2025 unique and united - my story.

Today is World Cerebral Palsy Day.

Cerebral Palsy is the most common lifelong physical disability worldwide.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a group of lifelong neurological conditions that affect movement, muscle tone, and coordination. It’s caused by damage to the developing brain, usually before birth, during birth, or shortly after. The word cerebral refers to the brain, and palsy means weakness or problems with using the muscles.

These awareness days are to educate others on Cerebral palsy and to educate on what is really is compared to what people think it is. Cerebral Palsy is purely a physical disability. The individual can have other conditions on top but they are not part of the CP.

This year’s theme is #uniqueandunited where yourcpf is asking everyone with CP to share their stories.

Mine started at 9 days old, where I had a miss cot death, after being resuscitated by my mum. The lack of oxygen to my brain caused my CP. I have mild spastic dipegia CP. So, it effects mainly my legs, but my left hand is also affected and I also have a slight speech implement.

I absolutely hated physio when I was growing up. Though my friends loved it when I had it in school and they got to join me! I never imagined it would be what I ended up doing when I was older!

I was bought up, that I had to try to do every thing myself and only ask for help when I absolutely couldn’t do it. I had a very sporty older brother and I swam from an early age and I swam right up to when I went to Uni. I did want to dance but we couldn’t find a dance school in Swindon that would have me.

Fast forward to my mid-20s, when my GP told me to try Pilates or yoga to help my spasticity in my muscles. I joined a local body balance class and did this regularly to I discovered Zumba. For the first time in my life, I could get to dance. I was going to 2-3 classes a week and loving it. Following from an injury, I worked with a PT in my gym, who encouraged me to train to be a fitness professional. I discovered Instructability and as they say, the rest is history.

12 years on, I’m teaching various fitness classes to everyone including Zumba. I am a Neuro Personal Trainer. I present my own brands at fitness events; I tutor & assess the L3 Designing Exercise Programmes for Disabled client’s qualification. Am actually tutoring our next 1 tomorrow. I placed in the final Disability Power 100, coming 2^nd in Sport, Health & Wellbeing but I have got lots of disabled people active especially when many thought they couldn’t or they couldn’t find anyone that truly understood their condition.

I have never let my disability define me, I define me. Its part of me but it’s not me. It just means I have to do things slightly differently. But that’s ok. In the words of Pulp ‘We don’t want no trouble, we just want the right to be different. That’s all.’

This is spot on. Everyone has the right to be different and be who they want to be.

(I hope you all sung 'but that’s ok', like Jarvis Cocker in your head when reading this!)