Born With Arthrogryposis, Not Defined By It

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I was born with Arthrogryposis, so struggle was part of my life before I was even old enough to understand what struggle was. My joints were affected. My muscles were affected. Doctors believed I would never walk on my own. Before I could even speak for myself, other people were already speaking limits over my life. I began in St. John’s, but by the time I was five, my family had moved to Chance Cove, a small outport community in Newfoundland where everyone noticed everything, including difference.

In those early years, my body did not move the way other children’s bodies moved. I wore braces on my legs with a bar connecting my shoes until I was about five years old. While other children were running, climbing, and moving freely, I was learning how to get from one place to another in my own way. I learned to walk by putting my back against the wall and sliding along. To get downstairs, I sat on my bum and bopped down one step at a time. At that age, I was not thinking about resilience or inspiration. I was simply trying to live inside the body I had and get where I needed to go.

Growing up in a tiny community as an only child, I stood out whether I wanted to or not. Other children noticed I was different, and they were not always kind about it. I was bullied, mocked, stared at, and made to feel like I was somehow less. School was not easy. Even gym class felt like a kind of public exposure, a place where I was reminded that I could not move like everyone else. I often felt watched in the wrong way, singled out, measured against other people, and found lacking before anyone ever took the time to know me. That kind of thing gets inside a child. It shapes the way you see yourself long before you have the maturity to question whether what you are being taught about yourself is even true.

Home was not always a safe place from that feeling either. I grew up hearing words that cut deeply. My father often told me I would never amount to anything more than a disabled welfare bum. My mother compared me to my cousins and made it clear that whatever I did was never quite enough. I grew up with criticism, shame, and the feeling that I had to prove my worth over and over, yet never seemed able to. That did something to me. It made me quiet in some ways and deeply driven in others. It planted pain in me, but it also planted a question that would stay with me for years: what if they are wrong about me?

When I was four years old, I had surgery to permanently bend one of my arms. That surgery gave me more independence in very ordinary but important ways. It helped me feed myself, wash my face, and brush my teeth. But it also gave me something no one could have predicted. My arm ended up bent at just the right angle to hold a pool cue. That mattered more than anyone around me likely understood at the time. Pool became one of the first places in my life where I did not just feel limited. I felt possibility. I remember telling my mother that even if I could not play games like the other kids, one day I would be the best one armed pool shooter in the world.

At seven, my parents bought me a pool table. I taught myself to play, first in my father’s shed, often when the noise inside the house felt too heavy. That shed became more than a place to play. It became a refuge. It was a place where I could focus, improve, and feel some kind of control. I practiced constantly. I worked on my stroke. I got laughed at, mocked, and underestimated, but I kept going. Over time, I got very good. Pool gave me something I desperately needed. It gave me confidence. It gave me proof that what people first saw when they looked at me was not the whole truth. It showed me that even in a body that other people pitied or dismissed, there was still skill, still ability, still something in me that could grow.

As I moved through childhood and adolescence in Chance Cove, I carried both sides of that reality. On one side was the visible disability, the bullying, the isolation, the constant feeling of being different. On the other side was this quieter thing being built in me, adaptation, patience, stubbornness, creativity, and the ability to keep finding another way. I did not always recognize those things as strengths then. At the time, they just felt like survival. I escaped into cassette tapes, computer games, imagination, and pool. I learned to live inside my own head because the outside world often felt too hard, too sharp, too unforgiving. But even in that, I was learning. I was learning how to endure. I was learning how to stay with myself when life felt lonely.

At nineteen, I moved to Clarenville. That was another chapter, another attempt to build a life while still carrying all the old voices, all the old wounds, and all the ways I had learned to protect myself. I stayed there until I was twenty six, then returned to St. John’s. By then, my life was no longer only about living with Arthrogryposis. It had become tangled up with abuse, shame, addiction, emotional pain, and the long aftermath of growing up feeling not good enough. I am not going to pretend disability caused all of that, because it did not. But I do believe that growing up visibly different, constantly compared, and made to feel less than shaped how I saw myself for a very long time. It left me hungry for approval, trying to be enough, trying to outrun the feeling that who I was would never be enough on its own.

There were very dark years in my life. Years of addiction. Years of pain. Years where things could have gone very differently. But the part of me that had learned as a child to slide along walls, to find another route, to keep moving even when movement was hard, that part never fully left me. The mindset that had been forming since childhood, adapt, endure, keep going, helped carry me through far more than physical disability alone. When life got darker, something in me still kept reaching for survival. Eventually, that same part of me reached for healing, rebuilding, and purpose.

A major turning point came much later in adulthood, especially after my 2018 car accident, when I could no longer keep everything pushed down and pretend I was fine. Writing began to open something in me. Speaking began to open something in me. I started telling the truth about my life, not just the parts that looked strong from the outside, but the deeper story underneath. I began to understand that my life had never only been about what I could not do. It was also about what I had built because of what I had to survive. The pain did not disappear, but it began to turn into purpose.

Today, when I look back on my life with Arthrogryposis, I do not see one flat story about limitation. I see a child who was told he would never walk, yet found his own way to move. I see a boy who was stared at, picked on, and made to feel less than, yet kept developing strengths no one else could see. I see a young person who found refuge in a pool cue and discovered that ability can live where other people only see limitation. I see an adult who went through hell in more ways than one and still found a way to rise, rebuild, and use his voice.

Arthrogryposis has shaped my life from the very beginning, but it has never been the whole story of who I am. It shaped how I moved, how I adapted, and how I had to live in the world, but it did not take away my worth, my depth, my purpose, or my possibility. I have had to do many things differently. I have had to work harder at things many people never have to think twice about. I have carried frustration, pain, shame, and misunderstanding. But I have also built patience, endurance, problem solving, determination, and a kind of strength that was forged slowly, quietly, over years of having to find another way.

So when I tell my story, I do not want it reduced to a disability story only. I want it told as a human story. A story of being underestimated. A story of hurt. A story of survival. A story of finding confidence in unlikely places. A story of carrying old voices for far too long, then slowly learning not to live by them anymore. And above all, a story of discovering that different does not mean defeated. It never did.