But I wanted to write about the night I had out last night.

I have a friend that I really enjoy eating out with. We go to different restaurants around town fairly often but this last outing was just very memorable for me. Firstly, I love my friends but especially this woman, lets call her “J”. “J” allows me to be myself while escaping the fact that I am handicapped. Now this sounds like a no brainier, right, well truthfully their are a few of my friends that the fact that I’m a handicapped is always in the back of my head. But back to “J”.

I meet “J” and a friend of ours, “Special K”, at a Nino’s Friday evening around 7pm. After arguing over the fact that I didn’t want to order anything, but in reality knew I would just steal from their plates, we started talking and just enjoying the company. Their was a fairly funny story that created laughter the whole night. And when I say laughter I really mean to say we three laughed so hard that we had the joint looking at us. And might I say, this is the way to go. If you have to laugh in public go all out! People look at me while I’m out every day, but it’s nice to give people a reason to look at me for a change.

And then to make the evening out even better another friend “B” showed up and we four continued to laugh out loud for long time. We ended up spending over 2 hours just hanging out and having a great time together and I can truthfully say that I didn’t once go into my own mind and that’s a great accomplishment for me

Now I know you all are so very interested in this, lol. But really I want to site to be more of a mono log of my life for myself, if someone else reads then so be it.

I really do want to post more on here so perhaps I can make it a habit.

Thanks for listening.
- Justin

I went with a group of friends to a local movie theater where I live, we all wanted to see “The Eye”. I really did not think anything about this movie being something I should not watch. I knew this was a “scary” movie but at the same time, I have watched scary movies in the past and though I knew I would be jumping a lot I had no clue it would be as bad as it ended up being.

I have Spastic Cerebral Palsy, and because of this, my reflexes are quite rough. It is very easy to get me to jump. If I am not expecting something, I get startled very easy and as such jump out of my skin quite often, I have lived with jumps my whole life and try my best to ignore them. When I jump, I usually just continue with whatever I was doing before a jump and this attitude has worked for me quite well for as long as I can remember. Moreover, all this is well and good because it is what my life is.

Nevertheless, here is the story…

I do not mind the jumps as long as they do not control my life. However, while trying to watch “The Eye” they started controlling my enjoyment of the movie, my enjoyment of the event as a whole, and there for my life. I hate when my CP controls my life, it means I not in control.

I do not know exactly why this particular movie affected my jumps so bad. I have an idea though: I cannot force myself not to jump. I can control my jumps a little by staying calm and not tensing up over a situation. (I was tensed this day) I can also control my jumps by concentrating on them, as in just telling myself what’s about to happen and reassuring myself I will not jump, this doesn’t help all that much but it’s something I can do in myself and anyone I’m with wouldn’t notice me acting anything different.

Alas this night my mind was not on my CP but on the movie and, more so, on the peoples I was hanging out with. Every little thing would cause me to jump and every time I would jump, they would look at me and ask if we needed to leave. This made me feel so bad that I was disturbing their enjoyment of the movie. I ended up asking them to stay and finish their move while I found something better for myself. I left and went to a different theater to wait on the group.

There is more to this story but I think I am done. I just needed to talk about it a little and get it off my mind.

Thanks for listening.
- Justin

Every once and a while I will get a wild hair and want to find something out about living with CP at my age but I have never been able to find much. I can find all kinds of good information about children with CP but not adults. So here comes MLDev.com

This site will be a place for me to vent about my life and a place for me to collect information I gather about my disorder. I do hope in the process I might be able to help others see that they can live life to the fullest, even with a disorder. If anyone ever has questions feel free to ask, all answer most anything and we both might end up learning something.

Thanks for listening.
- Justin