By Nelson Longpearce

I was born with a disability. It’s called Fibular Hemimelia. Fibular Hemimelia is a disability where one your legs is shorter than the other. When I was one year old I had surgery because when I was born my left foot was also backwards. The doctor’s prescribed physical therapy mainly for my core strength to help my body compensate for these problems with my feet.

When I was six I joined Taekwondo with Mama. One year later I had an appointment with my orthopedic doctor, Dr. Booker. Because this was the first time seeing Dr. Booker he talked to us about physical therapy and said that a sport would be a good physical therapy. He asked if I did any sport, I said “yes, I do Taekwondo”. So he asked me to run up and down the hall. After that he said I seem strong enough, and that if I continue Taekwondo I wouldn’t need to do physical therapy.

The reasons Taekwondo is better than physical therapy in my opinion are: First, Taekwondo offers a community that you can trust and respect so that if you have a real problem you know you have someone to go to. Taekwondo also helps with your self-confidence and your self-defense skills. It definitely makes you more confident about yourself. And last but not least, traditional physical therapy is pretty boring because you kind of just do stuff that the doctor says and there’s no fun part.

Because I have a disability some of the things that I need to do are a little bit hard for me. One things that I find pretty difficult are jump kicks. I can do them pretty good on my right side. When I try to do it on my left side I do more of a spring kick. I find stances pretty hard. When I’m doing a right-foot-forward-left-leg-back front
stance, my left leg knee can stay straight. When I’m doing a left-leg-forward-right-leg-back front stance, I have to focus on keeping my right knee straight. But the good thing about this is that I have to push myself harder than anyone else so I can overcome these obstacles.

Taking all those things into consideration, I don’t think of my disability as much of a disability. A lot of people might think I’m incapable of doing something because I have a disability and that’s not really true. It’s just a difference and that difference I think makes me stronger because, like I said in the paragraph before this one, I have to push myself more. I mean, I might even be a black belt soon so just try to say that I’m incapable of doing something.