Fly Anyway: What It Means When Your Own Body Keeps Clipping Your Wings

There’s a strange kind of fatigue that settles in when your body becomes its own battlefield. It’s not the loud kind—the kind that storms in with alarms blaring. It’s quieter. Heavier. Like a weight that sits in your gut and refuses to move, a pressure that builds until even breathing feels like you’re negotiating with something inside you that doesn’t want to cooperate.

Lately, my stomach has been the ringleader of that chaos.

And brother… it has been beating the hell out of me.

People don’t talk enough about the kind of pain that sneaks up from the inside. It’s invisible. It’s silent. And it is relentless. For me, it’s this deep, grinding gut-ache that mixes constipation, nausea, and this sharp, twisting fullness that makes my whole body tense up like live wire. And because I’m a quadriplegic—spasticity joins the party every time something’s off internally.

Nothing like a locked-up body reacting to a locked-up gut.

When the stomach goes, everything goes.

And that’s the part people don’t always see.

They see the cardinal.
The color.
The resilience.
The symbolism.
The fight.

But they don’t see the days when the pain is so loud I feel like I’m drowning inside my own torso. They don’t see me trying to stretch into comfort I can’t physically reach. They don’t feel the way my muscles clamp down into stone, making even the smallest movement feel like I’m dragging myself through wet cement.

This isn’t just discomfort.
This isn’t just a “tummy issue.”
This is a whole-body shutdown.

A tiny internal problem becomes a full-scale lockdown.

And man… it steals from you.

It steals peace.
It steals rest.
It steals clarity.
It steals entire days you never get back.

I do everything I can. I adjust. I troubleshoot. I hydrate. I eat clean. I take the meds. I shift around solutions like a mechanic trying to keep an engine running on faith and duct tape.

But some days, no matter how hard I fight, the pain wins the morning before I even get a chance to compete.

And here’s the honest truth:
Those days wear on me.
They make me question my own endurance.
They make me feel like the world is moving while I’m stuck… painfully still.

Yet here I am.

Still writing.
Still showing up.
Still finding a way to keep my mind aimed upward.

Because pain doesn’t get the final word.

Not here.
Not in my story.
Not in the Caged Cardinal.

This body may ground me in ways I never asked for, but the soul in me?
The will in me?
The part of me that refuses to quit?

That part still catches wind.

Even on the days I can’t move the way I want…
Even on the days the nausea feels endless…
Even on the days when my gut feels like it’s full of cement and every bit of spasticity screams with it…

I remind myself:

Fly anyway.

Not with wings, but with grit.
Not with perfect days, but with honest ones.
Not by rising above everything, but by pushing through something.

This pain is real.
This struggle is real.
The frustration, the exhaustion, the feeling of being trapped in your own body—it’s all real.

But so is the fight.
So is the fire.
So is the stubborn hope that keeps me moving—inch by inch—toward a fuller life.

If you’re carrying a battle inside you right now… if your body isn’t cooperating… if you feel stuck, strained, or worn down by something no one else can see…

You’re not alone.

I’m right there with you.
Hurting.
Adjusting.
Trying again tomorrow.

And until this storm in my gut settles… until my body loosens its grip… until the pain gives me a few breaths of mercy…

I’ll keep choosing to rise in the only ways I can.

One thought at a time.
One moment at a time.
One stubborn, cardinal-red heartbeat at a time.

Fly anyway.

Because some days, that’s the bravest thing we can do.