Perseverance.
That is the word I always come back to when someone asks me to describe myself with one word. Living with a degenerative disability in my feet since childhood has led to me to face many things – the need to constantly adapt, endure, and let go. Grief walks side by side with any type of degenerative condition, and I spent many years battling depression and self-hatred and shame, wrestling with all of the surgical failures and lost dreams.
Yet, a student once asked me...
“If you could never have had your disability, would you choose to not have it?”
What a powerful question. That child in me screamed out from her grief and agony, “Yes, please, heal me!” And yet the person I was in that space with the student said, “No.”
My lived experiences, although painful, forged an intense empathy and beautiful compassion for all of the living beings around me. I became the person who could sit with someone in their tears, celebrate all of life’s successes, and fight through the anger of “this should have never happened to me…” I became the person who could even find compassion for myself on the other side of self-hatred and breathe in the blessing of being alive in this world. It taught me the humility, joy, and importance of support and letting others help me. From my constant, chronic pain I am taught to pause, take notice, and listen to my body and the world around me. Needing to constantly adapt crafted my ability to think strategically and see connections in places where they are not as apparent. And I was able to find a healthy way to channel the stubbornness my father gifted to me to endure and choose to rise up and keep moving forward as best I can.