Humbly Courageous

Hello and welcome to another week at Humbly Courageous. I’m glad you are here! Living my life with a progressive muscle disease, I’m no stranger to the self-blame game. Whether it be brought on from outside sources or my own thoughts, self-blame towards my lack of physical abilities is always waiting in the wings to attack. It’s an automatic go to if I’m not careful. It’s not helpful to me in any way. If I’m not my own cheerleader in a situation like this, how can I expect anyone else to be? I’ve spent the last several years trying to correct damaging thought patterns. Most of my life, I was extremely negative towards myself and my disability. Retraining your brain is definitely possible, and it is something I’m capable of doing.  I’ve seen a lot of progress in myself. However, it takes consistency and diligence, and a whole lot of patience. You have to go into it accepting you will take two steps forward and one step back over and over.  Recently, I thought about how not that long ago

Hello and welcome to another week at Humbly Courageous. I’m glad you are here. Spring has sprung! We are through the darkest and coldest days, and can enjoy 6 months of a lot more daylight! Anyone else have a diary with a lock on it in your early school days? Where you kept your deepest secrets and privately wrote about your childhood crushes? Under NO circumstances was anyone to even try to open that masterpiece under lock and key! During a recent attic clean out my husband brought a couple of boxes down for me to go through. They contained the last shreds of my life before adulthood. In the boxes were two diaries I kept. One during my younger years, and one during college days. There was some talk about young relationships, but mostly there were pages and pages filled with my insecurities regarding my disability in both. Not much changed between the two. Insecure and silently struggling with something no one understood. In these pages I referred to my disability as my “problem”. How

Hello and welcome to another week at Humbly Courageous. I am glad you are here. For the majority of my life, I was waiting. Waiting on things to get better, waiting on answers, waiting for a treatment, a release from the prison of my disability. I was waiting on a time when my body could catch up with my mind. To be able to achieve the things I wanted to. Just because a person is disabled doesn't mean we don't still daydream about all the things we wish our bodies could accomplish. I spend a good deal of time daydreaming about what the physical achievements would look like if I could actually get there. Coming back down to reality stinks. I suppose the heart longs for things it can't have.  I've entered into the year I will turn 50 years old. What?! How can that be, I think, like everyone else. Where has the time gone? Feelings of regret, an urgent feeling to accomplish things is what I'm sometimes feeling these days. Maybe I haven't done enough before turning 5

Hello and welcome to a new week at Humbly Courageous. If you are a new reader, I'm glad you stopped by! I've mentioned in past blog posts, that several years ago, I started to seek out alternative types of therapies that could possibly be helpful for my disability. One of those therapies is called Rolfing. Rolfing, according to the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, is a form of bodywork that reorganizes the connective tissues, called fascia, that permeate the entire body.  I first learned about rolfing when I lived in Memphis, TN, when a good friend of mine introduced me to this therapy. That was over 20 years ago, and I still receive this therapy here in Indiana. In the article, linked at the end, I was interviewed by my current practitioner, whom I have been working with for nearly 20 years since moving back to Indiana. In the interview, I tell a touching story about how one person's generosity changed my life. I am forever grateful for the work done by my first rolfer, and now the

Hello and welcome to another week at Humbly Courageous! I’m glad you are here. Elementary school recess. It should be a great time in a child’s life. Something to look forward to, to help break up the long school day. At least that’s the way it used to be. I also remember my own boys loving the time to go out and run around and get a mental break during their early school years.  I’m not going to say recess was always a bad time for me, because it wasn’t. There was certainly some fun that was had, but also to be honest, it often gave me a pit in my stomach. Some days were worse than others depending on the activity the masses wanted to do that day. The mental load is so heavy for a child with a disability. There are so many moving parts and things you have to constantly be on top of just to keep it all together. Even at such a young age. It’s a lot.  Each time I would see the hopscotch design drawn on the pavement, I went into an internal panic. Most of these emotions and insecurities

Hello and welcome back to another week at Humbly Courageous. If you are new here, I’m glad you stopped by. Often when we are going through difficult times others will say “don’t worry, this won’t last forever” and it brings comfort knowing that they are correct a lot of the time. Our problems are often fleeting, or only last for a season. But what if you have something in your life that can’t be comforted by the thought of, “this won’t last forever” to get you through. Then what? I recently ran across a journal entry I wrote the day before I got my official diagnosis …finally. This is what it said. 11/7/18 Waiting: I’ve been waiting…for 44 1/2 years to be exact. Waiting for someone to tell me why I “walk funny” as people like to tell me. Waiting to tell me why I’m so weak, why it’s hard to sit up, why I can’t get myself off the floor, why I’m in so much pain, why I’ve had so many surgeries, why life isn’t fair, why others have strong bodies and I don’t, why I get stared at in public, w