Posts Tagged ‘perseverence’
Collide.
This is a tale of four people(although imagined) with four separate lives that somehow streamed into one river, before branching off into different directions. It’s funny how a complete stranger wrote a show that so often mirrors the spirit (and content) of my Life in New York City as a 20’s something Girl. Discovering not only what the five Boroughs of New York could offer me during my burgeoning Adulthood, but navigating the sometimes complicated relationships too! Just as a comet speeds through space colliding with other objects and leaving pieces of itself behind, so do we as people. Each relationship, meaningful interaction, successes, and failures have either built me up or broke me down. However, unlike Hannah Horvath, I never got to have a “goodbye tour,” of my Life and neighborhood in New York. Rather I fast forwarded through what I expected to be my fourth year in the city; instead waking up in a rehab hospital in Michigan. Which, needless to say was a shock to my system. Not fully grasping what had happened to me( I was unconscious for most of it after all) I just wanted to be back in New York. A place where completing even the most mundane or trivial of tasks, makes you feel like a champion. A place that is as difficult to succeed in, as the concrete is hard. I chose to live there, for it’s electric energy, for the massive amounts of opportunities, and to fulfill my teenage dream. As a fresh out of college 25 year old graduate it was the perfect place for me. Why? Because as I navigate stroke recovery and Life after a near Death experience, New York gave me guts. Not the kind you see in a horror movie, but real guts. The kind that helps you to fake it til’ you make it and go after what you want with no apologies. Do you find that behavior rude? Ladder climbing? Well, that’s just Life in the city babe. Where I once cursed the contrast of the Michigan trees to skyscrapers, the suburban sprawl to city streets, and the slow pace to the city’s efficiency; now I am thankful for it. Just as I found myself in NY at the right time and place, my recovery is happening at the right time and in the right place as well. I have run long and hard, but now it’s time to learn how to walk again.
-XO BLEU
keep pushing
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
-Thomas A. Edison
high
If a little seedling can manage to grow through cement, why can’t you do the same with your difficult circumstances? The world worships at the feet of the God of success, but what do we do with failure and catastrophe? Rather than meet these challenges with a smile, We crumble and fade from them. When you’re going through a hard time keep smiling. Make people wonder where that smile came from, and how it got there. Meet life dancing with your hand in the air rather than lying down. Imagine what you’d do if the floor was pulled out from beneath you, because that’s what happened to me actually! In one fell swoop, I lost my high paying job, my apartment, a significant other, and my left arm and leg were paralyzed. I went to bed expecting to go to work and then home to New York City, but instead woke up in a Hospital back where I started with even less than I had as a child. In this situation you can either give up and fall into the arms of a suicidal depression or get up even when you don’t feel like it. Despite my desire to bury myself under the covers in my bed, I forced myself to get up and go to rehab every week. Because, regardless of how I felt, life wasn’t going to hand progress over to me I had to push back to achieve it. I can assure you , that if I can do it, so can you! Just as trout swim miles upstream to spawn, sometimes we find ourselves swimming upstream as well. Perhaps we aren’t swimming upstream to spawn, but our reasons are not so different from the trouts. That reason is simple, both of us are swimming towards Life and not away.
God speed!