Year 6: Taking up Space and Knowing my Place.

This post is two months late, and it’ll be a bit all over the place, but hear me out. I’ve been busy healing. Truly, properly, healing. I started a new job June 1st, flew back to California on June 4th to recalibrate my nervous system with family time for two weeks, after 6 weeks of war and while working and training for my new job from afar, so it was a very loose definition of vacation. I got back and hit the ground running with a new mindset and zest for life. 

Historically speaking, July has been a problematic healing month for me. n July of 2010, was the event that I'm pretty sure changed my trajectory in life. It's the wound that led to every other wound along the path these last 16 years, so July, historically, has sat very heavy on me. This morning during my post gym shower, I realized that this was the first July in sixteen years that just passed me by, that didn’t feel heavy and I cried and cried and cried, from relief after almost two decades of pent up survival mode feelings. It’s like 16 years of pain and trauma after trauma finally released themselves from my body and I’m feeling so light. For the first time in 16 years. You can only know how freeing this is if you’ve been walking  through the darkness for a few chapters. 

Last re-birthday I wrote to you from Ohau, Hawaii, about how much I succeeded in reaching the top of the hill on many uphill battles. How I would keep pushing through because this second chance at life won't be wasted on a half life. I wrote about how I found a love I never thought I would find. Now lets all collectively laugh at that part, after leaving everything behind in California again, I moved back to Israel; after a month of living together, I discovered what is required in love is action and not words. Maybe that relationship was just the stepping stone to get to where I'm truly going. In discovering what I require from romantic love, I was able to start the ugliest part of my healing journey yet. I learned to look and find love in the small everyday things around me and within me. I am forever grateful that love comes in so many forms. So even though my happily ever after hasn't fully arrived and revealed itself yet, I still did find so much love around me. 

In my family, in my friends who are family, in the grocer who helps me bag up my items, even when theres a long line,and insists on carrying my bags home for me, in the rare bus driver that breaks the rules and drives me all the way to the door of the mall, in the bus driver that waits for me to sit before driving off so that i dont fall (again), in the random guy at the gym who saw my struggling with a highly spastic lefty and came over and genty helped hold the machine at an angle where i can manually fight with lefty and work my targeted muscles. In the flowers and in the eyes of those looking at what they love. This is turning into a valentines day post. 

Let's bring it back in. After my break up, I highly debated many choices in my life. Historically, I tend to make myself small, especially in past relationships, and especially with the disability my stroke gifted me. I also stay in places that don't properly value me for too long. So since the last time we spoke, I have been taking up space and knowing my place, or at least trying to, I am ever evolving of course. This mindframe shift is what has led me to be able to find love in the little everyday things. By shifting my mindset to that frequency, I've found that I attract all the good frequencies to me. Only the non-believers will call me delusional, and that's okay, I'll save the lower frequencies for them ;)

If we do good and think good, the good will come flowing back to us, its basic physics ;)

With my new found philosophies and motto, I have created a looot of shifts in my life leading up to my 6th re-birthday. I switched three jobs since making the move, lived completely independently, through a 6 week long ballistic missile war,  and have reignited my own rehab program since the health fund system has given up on me. I’ve learned that every delay and plot twist is for my highest good. That's what i try to remind myself on the darker days, the good news is that the sun always rises, just like us resilient neuro patients. I'm excited to see where I'll be a year from today and what crazy way I'll be celebrating, healing and living to the fullest. 

Sending you love, 

Dana