I shared something the other day that pretty much said something along the lines of how we aren’t given hard stuff to show us how weak we can be but instead it’s meant to show us how strong we truly are. It was a quote given by an unknown author & I find that incredibly fitting. Because none of us know who we truly are until we have a mountain put before us & we have to decide how we get to the other side & who we will be during the climb. Some may decide to climb the mountain despite the narrow cliffs & jagged rocks that sit below each slip or trip. Some may grab a shovel & start digging straight through the mountain. Some of us will conquer it with joy & that blessed feeling of making it to the other side while others might cuss every rock & divot on the path. And some may choose to not even try to climb the mountain & sit in self pity as they watch others attempt the climb. And the list goes on and on. Which is ok because there is no one right way to climb a mountain. But any which way, the journey will be hard and how we handle the difficult moments will tell us a lot about ourselves. It will make us feel a little less unknown. Especially to ourselves.

Isn’t it strange that sometimes when we are at our strongest we feel like we are at our weakest? I mean it barely makes sense. Like when you endure a great struggle of any kind, size or proportion you might begin to feel like you’re at your wits end & taking one more step seems literally impossible. But you do it anyways. And that exact moment, the point where you do take another step, is the moment that shows you how incredibly strong you actually are despite any circumstances. And that speaks volumes about you. Taking another step when you’re too tired to. That mountain might have slowed you down but it did not break you. You are so much stronger than your circumstance & we often forget that.

Knowing exactly how strong you are is virtually impossible. You’re not going know until you’re actually living through that crash course & dealing with what you got from here on out. How could you? How could you know beforehand that life on one leg is very livable? Because if you had to think about having a limb amputated while standing on 2 good legs, thats a scary thought that seems hard to survive. Or how could you know that you could beat cancer? And then after you do & by some stroke of bad luck you develop more lesions & how do you know you’ll get lucky a second time? We don’t. Which is to be expected. We can only hope that we are as strong as the 16 year old who is fighting cancer or as the wife who lost her husband & father to her children. But like I said before, you aren’t really going to know until you are in those shoes you never hope to be in. And that’s the moment where we learn where our breaking point lies and we become a little less unknown to ourselves. Where we realize weakness is a concept & strength is a reflex. And how we react is how we get through the hard stuff.

#TheOneLeggedMommy #Strength #Weakness #Unknown #WeDontKnow #Amputee #Amputation #HipDisarticulation #NecrotizingFasciitis