Attitude

As I was thinking about all the things I've learned over the past 11 years, many topics arose to my mind. Yet the one thing I kept coming back to was attitude. I'm constantly reminded that life is never fair. Many of us plan for things to go a certain way: finish high school, find a successful career, marry the perfect person, make a lot of money, retire, and ultimately live the fairy tale story. Yet, I and many others have found that is not how life works. Bumps in the road can be seen as cancer, death, divorce, brain injury, and the one I know so well is spinal cord injury. And truly the list can go on and on and on. Deep down most of us fear what could happen and just hope we're not the one's to have to go through it. 3 days before my accident a friend asked me while we were driving "what would be the worst thing that could happen to you?" I thought to myself and remembered seeing Christopher Reeve on the television screen the night before. With that, I responded "To be paralyzed." If I was paralyzed, I would want to die." 3 days later, I was facing that very situation. The doctors said that I had broken the c5th vertebrae and that the bone had gone straight through my spinal cord. I was mad, sad, lonely, jealous, and every other negative emotion you can imagine. I thought there was no way I could go on, and that it would be better to die.

Yet 11 years later, I can honestly say that my life is better today than it was before the accident. I’m sure many of you reading this are saying, “What? How can you be happy and paralyzed?” Yeah, I never thought it possible but I truly am. You may now say “why?” Hmmm, Why? There are many things that have attributed to my success; a family who has supported me from the beginning, my faith in Jesus Christ, others who I have seen endure more, yet there is one thing that I know without I would not be here today, and that element is attitude. Deep down all of us have one thing we can control in this life and that is our attitude.

When it was time to make the transition home from being in Rochester, MN for 6 months, I started thinking about getting back to my friends and a sense of normalcy. I was seeing how much I had changed and that it was going to be hard for me to fit back in with my friends. This began my first internal dialogue with my self about attitude. Truly, I was depressed and I knew my friends wouldn’t want to be around me if I was crying all the time and couldn’t move on. I knew deep down I had a choice to make. I could be negative and be paralyzed or I could be positive and be paralyzed. My choice completely. Too many of us think deep down that if we focus on the negative and dwell on how unfair life is, it will somehow make our situation better. Yet, I was seeing that this was not true. I was getting more depressed everyday by thinking about my new life. It was then that I decided that, to the best of my ability, I was going to look on the positive side of life.

It sounds inspirational, yet I soon found that I was in for a struggle of a lifetime. What was positive in my life? I was paralyzed from the chest down, I was having to rely on others to do almost everything for me, my parents had to sell the only home I had ever lived in and build a new home, their marriage was falling apart, my boyfriend and I broke up, and my best friend came to see me twice. I couldn’t find much positive. Yet I began to find small things. First, I was alive. Now that was a stretch because my life now didn’t seem to be much. Yet I was breathing and alive. I would start there. Then little by little I began to see that my attitude was a huge key to my success. Today, I have seen that I would not be where I’m at without having a positive attitude.
What are you facing today? Maybe a bill you don’t know how you’re going to pay, or sickness in your body. Or maybe someone hurt you or you just feel down with the way the world is going. It’s so easy to get focused on the negative. Yet I challenge you to stay focusing on the positive. Even if the only thing you can think of is being alive; focus on it. Millions die everyday. If you’re reading this, you’re alive and that is something positive. Take one day at a time and choose to find the ray of sunshine in the clouds. And just like me, you’ll wake up one day overcoming what you never thought possible. Joyce Meyer sums positive attitude up in this quote, “Even a person who is really positive won’t have everything work out the way he would like it to all the time. But the positive person can go ahead and decide to enjoy himself no matter what happens.” This is the definition of having a positive attitude. I could write forever on the power of a positive attitude but the truth is; this is how I’ve decided to live my life and I challenge you to join me. You’ll be thankful you did.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello everyone! I have been wanting to start a blog for awhile now and am excited that now I'm here. I hope to inspire you with entries about how to live our everyday life with meaning, fulfillment, and purpose. It will be 11 years in November since my life was changed when I fell through a trap door while practicing for my high school musical. This left me paralyzed from the chest down. I thought my life was over and couldn't imagine being happy ever again. I was forced to examine my life and search my soul for what I was going to do next. One day at a time, I pressed forward and began seeing that life was still worth living and that I possibly could do things I had always dreamed of. I hope to share in this blog what I have learned in this 11 year journey that has truly brought me pure happiness, peace unimagineable, and joy that is unexplainable. I also will be sharing when my next speaking engagements are happening. Through this blog, I hope your life is impacted! Keep checking in!
Tasha