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Showing posts from February, 2020

Be a Survivor

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No, I’m not talking about the TV show. This post may come off a little insensitive so I’ll apologize ahead of time. After a traumatic incident you’re faced with two options. You can fight back and push, or you can fold like a lawn chair. You can be a survivor or a victim. Part of me navigating this injury has been finding support groups. My faith. My family. My friends. My doctor. My psychologist. My town. Hell, even my puppy. Social media can be a great tool to find like minded groups of people but it also opens a window into some of the ugliness out there. I’ve seen some pretty shitty people in my relatively short stint in the Army so some of my expectations of people can be pretty low, but somehow someone comes along and sets a new and improved standard. Some of the most toxic people that I’ve had the displeasure of witnessing, unfortunately have been members of a spinal cord injury support page with tens of thousands of “like minded” people on Facebook.  I throw quotations around “

Alive-versary Year 3

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The dreaded date has once again arrived. February11th. Technically it’s tomorrow. Will it ever becomes just another day? That’s certainly been the goal. But I don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible. It will always be the day that I died. Do I hate it or celebrate it as the day that I persevered above death? I got my chance to look that bitch in the face and tell it to piss off. Maybe I should just ignore it? After all, 3 years is a long time. My scars are fading and my life is improving almost daily. There’s true beauty in the struggle and I’ve been grinding daily since February 11th, 2017. I guess that only time will tell... but it certainly feels like a fog is in the air every year around this day.  However, all of this isn’t even my point for this blog post. Today, I want to focus on how quickly life can change and how delicate it actually is.  February 10th, 2017. Just another Friday. I woke up to my alarm on my $10 Walmart watch. It was 4:45 am so I hit snooze. Then my 5:0