#IAmASurvivor are stories from women of all walks of life, telling their stories of survival. Everybody is a survivor and all stories deserve to be told. These stories are all in their own words.
Life is not about what we survive it is about how we live during and after we survive something…….
Survival it is true what they say… you should listen to your elders and ask more questions. Not because they know everything but because they have experienced so much more in the world, this includes failure and complete stuff ups in ways that we could only imagine. Maybe this is why they say youth is wasted on the young. On one hand my story is simple but on the other hand it has so many twists and turns that I would not know where to start or even what story to tell. So, I thought instead of writing about my story in terms of what I have survived I would write one about how I have survived.
The truth is statically I live amongst the most fortunate in the world. I am white I have blue eyes, I live in Australia in a first world country. I have a great job and right now if I decided I could just pick up and fly anywhere I wanted in the world, because I know I could survive. But all of these things they don’t make you what you are. The saying goes money does not buy you happiness well sitting at home thinking about life doesn’t give your life experience either and this is the real point that I would like to make. If we only get one life, one chance to be who you are right now in this body. If you didn’t care what anyone thought about you, if you had no fear and only love in your heart.
How would you live, what would you change, who would you be if you could be anyone?
I ask these questions daily to myself and after years of asking I still come up with the same answer to be more me, to be the best version of me. I say this to myself even at my weakest times. To breathe in to live a life of passion and kindness and to always remember fear is there for a reason but if the situation is not threatening and I am not going to hurt or harm anyone maybe that’s not fear maybe that’s just bad thought patterning and potentially completely untrue.
You see no matter your advantage in life it will never make your experience of pain heartache and loss, happiness and love any less or more than any other human on this planet. The things that I have survived to be honest I feel extremely grateful for compared with another. But if you go down this route in your brain you will soon find there is always someone worse off and always someone ten times more fortunate. This does not mean that someone like me does not understand poverty or discrimination or prejudice because I have in big horrible messy ways and I would never wish this for anyone else. You see this is why I became an educator.
You see the number one survival mechanism that I have it is resilience, this has now turned into grit.
I believe that when you have grit you become a highly valued person, because other now know you have learnt ways to turn your weakness into strengths, the only way that this is created is through spending hours training and retraining your mind. People sometimes ask me is this really possible well my answer is yes, it is. Not only is this possible but if you learn how to manage your thoughts you can change your behaviour and reactions. In this there is power and strength. You see these two words do not come in the shape of physicality they come in the shape of your thoughts and they formed through practice. For me at first as a child, it was practice of writing the letters b and d, this was always hard, I spent years training my brain how to do this. It is true my Dyslexic brain sure did create some interesting drama, but it also makes me super creative, so you tell me which side wins.
You see this is the beauty of age, this is the wisdom that age brings you. You learn the key ingredient to getting what you want in this world is in your reactions and interactions. It is the way you learn to handle yourself with worth, love, kindness and consideration, that will separate you from anything that is not what you are. As we grow older, we realise we learn more through failure. You learn how to react and respond in kind and forgiving ways. You learn your emotions are passing fleeting moments in time that you can never hold onto and you are able to have a wider less judgemental lens on yourself and others. But this does not mean that others are allowed to walk all over you. Age gives you grace and peace that enables you to handle the tuff stuff, by calling it out and if you have refined your communication skills you can do it with little to no conflict. I am still working on this, but it is always getting better. I think the key here is to take full responsibility for all of our actions, beliefs and choices. This can only happen however if you decide, that your purpose is to constantly work on yourself in order to be the best you can be. To understand this is to understand that there is no replacement or comparison of who you are and what you can become. For when I ask children what the value of one human life is, they tell me there is no monetary value on that.
To be honest the things that would seem detrimental to others have really strengthened my character and made me into someone who I thought I might never find again, this happy energetic ball of fun.
Unharmed, untainted and full of love in all ways for me this was my choice, peace with myself is my decision. Sometimes I get asked why and my answer is simple where energy goes energy flows, as quoted by my close friend Anna. I tried it the other way and all it did was lead me into misery and now I know me, I know happiness and I know that the way for me to survive is to be me and the way for me to know who and what that is … is to try stuff and when I am trying stuff out I get fail and feel and then I ask myself those questions up above and I know, I learn what is me, what is fear, what is real and what simply is not. This is how I survive……..
Written by Angela Jayne Heath, Educational Leader and Innovator. Follow her travel and adventure stories @pangerellia and her mindset quotes @coolchicksthink
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