Today was one of the best days I have ever had. It was truly amazing and so full of love.
Today showed me that I am exactly where I have always wanted to be…I am now doing EXACTLY what I believe in and I am doing it with everything Ive got! I have spent 8 years working hard to get to this place…and I am here now…it’s surreal! I have worked hard to to get to this place where I can help others with more strength and wisdom than I ever could have before.
I started the day out by stopping by Tacoma Metro Parks to talk to my Adaptive Recreation boss and too-good-to-be-true of a friend, Parker Ayers 🙂 He is, and always has been, a mentor to me and I am so thankful that I get to go to him for advice and guidance as I figure out where my path is leading me.
So I stopped by to run a million ideas by him and get his input.
I then headed to Seattle to meet a spinal cord injury researcher at the University of Washington’s Medical Center. I met with him to discus becoming a member of his Spinal Cord Injury Peer Mentor Program. He also happens to be in a wheelchair and shares the same passion for wanting to make things better for people with disabilities and we talked for almost two hours…about everything 🙂 I am so thankful to have been introduced to him. These amazing people just keep coming into my life and it is seriously blowing my mind!!! haha
His Peer Mentor Program will give me the opportunity to do EXACTLY what I have ultimately wanted to do…he is going to call me when someone new is in the hospital and has become paralyzed or disabled in any way and is having a hard time, so that I can come visit them and try to help them feel a little better about their situation. ❤ I was so happy and excited the entire time we were talking 🙂
Annnnd then I drove to Seattle Children’s Hospital and I got to spend the next few hours with this amazingly sweet, and bright little boy named Evan (well…he’s 11, so he’s not that little! haha but I don’t want to say big boy because that’s weird lol) Evan has spina bifida and has had over 15 surgeries in his short life! He recently had to have another surgery and he was feeling a little down while in the hospital. Wheelchair basketball is his life though and one of the mom’s from the team wrote me on Facebook and asked if I could reach out to him and write him a message or something…but a message would just never be enough for me…I would honestly be there in a heartbeat for anyone that I thought I could help in anyway at all! And I am so glad I went. I honestly feel like he helped me so much more than I ever could have helped him. We talked about so many things and I was incredibly impressed with how wise he was for his age. And of course I fell in love with his kind heart.
I got to find out more about how it feels to have a disability when you are a kid and I tried to think of ways that he could try and look at things differently. He said that it makes him sad when he can’t play with the other kids…and I told him that we are going to make that better!! Because we are. I am going to do everything I can to spread awareness of adaptive sports and we are going to help people realize how many things we really can do.
We just need to be given the chance to do things. I have big dreams and I am already working on quite a few things right now that I hope will be able to someday make a big difference in the lives of these kids. Because no kid should ever have to feel like that!
Annnnd then…on my way home I stopped by target to buy some new grey sweats…because when the person broke into my car a month ago…he stole my sweats! ughhhh!! haha
And then when I was leaving target I saw this person that was homeless digging through the clothes bin and I was really pulled to go give him or her the rest of the sandwich that I had with me in my car. It was nighttime though and I was kind of scared, so I hesitated a bit, but I ended up turning around to go back to them. I tried calling my sister so that she could be on the phone in case they, you know, it was some crazy person and he/she stabbed me or something… 
well long story short…my sister didn’t answer her phone…and I didn’t get stabbed 🙂
and I got to meet this AMAZINGLY sweet lady! After we started talking for a bit, I asked her if I could record her because I felt like her story should be shared with others…with the people that too often judge others when they have no idea what it is like or what they are going through. She was so sweet, and so funny and I hated to leave her out there in the cold like that 😦 Especially when it had just snowed the night before.
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