Hi guys! I don’t know about you but where I am it was a spectacularly sunny weekend promising very good things to come! It’s lovely to breathe in the fresh air and let the warmth fall on our faces. I also need to mention something that really hit me this weekend…my friend of 17 years gave me a birthday gift that had taken a while to arrive. Her message and the gift itself were so touching that they made me cry. If you’re reading this right now, I deeply thank you! Being best friends with you has been an incredible journey and I look forward to seeing where it takes us! This is the wonderful person who saw me when I was crying by a water fountain on the first day of kindergarten. I had no friends and I’d never been to preschool so everything was quite intimidating. She said that she would be my friend and from that day on we were sisters. Unsurprisingly, she got me something that I will cherish forever! I opened a jewelry box to find a beautiful necklace with a pendent engraved with the semi-colon. The inscription on the package read:
Warr;or
“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.”
Wow. Now I don’t know if I’m truly strong; if I am it’s probably in all the wrong ways, making me do the stupidest things…but the sentence still rings with truth. And the fact that my best friend sees me as strong means the world to me. I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to take off the necklace!
The meaning encapsulates much of this project of mine. For anyone new here, I’ll recap. The semi-colon is a symbol for hope for mental illness and surviving suicide. A semi-colon is used when a writer could have ended the sentence but chose to continue instead. As someone who needs writing almost as much as air, it’s a constant reminder that I have a second chance and that I need to keep going with my story. (This is why it’s tattooed on my arm!) It may be tempting to put in a period…but I have to be done with that. This symbol is for everyone out there who continues to fight. You are strong, you are courageous and I stand with you!
This topic also reminds me of a quote I came up with the other day:
Not only are we continuing the sentence that is our lives, we’re taking charge of the personal ‘book’ we arrived with and are filling it with our individual essence. Never diminish the power of your own story. There may be a plethora of books in this world making ours feel particularly small and insignificant, but I assure you that it’s not. Your story matters; your life matters and even if no one reads it, it’s your own. Fill it with accomplishments that matter to you if no one else. You are the writer, the inspiration and subject, the illustrator/photographer and finally, you are the editor! Write in ink not because you know you’ll never make mistakes, but because you are confident in your ability to amend, and to learn and grow from them. Some chapters of your book may be beyond painful but no good story is without pain or loss. It provides context, is part of life and cannot be glossed over. Be your own protagonist…develop your character…and notice when you’re the antagonist because the most significant foe we have looks back at us in the mirror. Don’t let your book be a biography, write it yourself and take pride in it! Immerse yourself in the present moment; don’t skim through the passages. I promise your story is worth savouring! Don’t like the direction it’s headed? Time for a major plot twist! Take hold of that pen and start writing…for YOU.
Write your own story and live it with everything you have!
By the way I’ve begun to post some of my images, artwork and motivational quotes on Instagram if anyone is interested!
I got into some wood carving this weekend!
Happy Monday!
