I think about blogging nearly every day of my life, and the truth is I’ve been in a really long journey of rearranging elements of my life, my body, my home . . .

For instance, since November 2022 I’ve been in a longass process of getting myself re-enrolled in PT and OT — yes, more on this later — and there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. I’m on the schedule! (But not until late August.)

Since transition times require the most intention and mindfulness, I am not going to commit to writing in here with any sort of definable regularity quite yet. However! I am willing to show up when the energy is available and in the form it wants to come through.

What that means is the format may change; I may not sit down and write out a 10,000-word essay every time I post. Some posts will be in micro form; some will be photographic, perhaps a simple video here or there. I haven’t yet gone into detail on this on any of my blogs but for a few years now I’ve been in a deep dive around living my Human Design, which is an ongoing experiment. 

The piece I’m looking to play with here is around my undefined throat and how she needs a variety of ways to express!

Now that I’ve completed my little preamble, I’ll drop the one thing I came in here to bring to you today:

The medical model is pretty problematic; I’ve seen this everywhere in the US, I’ve seen it in Taiwan, I’ve even experienced it in Italy and witnessed it in the UK. It was alarming to me what went on in Australia during the height of the pandemic. Even in the countries that everyone projects has it so “great,” in my opinion that is still rooted in a foundation of a highly flawed system. Chances are if you’re a reader of this blog you have a lived experience of what I’m talking about.

But as much as the system sucks, there are small ways you can exercise your own sovreignty and agency.

The example most alive for me in this moment is in the arena of supplements.

If you’re concerned about the quality of your supplements (as I am), in an unregulated industry — a general rule of thumb is to only purchase your supplements either directly from the website of the company that makes them or from your medical provider. (If you’ve got access to a Full Script store, or another reputable dispensary, that could work, too.)

The irony of the fact that it is Prime Day today is not lost on me when I say this — but that same rule of thumb says to avoid ordering supplements on Amazon, because as of yet they haven’t really regulated who can and can’t sell supplements (and there can be a lot of dupes).

We generally try not to rely on Amazon for absolutely everything because we would rather invest in our local businesses when possible, but sometimes — under time or monetary constraints — Amazon can be of service.

What I did this week was I put my investigator hat on and found the “store” within Amazon that sells me a probiotic that I’ve been taking. I went on the official website of the company and contacted them asking them if this Amazon store was theirs.

They wrote me back right away and confirmed that it was in fact their store. This allowed me to relax and continue my subscribe & save with peace of mind. (And of course, come the day that our situation changes for the better, we can always make the swap back to ordering directly from the company.)

It may not be a groundbreaking, life-altering shift, but remember: We are only victims to navigating our lives if we choose to be.

Warmly,

Pamela

I’ve had quite the journey with my AFO (ankle-foot orthotic), which was custom made for me when I was 19. I had cast it aside out of pride and stubbornness (and vanity) when I was maybe 21, also because I didn’t want to encourage atrophy in those muscles. But I’m in the clumsiest phase of my cycle right now, and when we strapped that AFO back on yesterday I basically felt the hallelujah chorus radiate through my body.

There’s more to this I want to dig into and write about for this blog, but for now I am just so thrilled to what is possible for me in the arena of outdoor play these days. I’ll also share a bit later on about my experience on an adult tricycle last summer at Mackinac Island!

After yesterday’s activities, today’s big restorative practice is to reset the heart of the home (the kitchen), which took a huge hit during our hurricane of prep for the park.

Sometimes the post-stroke journey has sucked. I literally fell to my knees in the middle of the grocery store yesterday because I was walking too fast for my current energy level and stumbled over my own feet. (This doesn’t happen often at all — it never really has — but since the stroke, it’s something that does happen occasionally, so it keeps me humble!)

I used to treat wiping out in public as something SUPER embarrassing and I would’ve worn the embarrassment on my shoulders like it was a backpack filled with rocks. I’d use it as evidence of a false belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and other things would happen and I’d add more rocks into my backpack until practically everything was a fricking drain on my life.

Yesterday, though, I simply got back up and carried on. Not because I wanted to bypass any uncomfortable feelings, but because there genuinely weren’t any(!).You know what this means? It means I’ve taken the backpack off.

This is HUGE.

It’s the result of being intentional about where I put my regular focus in my life (as trite as that sounds). I’ve focused more often on giving myself grace, not adding meaningless things into that backpack, making a practice of letting go of guilt and shame. Prayer. Connection to something greater than myself. Developing a healthier and healthier relationship with my body and what it needs.

It’s a beautiful thing to see the fruits of my labor become manifest in my actual experience, and that is what I’m celebrating today. (I’m also celebrating that I wrote a post today. ;))

Before I go out for my strokiversary dinner with the fiancé(!! Yes, we got engaged a couple months ago!), I’ll leave you with these “MercRetro Strokiversary” questions:

Do you celebrate your Strokiversary?

What little wins (which add up to big ones) can you celebrate right now?

Drop your commentary below.

Love you. Thanks for coming along with me on this journey.

Let’s talk about transitions.

I was once at a hot yoga class, where I changed postures and suddenly I experienced some sharp pain in my knee! I’d never had that before and I was concerned I’d done something incorrectly. I’d done it very quickly, aiming to keep myself at pace with everyone else.

At the end of the class, I approached the teacher and shared what had happened. What she said next has remained with me for years:

“We must be the most mindful during transitions.”

I don’t know about you, but I often get myself in the most amount of trouble when I do things quickly out of trying to keep pace with the rest of the world (or what I perceive as the rest of the world). It’s the easiest time for me to self-abandon, and the best safeguard I have found in 15 years against this is to deeply ground into my body and slow everything the heck down.

Transitions are any pockets of time between one activity and the next — for me, they’re non-negotiable. I don’t do anything back-to-back. The more activity I outwardly do, the more of a rest period I build in in between that and the next thing. This could be a game changer for most people post-stroke.

The tricky part is even if I’m doing something that energizes me, I still need at least a brief interlude between activities to get back into my body and get present once more. The trappings of engaging in high-energy-taking-as-well-as-giving activities for me is I can fool myself into believing I can just go, go, go endlessly.

Energy management is a skill developed mindfully and with great devotion to presence to your body and what it needs from you. It is an unlearning of wider societal habits and a re-learning of getting in touch with how your body communicates with you.

The cool thing about presence is that it’s got this funky ability to bend time, and the more present I am — the more paradoxical my experience becomes.

The more present I am, the slower I can move, yet the more efficient I become.

The more present I am, the more deliberate my movements, yet the more free of tension I am.

The more present I am, the more I occupy my entire body, yet the more connected to Spirit I am.

The more present I am, the more loving I become towards myself, yet the more I love others.

I’ve found that the more I integrate deeper and deeper presence to my transitions, ironically — the less I need all that time to transition! I make such a regular practice of becoming present with myself (through meditation, dance, journaling, among other things) that dropping in and fully inhabiting everything I am takes just a moment. Not even five minutes. Sometimes, just a deep breath will do it.

That kind of deep love for yourself will always be there for you — but first you must be there for it.

I invite you to start a practice of getting present. Of stopping all the doing and just being for a change, of dropping all the judgments and the stories of what “should” be and being kind enough to yourself to create much-needed spaciousness in your life.

Begin with just five minutes at a time. A timer can be one of your best friends!

Notice whatever comes through for you, in your body, whether that’s emotion or even numbness. Do your best to remain neutral about what you feel/see. You can even name the sensations aloud: “I feel tingling in my foot, and a warmth in my belly. A small constriction in my throat, and my eyebrow feels a bit itchy.” There’s no way to do it wrong besides not doing it at all.

I promise, the more presence you bring into your life, the less frantic you’ll feel, the less inclined to succumbing to outside pressure. There’s nothing better than true groundedness in who you are and honoring exactly what it is you need to do you, boo.

Leave a comment and share your experience with getting present — and share this with someone who’d benefit from this!

Enjoy your weekends, all.

Love you.

Pamela

Happy New Year!

Some things:

1. My word of 2019 is “lighthouse.” I’ll be experimenting with broadcasting in fun, fresh new ways, more often.

2. Since that is my intention, the content is not always going to be as long-form as some of my past posts. I’d like there to be a variety of long and short creations in my “portfolio,” as it were.

3. None of this will always look very polished. I’ve been honing my writing chops for 2/3 of my life and am very comfortable hiding behind the written word — but by committing to becoming a lighthouse and experimenting with creative license, there’s gotta be some room for me to put out content that’s done, but not perfect. Be prepared for a little ghetto fabulosity.

A note on new beginnings, and incidentally, the piece for today’s Forgiveness Friday:

Today coincidentally is my eight-year anniversary with my partner, and over the years, we’ve been steadily building a foundation of shared values as we uplevel our relationship. As this has happened, I have found myself unconsciously “testing” him and myself because there is some old junk from our pasts that hasn’t yet been fully resolved or cleared out of the way.

This is super normal in any close relationship that has withstood a long time. Even with people who are so like-minded that everything generally feels easy peasy, closeness always comes with checkpoints where “stuff” needs examination. I’m the first person to say that relationship duration is only one factor in relationship strength; I’ve had superclose besties that I became that close to in the span of a couple months, and acquaintances of several several years whose life aspirations and preferences I couldn’t even begin to tell you.

Intimacy is always evolving, and it’s a practice. It’s a commitment to self-care, so that you can show up energized and generous with others, and vice-versa.

You know why resentments build up between people whose lives are very close, but lack emotional intimacy? Because one or both (usually the case) of the people is holding on to baggage from the past and carrying that baggage from year to year. They aren’t clearing what’s preventing them from being as generous and loving as they’d like to be, and they’re allowing that resentment to build a case for not being giving and not loving that person.

And if you’re doing this with another person — your partner, your friend, your family member — then, chances are, you’re doing it with yourself, too. (Even if that’s a lack of forgiveness for a post-stroke condition.)

I descend from a line of impossible perfectionists. The levels of toxicity that would build up in my body holding grudges against myself or others who didn’t meet my (often completely unreasonable) expectations kept me so blocked off from true closeness with others that I’m actually astonished I had any friends prior to 2015. Yup. That recently.

A lot can change in a really short time, even if it feels like transformation can take forever. Hint: It goes faster when you’re willing.

I wasn’t truly willing to take the chance to ask for what I needed, which suddenly increased in a huge way after having had the stroke. Obviously.

It felt like too much to ask, to ask for anyone to slow down as they walked beside me, or to give me more time to physically do things.

Instead of empowering myself to voice these things, I just hoped for the best. Hoped friends would intuitively know how much time I needed to go from A to B, hoped men I dated would read my mind.

I got lucky sometimes, and other times I lost people because I didn’t know how to talk to them about these new things I needed. (We definitely don’t need to go into how the mind-reading thing went in my love life!)

Part of it was that I was only 19, part of it was that I wasn’t raised with modeling of effective communication, part of it was a lack of discussing any of this in therapy at post-stroke rehab. Regardless, I hope that my 15 years of practice in powerful communication and developing self-trust models some valuable tools for you.

So the first practice of 2019 I’d like to leave you with today is the practice of getting to know what your needs are. Your needs can be practical (“I need a full week to pack a suitcase before I travel anywhere,” “I need my phone to be fully charged at the start of the day”), they can be basic (“I must be fully fed before I start my workday,” “I need eight hours of sleep a night”) — in fact, I encourage you to start there, and they can be emotional (“I need to ask for five minutes to vent before I can move forward”). The last area often feels the hardest to ask for, in our emotionally constipated society, but it is KEY.

Just blindly going through your life not even knowing what your needs are is a great way to not get them met. It’s a great way to add to the baggage everyone’s carrying around year after year (especially you), and that’s frickin’ exhausting. Right?! Stop the madness!!

You have to name it to claim it, and that’s the first step to letting it go and creating more space and less conflict in your life and internal experience.

Don’t get caught up in creating a list that consumes you. If you’re a recovering perfectionist like me, you could go on forever with a list of grievances/demands. If that’s you, start with a list of five things only, and know that even if only one of those needs started getting consistently met that would be a huge improvement from where you were before.

If you find yourself consumed with despair at how many unmet needs you may have right now, there’s a part two to this exercise. Balance this list with a second list — a list of appreciation. Flood your mind (and ideally, your heart) with everything and everyone that you do have in your life that you truly are grateful for and remind yourself there is no lack in your life. Let that list be as long as possible. Really let it into your heart and mind and bathe in that feeling.

Take a deep breath. Know that you’ve taken an essential first step to taking ownership of your own personal power, and that that’s something to celebrate!

Questions? Comments? Share what comes up for you below, and share with someone you know. I would love to hear how the exercise adds to your life!

To new beginnings and renewed aliveness,

Pamela

It took me a while to face the discomfort I felt for not getting a handle on the messiness of my life’s unfoldment over the last few days, but alas, I’m here and that’s what counts.

Let’s lean into this though, because I know I’m not the only one who gets paralyzed by her own unmet expectations.

There’s a relentless overachiever driving me forward at all times. Scared to pieces of not getting life “perfectly,” convinced that there is a way to do life perfectly.

The problem with this relentless overachiever? She’s exhausted, because she’s constantly fueling this illusion of perfection, which leaves nothing untouched. NOTHING. She spends her energy constantly putting out fires — fires around what we create, how we move, how we look, what we do.

And there’s no doing right by her because with her attitude, perfection is completely unachievable. Even the infinite magnificence of the Universe gets dwarfed by her myopic need for control and personal will.

I bring this part of me up today because historically, we’ve had a strong love/hate relationship. I loved how she pushed me to artistic mastery and expression but hated how miserable I felt living with her criticism all the time.

And when I felt miserable, so then did the people around me because I stopped really seeing and appreciating them, and I projected onto them the relentless and unrealistic expectations that I had going on inside of me, too. (I’m actually shocked I had any friends growing up!)

Everything that exists in us has a purpose. Our shadows hide our light, but ultimately, when they’re welcomed back into the light, become the light themselves.

So what happens when my relentless overachiever grabs the reins, unchecked? I start viewing everything from the lens of suffering, of “never enough.”

The tricky part is that our wider society really subscribes to a lack mentality. We can’t ever get enough, particularly this time of year — wild, untethered consumerism threatens to put the masses into debt each holiday season just to show people they love them. Whether you subscribe to this particular manifestation or not, chances are you’ve absorbed the lack mentality of our culture somewhere.

What if, just for a moment, we reexamined our motivations behind our unconscious behaviors? Shone a bright light on what we’ve been doing for weeks, years, lifetimes, and really wondered what we’re doing it all for?

Have you ever heard of Nick Vujicic, the man without limbs? (He’s a scintillating motivational speaker you can find easily on YouTube.)

This is a man who was born literally without arms and legs. What I love about his story is that as he grew up, he never viewed himself as missing anything. His parents treated him as they would any other child and even assigned him household chores like vacuuming.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve still got all four of my limbs and many days it’s damned near impossible for me to not compare the right, unaffected side of my body with the left, and make the latter “wrong” for not doing things the way the other side does. Even unconsciously.

The point isn’t to compare myself with Nick; it’s to point out that his quality of life undoubtedly has been pulled forward by love and acceptance, as opposed to pushed by the sting of self-flagellation and -rejection, and regularly.

Your body believes everything you say about it. How many times have I heard stroke patients refer to their unaffected and affected sides as their “good” and “bad” sides? That was me, too.

Your relationship with your body is no different from a parent-child relationship. Unless you were blessed with kind, structured, emotionally and physically present parents who made zero parenting mistakes (whatever that would look like), it’s likely your relationship with your own body could benefit from some unconditional love.

If you feel constant resistance, like I did and still do in some areas, to doing what you know in your heart of hearts is the right thing, drop into your body and put a hand on your heart. Tune in. What does your resistance have to tell you?

Invariably, your resistance is trying to protect you from something. Mine is usually trying to protect me from the harshness of my relentless overachiever perfectionist (or that part in other people) and/or reminding me that this is where I often self-abandon for the sake of my image and reputation.

Whether that image is an identity (“a generous friend,” “a good writer,” “a stroke survivor,” “a competent student”) or a commitment I made to others, I can often lose myself to trying to prove whatever it is, and trying to hide from what I fear is my actual inadequacy:

• What if my friends don’t feel the love I have for them?
• What if the article I wrote is crap?
• What if I look too disabled/not disabled enough to fit in here?

(That last one is super fucked up, by the way. The result of not accepting the two worlds we occupy suspends us in a sort of limbo where we feel inadequate no matter which we’re exposed to. We’ll go into this in more depth another time, and PS. never call yourself disabled, please.)

So you can see why there’d be a constant part of me that’s perpetually exhausted. She’s so busy managing illusion at the cost of anything else that if she’s running the show, I’ll forget to nourish myself in the ways that really count.

In other words, it is my responsibility to provide myself whatever it is I really need. If I’m afraid the people I love don’t feel my love for them, I’m probably not feeling my own love.

This morning I finally returned to my mind-body-soul practice in my zen space — something that I do, non-negotiably, every morning, when I’m not tripping over my own stuff.

Unconditional love is a lost art. It’s always the answer. You must find a way to give it (and receive it!!) for yourself, to set yourself up to win, and everything will fall into place.

It is what will interrupt the chaos of a hectic mind. The tension of too-high expectations. It will heal you faster than doing 100 reps of any exercise would.

(Ever seen a fully able-bodied person hate imperceptible flaws on themselves? You might be convinced your supposed inadequacy is based on simply your abilities — but the measuring stick of lack is always, always longer.)

Through the lens of forgiveness and unconditional love, there is only the gift of life.

This holiday season, give yourself the gift of seeing and appreciating everything you do have going for you — the fact that you’re alive and able to read this post, for example.

Close your eyes. Flood your heart with these appreciations for five minutes, and see what that does to the voice of your own relentless overachiever.

And in the day to day, also, be willing to show up even if “it” doesn’t look the way you want.

It was never about that, anyway — it’s about loving what “it” already is, right here, right now.

It’s called presence for a reason. Love love love,

Pamela

The very topic of “body forgiveness” in this series has been rather confronting for me of late — because it is with utter humility that I am noticing my own blind spots around this very thing, and if I’m honest I’m experiencing a bit of horror and shame at the existence of these blind spots.

And isn’t that the real struggle for anyone who’s had to deal with tremendous loss? That instead of facing the real heart of the matter underneath it all, we get distracted by that top layer of “unacceptable emotions” and either try to ignore or dismiss them or cover them up with coping mechanisms, like addictions?

(And don’t fool yourself into believing that just because you’re not in a 12-step program, you don’t have any addictions.)

Earlier this year, I got back in touch with my grief. I’d disowned this emotion early on in my life as a way to protect myself from feeling the depths of my emotional pain and as a way to not appear “weak.” Literally, by the age of eight, I’d understood that it was not welcome for me to ever cry, so I didn’t. Like, ever.

So back in May, my darling furbaby Ernie passed away, two months before he would have been seven. It was all very fast and inexplicable and I really couldn’t let go. For days, I cried uncontrollably at the sudden loss. I honestly thought the tears would never stop.

Yet, shockingly to me, as a result of letting my grief run its course without judgment or restraint and by letting the people closest to me know what was going on, VERY shortly thereafter I was able to go to my best friend’s wedding and genuinely enjoy myself, whereas the old me?

Old me would have sulked for months, unable to move forward very effectively. Trust me, my journey with grief in response to loss is a familiar, intimate one. It took me, no exaggeration, a full decade to energetically complete the course of grief in the aftermath of my last breakup.

So you’ll hear me often say, “Take as long as you need” in response to the way people mourn — whether they’re mourning the loss of people, pets, a relationship, a job, an old identity — because when it comes to that 10 full years I took to truly move forward, in retrospect I don’t regret a thing.

Does grief always have to take 10 years though? I’m no expert at this (and no one really is), but my answer is no. Grief is like this wild animal that must have its way, and the only wrong way to “do” grief is to not allow it to be what it needs to be. It will have its way with you, and you will need support from a community (read: not just one other person and NOT no one!). Honestly, I didn’t have the tools at the time to deal with it healthily. I did experience lot of unnecessary suffering. The most efficient way is through — to surrender to it and let it take whatever form it wants — and in a safe container. Grief will change you. It will harden you or it will soften you. I personally chose to be softened by it, because that old attitude I used to have around not crying? It was all bull shit.

If you do a little research, you’ll find plenty of evidence that crying is actually a necessary way of releasing toxins and stress. If your conditioning is anything like mine, though, you could attend an entire week’s worth of lectures on those health benefits and still be no closer to accessing your grief.

After so many years of stuffing down those tears and wearing a mask of invulnerability, it is still easiest for me to pretend like nothing can touch me. Which is actually the biggest lie of them all because underneath that veneer, I am actually quite soft and tender.

I bring this up because I’ve noticed that an area where I tend to just push through and act invulnerable is with my body, in general. What this looks like is showing up in the world as though I’m the same as anyone else, and this is not only a bit dishonest, but also sets me up for a lot of conflict when other people expect me to be just like them when I’m just not.

And then there is the voice of shame that says, “How dare you publicly write so often about body forgiveness when clearly you aren’t through to the other side?”

Well — if I know anything, it’s that if you’re drawn to my words, it’s because we’re on a similar path. The details of your story will be different from mine, but the patterns and tendencies underneath are the same.

And for me, what has always helped me access the depths of my emotional experience is hearing voices of others who have been brave enough to put words to what they’re going through. Their words are like a salve to the soul; they allow me to know I’m not alone in my struggle even if it feels like I am.

I hope to be a voice like that for you, and I also know that if I preached at you as though I’ve got it all figured out, that would be a lie. It’d be a real disservice to you and to me, because it’s our humanity and not our pseudo-perfection that unites us.

So I promise to you that I will show up, in my chaos and confusion, as well as in my mastery and leadership.

Here’s my chaos: I feel like I live in a perpetual state of transition, of stuckness between two worlds (between “victim” and “victor”), and I waste a lot of energy bouncing between pushing through, invulnerably, and feeling or acting helpless and incapable. And my experience suffers as a result.

Here’s the area of leadership and mastery I fully intend to create for myself: a sweet spot, where I am able to show up with grace and ease and unapologetically be able to give and receive my own areas of tenderness.

Because . . . when we block out what feels bad, we also block out what feels soooo good.

That’s where the next installments of this body forgiveness series will take us. I will invite you to get in touch with what you need, and to relentlessly provide that for yourself.

Please let me know in the comments if this resonates for you. And share this with someone you know who could use it.

All love,

Pamela

[Editor’s Note: Revisiting this post in April 2025 — 10 years later! — this post is super cringe. There are a lot of broken promises in this post, but I am committed to backposting for posterity and embracing my cringe until it transmutes into self-compassion.]

Every year, my “strokiversary” rolls around as though it were a ninja — swiftly, quietly. Behind the scenes.

The one exception to this is a couple of years ago when I anticipated the big one-oh and signed up for The Color Run: I was happy to hear that the event was open to walkers as well as runners, and I rented a GoPro and strapped it onto Anthony’s forehead so I could document the experience.

The good news is I’ve recently succeeded in reaching a self-imposed consistency challenge goal: releasing weekly Style Tip Tuesday videos for my jewelry biz — which means I’ve somewhat undergone a crash course in video editing. So I’m working on a video for you in honor of my strokiversary, and I would love to complete it soon.

I have a confession to make. In 2008, I started my memoir. When I began this blog two years later, I really wanted to offer a resource for survivor-thrivers where they could look for ideas and therapies, and most importantly, find community to lift each other’s spirits up in a way only we can.

But in order to do so, I had to make myself more visible. So that the Rehab Revolution movement could truly take off and reach the people who needed it most, I had to become seen. (I’m going to explore the concept of “being seen” in more detail.) I’m sure any stroke survivor reading my words right now can relate to the fears that often accompany physically being seen by the world — as well as emotionally — and it’s important not to forget that I’m right there beside you.

Some of you reading these words right now may have just had a stroke a month ago, or a year ago, or perhaps more time ago, or less. I simultaneously want you to know that a) you’re not alone in your experience, and b) now that it’s been 12 years, I’ve had a lot of time and opportunity to give me the “street cred” to guide you along the way. I’m living the reality of surviving from a debilitating stroke that ground my life to a screeching halt at the age of 19, and because I know I’m bigger than some brain injury, and because I’m blessed with an expressive voice, I’m willing to hold myself up to a new standard, and to help advocate for those who come after me.

This new standard means I’d like to step up in a greater way so I can serve you. I want to inspire those who experience the total upheaval and intensity of a stroke so that they know that life doesn’t end there. Those who came before me (like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor) have given me the same gift, and I want to provide that for those who came beside me, and those of you who will come after me.

Here’s a surprise for you. I’ve hinted at this on my Facebook page — so if you were anxious to find out what’s coming, here’s the Official Announcement:

I’m not super techy, so I don’t know how long it will take me to transfer everything over to the new address, but I’m hiring some people who know what they’re doing.

The new website should be under construction for a little bit, but in the meantime, you can still contact me on the Facebook page (I’m changing the name on there, but the address will stay the same) or e-mail me at revolution.rehab@gmail.com. (That address will remain dedicated to my oldest, loyalest readers.) I’m not super certain whether my original content will remain at this URL, though. (I’ll make sure to get the right team of people to get the answers to any of your questions.)

I’m working diligently to come up with a plan for how I can better serve you in the near, near future — there are a lot of ideas, and I’m bubbling over in excitement. You can expect a multimedia experience, from a stronger social media presence, to regular blog content, to videos, to podcasts, livestreams, and more!

Tomorrow I begin a six-week blog challenge, so you’ll definitely see much more of me very, very soon. Looks like year 12 is a pivotal one for me! I’m declaring a #StrokiversaryWeek, so we can explore the mixed emotions, feelings, memories, and experiences that often come together on this date.

What do you usually do on your strokiversary? Leave it in a comment!

To our healing,

Pamela

And ever since, I’d written story after story. It was a self-imposed discipline. My first completed original work was a novel called All That and A Cup of Milk, which I wrote at 16 and self-published in a binder covered in magazine cutouts of models I’d used as representations of my characters. (I was 16. ’Nuff said.) 

This was my bliss. I used to come home every day after school, and like clockwork, would type away at the computer (people think I type fast now with my one superhand! I believe I even have video footage of me writing at the giant box that was my old-school desktop back in the day) working away at my stories. But . . . 

To this day, I haven’t completed another book. Something anti-magical occurred during undergrad. My writing degree required what I fondly call half an English major’s worth of literature classes. (Ironically, I’d spent a few years as a kid believing I wanted to become an English teacher. HA!) When I first learned how to read as a child, all I did was read. I used to go to the bathroom reading. I recently dragged myself to the eye doctor — one of my least favorite things to do — because I carry a hefty -10.5 contact lens prescription. This was the first year the eye doc had ever told me one of my eyes had stabilized and not gotten worse since my last visit. 

 Anyway. I’ve been nearsighted since I was six, and I’m sure all the 100,000s of hours I’ve spent with my little nose in a book was a heavy contributor. 

 When I was a creative writing major, I pretty much quit reading for pleasure. (The U of I might revoke my hard-earned degree for this.) I would come home from the school bookstores at the beginning of each semester with a stack of books as tall and thick as I was.

Meanwhile, all my scientist and numbersy friends/roommates would be all, “Why don’t you ever study?” Italian came easy to me. After a year of forcing Florentine shopkeepers and residents to talk to my Eastern face in Italian, I had done the impossible: I’d returned to the States not only proficient, but fluent, in the language. Because of this, I had pretty much placed out of any language courses U of I could have offered for my major, and all that was left was cultural courses. I may have been a wizard at rolling my Rs and conjugating verbs in any tense, but history is a different beast to me.

And then there was Dante. I spent a semester reading and studying his entire Divine Comedy (that’s three canticas — not just Inferno, but also Purgatorio and Paradiso). Let’s not forget that as a writing major I also had to dive deep into Shakespeare . . . If you escaped the education system with only an overview of Romeo & Juliet, know that for a writing or literature major, that sounds like graduating from high school with only knowledge of basic arithmetic. 

And then there was Nabokov. Who to this day I still can’t say I fully understand, other than appreciate his genius. 

 So pretty much, “studying” for me was reading. All. the. time. And besides the stories I had to write for my actual writing classes, I quit writing for fun as well, after a terrible blowout that had gotten me in trouble with a roommate I’d had as a sophomore. 

The period of pre-med lasted only a couple years at most. Physics took over my life so much that I even found references to Newtonian laws in my writing(!), and I had no social life. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am naturally an extravert, despite the fact that I have consciously chosen a very solitary pastime as my favorite vessel for carrying my voice to the masses. 

Pre-med made a total nerd out of me, and it soon became apparent that I’d been trying to mold myself around subjects that I merely found interesting, but wasn’t passionate enough about to shape a career out of. (Is anyone surprised that the Italian-CW major wasn’t dedicated enough to organic chemistry and molecular biology to pass the MCATs?) 

 I think what really drove that home was the semester I was lucky enough to get kicked out of a writing class (more on that later too) and then into an independent study in the creative writing department with one of its chairs. Prof. Madonick (or “Mike,” as he insisted I call him) inspired me to start my memoir. 

 When I wrote the first several pages of this memoir, I found five years’ worth of pent-up emotions release for the very first time. Things I didn’t even know I’d been holding came out of my fingertips and onto my screen. I could barely see the words as the vision of my words blurred through the tears. There were so many tears.

I was 19 years old when the stroke happened — so I was pretty much just a punk kid in the world believing I was invincible and capable of anything I could dream up. (Heck, I’m 31 today and still believe I’m capable of anything I can dream up.) But when I was 19, I both knew a lot and nothing about myself. Any self-exploration had been only at the surface level, and it wouldn’t be until I graduated that I really leapt into the vortex of personal development and self-study, because that was when I decided to give entrepreneurship a shot.

So the memoir really helped me process a lot of what I’d been feeling and experiencing underneath the façade of “everything’s just fine, and I’m just like everyone else, just a bit more gimpy.”

It had been precisely that façade that had kept me denying a lot of my own feelings. Things weren’t “just fine,” and I certainly wasn’t just like everyone else. “A bit more gimpy” looked like regular accidents and spills, anger and resentment, and an inability to do what I wanted to do how I wanted to do it. 

 (Wearing heels is as valid a desire as it is to not want to drool on someone while kissing them.)

The memoir had become so game-changing for me that I knew the world needed it.

I’ll say it again: The world needed it. And I believe this is why my memoir has been incomplete since I began it in 2008. Who was I to dare provide the world with something it needed? Two years later, I created Rehab Revolution, so that I could get a head start on creating a community of people who needed my voice. Since then, a small number of young stroke survivors have indeed reached out to me to thank me for what I’ve done for them. They truly warm my heart — and if any of them are reading this today, please know that you guys are why I write. 

 Four years ago, I sent myself to the UW-Madison’s Writers’ Institute conference for the first time, and I experienced a misplaced sense of shame. Shame that I was willing to put money on the line, invest the dollars into myself as a writer, but not willing to finish my manuscript before I came. There were what felt like hundreds of writers there, of all kinds, backgrounds, and genres, most of them there preparing to pitch their manuscripts to agents and editors who had traveled there to pick up new authors, and there I was, reeling. 

What? There were people there who could potentially propel my little 34-page-and-counting Word document into an actual, tangible book? I — the twentysomething stylish girl with a limp — could actually launch this dream of becoming a full-fledged author at this conference?! “Next year,” I told myself. “Next year I’ll have it ready.” 

“Next year” came around and I said the same thing. And again, and again. 

In retrospect, I don’t blame myself for freezing. I had no idea what I was getting into going to this conference in the first place, so that first year was a learning experience. I discovered that the conference, rather than focusing solely on the craft, taught the side of writing I’d never learned as a writing major — it taught the business side of writing.

How to pitch. Practice your pitching. Writing a query letter. Networking. 

I wrote a couple networking posts from 2013; that was my first year learning to network. And the first Writers’ Institute I attended was in 2012. #forshame 

 I remember finding myself seated next to an agent (who was looking for memoirs to sign! *facepalm*) at the (ahem) networking lunch and spiraling out of control in my head.

Ohmygodit’sanagentlookingformemoirsIshouldreallytalktohim. 

I told myself that this was the Universe’s way of handing me what I wanted on a silver platter, and that if I passed it up, it would not happen again. I forced myself to start a conversation with him . . . right as the lunch started wrapping. He was gracious enough to indulge me for several minutes, and he even gave me a little feedback and advice before he had to run off for someone’s pitch. I remember something he said was along the lines of not rushing my memoir, that it would take as long as it had to take. This encouraged me. I kept repeating the “Next year I’ll have it ready” and even signing myself up for non-traditional participation in NaNoWriMo a couple of times, but I found myself somehow blocked.

Next month, I’ll be going to my fourth Writers’ Institute conference. My manuscript still sits at 34 measly pages (though to be fair, they are single-spaced). I honestly thought I’d written more. But the truth is, that’s only because of my blog. To this day, I’ve published 209 (210 if you count this one) articles — most of them completely original content by me or by my guest writers — and while I am so happy to know that my posts are helping a small number of readers, it’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because it fools me into believing I’ve made more progress on my book than I actually have, but it’s a blessing also because it’s deepened my resource of exploration into what my memoir could include. 

On a slight aside, I totally believe in Divine Messages. What these are are repetitive whispers from the Universe, gently guiding me to what I need to embrace right now. These whispers often crescendo into outright declarations spoken by actual people I see in my day-to-day existence, and then if I’m not receptive (I’ve grown to become very receptive — the Divine always knows what I need), I have to learn the hard way why I should’ve listened in the first place. I’ve been consistently reading a spiritual journey memoir as well as following author Danielle LaPorte online these days, and both of these writers (who run fairly big-profile businesses in spiritual and personal development work) have been through and come out on top of some major upheaval that makes my current “I’m starting my life over at 31! What to do?!” sound like major #firstworldwhining. 

Both of these writers are graduates of Marie Forleo’s famous B-School, which I FINALLY signed up for this year after standing at the sidelines like a wannabe for five years. 

 (I did enter the scholarship contest again for the last time — once you’re a B-Schooler, you’re forever a B-schooler. Here’s my video entry.) 

When I first began rebooting myself and my business, I started networking again like it was my job. (I mean . . . it totally is.) A virtual assistant that I’d met a year or two ago at a networking group, Mary, started talking to me about my book and began supporting me in a significant way. I told her that if I didn’t finish my book now, I was never going to do it. Rather than just “being excited” or giving me verbal encouragement and then forgetting about me, she’s been nudging me and keeping me accountable to my commitment to get my memoir out there. 

 Have I written anything yet? Well . . . this counts, doesn’t it? 

Seriously. I’ve learned that sometimes pushing through resistance just makes the resistance stronger. The fact that I’ve had my memoir actively on my mind this month and that it is sitting open on my laptop right now are already big steps if you consider my manuscript’s distinct absence from my radar for the past few years. Here’s a screenshot of a Facebook status I posted two weeks ago. (Mary suggested I post it.) 

I also promised Anthony that I’d make a super honest effort this week to work on my memoir. He kind of thinks I should save the time, energy, and money this year, sit out the conference, and buy myself another year.

But I know better. Enter more Divine Messages: Yesterday, I came across a blog post by one of my favorite friends and leaders, success coach Kris B. It’s about having the courage to go “all in.” (Funny sidenote . . . she actually featured me in it!!)

(I think the whispers are getting louder.)

B-School starts on 9 March, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to start. (The conference is on the 27th.) The year 2015 may have begun nearly three months ago, but I can feel it in my soul — this is the best year yet. I feel the culmination of everything I’ve ever done and everything that’s ever happened for me bubbling up in this moment.

I’ll be posting on my progress and anything else that comes up as I go. March will be a busy month of more reinvention, more exploration, more leaps and dives into the unknown.

The Universe will give you everything you want — and more — as long as you show that you are committed.

Thank you for reading this and allowing me to speak to you the way I know best. I love each and every one of you — even if you disagree with me and/or think I’m off my rocker.

Questions or comments? Leave a message below!