30 DAY JOURNAL CHALLENGE: Day 2

Chapter 1: Gratitude
​Day 2: Write about a skill you are grateful for. Why?
If I think about a skill I am grateful for I may need to say either self awareness or resilience.  Are those skills or is the prompt asking for something to be identified like sewing, or cooking, or another tangible? If I need to credit a skill with supporting me these last 26 months it's been my resilience.  When I first began my journey with the Love Your Brain mindfulness program the concept of resilience was new, yet I was naturally exhibiting behavior (for the most part).

Being resilient may come naturally and it's been strengthened overtime I've faced a fair amount of adversity in my life I don't think I've ever fully tried to note it all probably most notable to me would be the period in 2004 when my then husband and I separated and my journey as a single mom kicked off most recently the recovery from my stroke. My path towards resilience was built in part on experiencing:

• a friend's suicide in high school
• the end of almost 10 year marriage after years of verbal/psychological abuse
• navigating family court
• single parenting
• co-dependent relationship where I was constantly saying “yes” when I meant “no”, doing things I  didn’t really want to be doing, doing more than my fair share, and doing things the other person was capable of doing themselves
• deaths of my grandmother, my ex husband, so many aunts and uncles, my brother 
• surviving a stroke

There seems to be a fine line between resilience pulling you through adversity and some form of denial. I certainly don't let myself get bogged down in problems - I see them, acknowledge them,  and decide to move forward.

“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” -Walt Disney