We Want to Know Wednesday Week #6

1. What is the best advice someone has ever given you?

Growing up I’d always watch Teddy closely and try to figure out how to be as impressive as I perceived her to be. When I started high school I felt like I was completely irrelevant and didn’t think that I was nearly good enough for the older kids to ever care that I existed which bothered me quite a bit. Teddy indirectly gave me the advice to get back to just being myself and enjoying life instead of wasting time trying to somehow impress people like her by becoming something that I’m not.

2. What is your greatest accomplishment? I think my greatest accomplishment is to have the high caliber of friends that I do. It makes me very pleased and content to have the people in my life that I still do. I’ve always been very grateful that during the few times when life has knocked me down I’ve had at least one supportive friend that’s helped me to get back up, regroup, and keep trying.

3. Who do you admire?
I admire my mom. She was a very kind, selfless and generous person. It was amazing to me after she died how many people mentioned something that she’d done for them that I wasn’t even aware of because my mom never talked about it. Even when my mom was very sick from chemo she’d always be more focused on helping Sheila and I be successful than her own needs which was very impressive to me.

4. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?

I'm too much of a perfectionist. I don't like making a lot of mistakes, but I need to realize sometimes that life is learning process and it's unrealistic to expect that I'll always be perfect.

5. How do you want to be remembered?

I’ve always had a goal to be more kind to people than they are to me. If it’s helped people to watch how I’ve tried to overcome whatever challenges I’ve had in life that’s fine. However, it would be much more meaningful to me if I was well-respected as a genuinely good person, by the people I care about most, rather than having my disability define who I am because hopefully there’s a lot more to me that people focus on than just that aspect of my life.