Dear diary

Anyone else have a diary with a lock on it in your early school days? Where you kept your deepest secrets and privately wrote about your childhood crushes? Under NO circumstances was anyone to even try to open that masterpiece under lock and key!

During a recent attic clean-up my husband brought a couple of boxes down for me to go through. They contained the last shreds of my life before adulthood. In the boxes were two diaries I kept. One during my younger years, and one during college days.

There was some talk about young relationships, but mostly there were pages and pages filled with my insecurities regarding my disability in both. Not much changed between the two. Insecure and silently struggling with something no one understood. In these pages I referred to my disability as my “problem.” How sad that makes me to read. No wonder I couldn’t accept myself. I was seeing myself as a very damaged person who drew a bad hand. Lost. Needing answers.

Countless times I expressed, “why me?” My young mind wasn’t yet grasping that I could choose to focus on the good in my life. There was lots of it. I was laser focused on my “problem.” When you give something in your life that much attention, it’s almost impossible to clearly see anything else. Everything going on in my life always went back to my problem. Whether it was to blame or not, I blamed it for everything that went wrong in my life.

These days I still try to journal every day. Over time, my journals have slowly but surely become a place where gratitude is recorded more than hardships. Where the good outweighs the difficult. The hardships are still there, but more in the background.

My old diaries still contain many empty pages. My current journal I’m writing in is almost full, and it’s time to start a new one. I think I’ll finish the pages of my old diaries. The story that started soaked in questions, insecurities and self-doubt will instead be finished with striving for gratitude, while still being truthful with my words. Staying true to myself. Giving myself the grace, love and acceptance I needed as that young girl, but so often denied myself.

I’m so grateful I kept these diaries for all these years. It takes humble courage to open up old diaries. Especially when they contain such raw and tough emotions. I now realize that life is an imperfect journey with lots of room for improvement. There is always room to grow.

Until next time …

Amy Shinneman is a former National Ambassador for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, disability blogger, wife, and mom of two boys. You can find her blog at humblycourageous.com and reach her on Instagram @ashinneman.