Skip to main content

About Me

My photo
Humbly Courageous
Hi, I’m Amy. I live life with a condition called Bethlem Myopathy which is a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy. I like to help others by showing how I live well with a debilitating condition. I was born with this disease, so it’s the only way I know life. I continue to work on embracing myself and using that to help others.

Followers

Dear Diary…

Hello and welcome to another week at Humbly Courageous. I’m glad you are here. Spring has sprung! We are through the darkest and coldest days, and can enjoy 6 months of a lot more daylight!


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 out 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, it was the blame for everything that went wrong in my life. 

These days I still try to journal everyday. Over time, those journals have slowly but surely become a place where gratitude is recorded more than hardships. Where the good outweighs the difficult. The hardships 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. True to myself, giving myself the grace and love 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 really is an imperfect journey with lots of room for improvement. Always growing. 💚

For more on my story, follow me on Instagram @ashinneman. 
Check out my weekly column “Disability in the City” in The Hamilton County Reporter.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dear Muscular Dystrophy

A letter to Muscular Dystrophy on the eve of my 49th birthday. This has been a lifelong journey…. Dear Muscular Dystrophy, At times you dazzle me, showing me the heights of human love and kindness, and at other times you take me to the deepest, darkest parts of my soul. I have silently pleaded, please just let this end. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’d like to say that was a one-time thought, but you’ve made it impossible to tell that as a truth.  I want to love you because you are a part of me, but you make it so hard at times. You feel like a best friend when I achieve feats that seem impossible due to my physical weakness, but also you feel like my worst enemy living inside of my body when you fail me, and I’m once again lying on the floor. You robbed me of big chunks of childhood joy, while I sat in silent envy of my friends, as I watched them effortlessly turn cartwheels, run and jump.  You are stuck to me like glue during the countless hours in waiting rooms, operati...
13 comments
Read more

In Luke’s words

Hello, welcome back to another week at Humbly Courageous. I am glad you are here! When my oldest son asked me to proofread his college essay a few years ago, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what I would read. My biggest fear before having children, was that my life, my disability, would affect their lives in a negative way. I know what I endure as a disabled person on a regular basis, and for years I debated if I wanted to bring children into the world with me and potentially affect their lives in a bad way. After years of discussion with my husband, I finally felt like the decision was clear. I feel God put it on my heart, that He wanted me to have children. I felt that very strongly all of a sudden. As I went on the journey that Luke took me through in this essay, I felt many different emotions. I felt sad, mad, grateful, proud and so much more. I am sad/mad that the opinions and reactions of others caused us to miss out on these precious times with Luke. That part ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Deep Breath

Hello and welcome back, or if you are new here welcome!…..Deep breath this week, as we are diving into the emotional trauma of 47 years disabled… here we go with just a few examples. Sharing these are really hard for me, but I think it’s important to share because these things are not uncommon for those who are disabled. Some I’ve shared before, some I haven’t.  “Yeah, from the look of your profile picture you really look disabled 😂” There is SO much I could say to this. What does that mean? Am I supposed to look a certain way as a disabled woman? Please, enlighten me. I’m all ears.  Or how about the folks that left me on the floor of a bar/restaurant because they assumed I was drunk because I fell as I was exiting because the door swung the opposite of what I was expecting, so easily throwing me off balance. Had not had a drop to drink. Left me there, staring at me as if I was a zoo exhibit.  Even the manager came by and told me to move because I was letting all of the ...
9 comments
Read more