No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Elenor Roosevelt

We all have insecurities about ourselves.  Maybe we don’t like to admit it, but the majority of us have that little voice inside our head, the paranoid one, making us feel bad about not living up to everyone else’s expectations.  Or maybe its just me.

I guess the consent that I always gave to others was the fact that I was insecure with how I am now.  I’m not saying that I am perfect- I was just more perfect than I feel I am now.  I had my thoughts more together, my head more clear.  Why would it not be?  I was in HIGH SCHOOL before my accident, all I had to concentrate was on cheerleading, friends, boys and homework.   I had it easy before this traumatic brain injury,…  but I was so young.  It was like another life ago.  2 decades later- I’m still here!!

A friend in an online TBI support group on Facebook helped me figure it out, it’s an insecurity because now my speech is a little slower, my actions are a bit delayed, so I’m very self conscious of what everyone else is thinking of me.  I felt this way very much more a decade ago, when I first emerged into the “real world,” and out of my college lifestyle, I was only a few years post-TBI, so I couldn’t walk quickly (besides the whole balance thing), my speech was slower, and my movements were more delayed.  Now, nearly two decades later, most people cannot tell that I even have an injury!  That is pretty exciting and encouraging to hear.  In hindsight, I have accomplished very much, someone just needs to tell my head.

So yes, if there is even the tiniest insecurity in your mind about your ability, anything said or done by others can be interpreted as “difficult to swallow.”  I still struggle with allowing other people to dictate how I should feel about myself; my consciousness has become more analytic to my imperfections post-accident.  I am comfortable with the people that know me, and know about me through casual encounters, something that I was not very comfortable with when I began embarking upon my career path.  Now I look at my imperfections as a testimony to what I have been through, and to what God has allowed me to accomplish.  So now no one has my consent to make me feel inferior anymore…I am strong enough to survive, and flourish.

Writing 101: Assignment 7; quote