Be Brave

This sticker was a surprise waiting for me when I got home from Nashville.

I’d been feeling completely uninspired and I don’t mean this silly little blog I mean any form of communication even talking and texting. To try to break the cycle at the beginning of March, I ordered a bunch of cards and stickers from an Etsy shop I’d been eyeing for awhile.

Rachel, the shop owner, and I exchanged messages. I told her how much the things I ordered cheered me up and that it was retail therapy after being in the hospital for a month and a half.

She is a lung transplant recipient & knows how unpleasant long hospital stays and chronic illness can be. Along with the surprise sticker was a card with the sweetest message saying she wanted me to be the very first to receive the new design and to “keep being brave even when it’s hard.”

Reading that made my eyes well up. I always get emotional when people care. I was scrolling instagram the other night and saw a post about that sticker… an unexpected question caught her off guard and after being upset for a bit she went home channeled those negative emotions into the “Be Brave” design.

This made me love it even more… in the midst of dealing with a negative moment in her life, she thought of me a practical stranger to be the first one to reap the benefits of the situation.

People tell me all the time how brave I am and that they could never go through what I have and continue to go through and choose to keep going.

Here’s a secret, you could… I hope you never have to, but you could. I hope life never throws you into similar situations but if it did you could survive it too.

Brave is a feeling I’ve rarely felt not in the moment and even in hindsight I struggle to find examples of it.

Not when I moved to Nashville to chase all the dreams, people said I was brave then. When I had move back home & put those dreams on pause, people said I was brave then too.

Definitely not during any of the trials of the past several years health wise which seems to be when people say it the most.

It’s scary and intimidating and it hurts. It doesn’t get easier to handle if anything it gets harder.

You no longer have reserve energy to pull from because you depleted it and haven’t had a long enough reprieve to build back those energy stores. Slowly a minute turns into an hour and an hour into a day and so on until all the sudden it’s a new week, month and year.

There’s one time I felt brave, when I took my first steps at 6 and a half. I’d been told my whole life I’d never walk independently. I’d always said to my parents or anyone who’d listen that I would. At that time, I had ulterior motives though. My Aunt had just had my baby cousin and I didn’t want her to learn to walk before me. So one day when I was at my Aunt’s house I took two steps from the couch to the coffee table.

Two steps became four, and four became six, and so on. We counted steps for months, eventually we stopped counting out loud anyway… I still count most steps I take to myself any time I’m walking, some habits die hard I guess.

The most ironic thing people tell me I’m brave for is being honest when it comes to what I post on social media. You see, I have ulterior motives for that too. It’s exhausting to constantly hide and paint the perfect highlight reel we all want to show the world on our Facebook timelines, Instagram posts, and Twitter feeds. One day I decided to stop trying so hard to pretend. I’m not sure when that day was but I’m a happier person because of it. Maybe you should try that and we can all be brave together.

Now that I’ve thought about it I think bravery isn’t necessarily something we can see in ourselves but something we see in others. Maybe we’re all a little braver than we realize. Honestly, like the card said bravery is continuing to keep going even when it’s hard.

-Hannah