Personal Growth

Self Help Weekly

Sometimes it may seem like real change isn't possible. These are the times when you need to look back at the real personal growth you've already had in your life. These are also the times to read inspirational stories like the one here by Ana Blum.

Personal Growth Is Possible

By Ana Blum

When I was child in Ecuador, I contracted Polio from the vaccine that was supposed to protect me. I grew up handicapped, condemned to asking for help for everything, feeling desperately different, wrong, and out of place. I spent most of my life facing difficulties and anger. Anger possessed my soul in an implacable way.

Years passed, and in a search for a rational spirituality, I learned to understand my body. I learned to help myself. I acknowledged, without despair, that I am different and that I always will be. I began to feel right and not out of place. Anger still visits me. I am sure it will continue doing so, but now it doesn't possess me - I possess it, and I transform it into strength, into power.

Personal growth IS possible!. It is a long path, an everyday path, but a sure path. When I deeply realized that nothing has more certainty than my own self, and that I didn't have the power to change my body, but I did have the power to change my thinking - that was when I started walking the road to a better life, to a joyful life, to a loving life.

You spend every second of a 24 hour day with yourself. Why not try to make that a pleasant experience instead of a frustrating one? You can escape from everybody else but never from yourself.

When I was a young girl I listened to people behind doors, saying: "Poor little thing. She is so cute, but with that crippled body how is she going to make it in life," and "Poor girl - she never is going to have a husband," and "Poor Ana. She's going to need someone to assist her forever." They might have been right if I had let them be, but I didn't. I changed my destiny and I found a way. There are always ways.

Self growth is possible! I could have chosen the path of self pity, isolation and anger. If I had, I probably would be living a bitter life in my old bedroom at the home of my parents in my native Ecuador. Instead, I chose to fly, and I actually did. Now I am living in the United States, working as a Spanish teacher, writing a book of poetry and happily married with a wonderful and intelligent man.

So, don't give up. Keep trying, keep looking for a way. Your strength is there, inside you. Personal growth really is possible!

Ana Blum has several books of poetry published in her native Ecuador, and has been in the United States since 2001. You can read poems and other Spanish-language literature from Ecuador, by herself and others, on her website: http://www.LiteraturaEcuatoriana.info

Next issue: The Blame Game.

Bye now,

Steve