Well the 2nd of April is here, and so is the second post in the WEGO’s Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge.  Today’s prompt is as follows:

Find a quote that inspires you (either positively or negatively) and free write about it for 15 minutes

So, thought this will be an easy challenge for me, as part of my daily journal that I keep I regularly write different quotes that I have found, positive ones that inspire me or lifts my mood, or perhaps something that ties in with a particular event that has happened that day.

However, it has been tough selecting just the one quote to use, but have decided on the following that I found recently on Pinterest that really inspired me, and it says the following:

This really spoke to me on a personal level as all my life, some people have made me ashamed of who I was  – at school I wasn’t like everybody else – I was very quiet, reserved,  and certainly was not part of the ‘popular’ gang.  I was more of a loner, a ghost, somebody  no one really noticed…

And there was my ‘issues’ with the dizziness – due to the condition, I had a problem with buildings which are open and have high ceilings, consequently, I used to panic quite a lot as I didn’t understand what was going on, and was unable to take part in sports as the hall in which our P.E. Lessons took place was very high.

This led to a lot of name calling, and left me ostracised from my peers, during a school trip to London where I became very unwell with the dizziness and led to a panic attacks, my ‘so called’ friends deserted me to go shopping, leaving me with a teacher whom I barely knew to look after me.  As in the quote, people throughout my life and have left me feeling ‘weird’.

However, years have passed and I can now understand that who I am is not my fault – I have a legitimate medical condition which explains partly the type of person I am.  And no-one has a right to make anyone feel ashamed of who they are – so what, if someone is a shy or quiet person, who would prefer to sit down with a book rather than going partying and getting drunk…

We are all different and unique – if everyone in this world was exactly the same, with the same interests and personality, then the world would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it?  Nobody should have to hide the person that they are, and we should all free proud of who we are and celebrate our differences and what makes us unique – after all they are the reason that they people in our lives love us…because we are us.

And as the quote says, if we hide our true selves, we never know the people who will love us for who exactly we are.

I do believe this, although there have been times in my life, even recently when it is hard to accept or belive what the quote is trying to say, maybe I will write the quote and put it up somewhere I can read it every day…