So thankful I’m here💛

I really don’t know where to start honestly.. let’s start from the beginning…  When I was born at 24 weeks and weighed one pound, I had a 10% chance of living. I stayed in the NICU for 4 months, had a laryngeal injury, nerve damage to vocal cords, and vocal cord paralysis. The prolonged time of me being intubated likely caused the permanent damage. But without that permanent damage, I would have died because my lungs were just too immature to function on their own. I had high doses of oxygen, so my retinas detached from my right eye, which made me almost blind.

When I was in school, I was bullied because of my voice, my learning disabilities, and my glasses, so my mom always told me to “kill them with kindness”. I tried the best I could, got made fun of so much in middle and high school, but I didn’t back down because my mom always told me to turn the other cheek and kill them with kindness.

In 2014 my mom passed away from lupus and other health problems. She was in so much pain, she had to take 8 Percocet a day. After her passing, I became depressed, had anxiety and panic attacks daily, and I turned to pills to take the pain away and to get high.. I ran out of pills so I stopped, but it wasn’t easy.

To this day, I live with my mom’s saying “kill them with kindness” (it’s actually tattooed on top of my heart with my moms handwriting) because you never know what people are going through and with what I went through, I would want someone to be kind and open and to help support me and stand up for me. I don’t take any bullying lightly. I believe everyone should treat others the way they should be treated point blank. And I’m always here to listen if anyone wants to talk. I’ll be open because I have an opened mind and willing to be the friend someone needs in their life.

Also my mom’s birthday is on World Kindness Day, which is November 13th, so kindness is just in my blood I guess.