Lose Yourself To Find Your Truth - Finding Strength in Our Weakness

Imagine waking up to a bright light flickering down from a drab, drop-ceiling, instruments and framework all around you. A few blurred images sharpen into assorted, familiar faces—one of them a stranger assigned to deliver the news, “you’ve been in an accident. You’re in the hospital and we had to amputate your right leg,” the stranger says with rehearsed familiarity, “do you know what day it is? Do you know your name?”

In another sterile room filled with contraptions and monitors and doctors delivering bad news, imagine yourself being told, “You have stage four breast cancer. We’ll have to do a full mastectomy” the melancholy is palpable, the shock almost tangible like the air freezing into a solid you can grip until your insides are frozen and numb.

Whatever you can imagine, whatever scenario or carnage or terror you have already contemplated for yourself, see it with such vivid reverie that you feel the raw visceral emotion of this fantastic experience. What’s left of yourself when so much has been removed? Who would you become…who are you now?

Then, upon waking everyday you’re faced with the seething embrace of a reality you’ve refused with drugs and alcohol with the tenacity of a starving dog in search of food. That all-too-familiar sense of impending doom when facing a day filled with addiction and our slow mortal decay. The lyrics of the addicts song, out of tune in our head. The chaos, even in fantasy is just as horrific and melodic.

Some say there is poetry in despair, others exist in a place where they’re too afraid to live and not yet desperate enough to die. So they fade into the grey, withering confines of their self-defeat and then they take that first drink or they slam that last needle or they swallow just one more pill.

Imagine, if you can, what it might be like to fight for your life every moment of everyday. To face demons in the daytime and nightmares that make you quiver and soak the sheets, even when you’re awake. Can you imagine?

There are those among us who can. The soldiers who lost limbs in the war, who developed breast cancer in spite of family history and there are those who still suffer the dregs of addiction and alcoholism. Those we call, “survivors” who should be known as “fighters” because the battle may be over for some, but the war never really ends. For those of us who lost pieces of ourselves we can say assuredly that our fight has just begun.
The ones who live with memories of abuse or still resist the grips of their addictions can tell you stern and straight to your face that this mother fucker won’t go down without a fight!

Sometimes we live as an act of absolute defiance against anything that might stand in our way. Sometimes, it’s all just too much. We get lost in the image of who we want everyone else to believe we can be; the idea of what we have to be loved. Until we remember that it’s not about how “perfect” others think we are, but the one thing that each and every one of us shares…vulnerability. It’s our flaws that make us perfectly human and the bond we share during the short time we’re given.

We were born of warrior blood, we have risen from the ashes of fallen nations and survived centuries of the greatest odds against us and still we fight on! Through the strength of our communities we have overcome and through “Meaningful Action Now” we can grow a little more each day and help a few more in need every day and “Unleash our Potential”. We are a community of fighters, defiant against our limitations and united by our flaws and made stronger for it. Because we ARE Manning Up!

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Manning Up, LLC is the world’s FIRST Integrated Media Channel using sports and fitness to overcome adversity. For more information and to join in the fight of your life, please visit: www.manningupusa.com and like us on fb.com/manningupusa