I love to read. I love to learn, grow, and experience anything and everything possible. Something about diving into pages filled with other worlds brings me hope, peace, comfort, and adventure. Books are my self-care. This wasn’t always the case though – I remember being a child and struggling for each word because of severe dyslexia. It seemed like I wasn’t able to get those tiny little letters to make sense. There were many tears and even more moments of anger and frustration. But that intense adversity gave birth to something I still carry today. It’s something that has helped me fight through the loss of a child, addiction, mental illness, physical illness, daily challenges, grad school, and a million other things.

I’ve always said that nothing has come to me on a silver platter and I’m sure you can relate. Life is full of challenge, pain, seasons of struggle and adversity. We don’t give up and we don’t give in. Much like in the book I learned to read as a child, we have to speak life into ourselves… “I think I can. I think I can.” And the next thing we know… we did it! There will always be hurdles, seasons, challenges, or mountains in our way but we are strong. We have courage. We have resilience and we will always come out on top. Don’t give up when things get tough. Just get tougher!

Sarah Deats

Sarah Deats is a Behavioral Health Technician at RI International and the Hope Inc. Stories Inspiration Engineer.