Welcome! Pull up a chair, a couch or a bed, drink some tea, coffee, a beer or a glass of wine to take a moment to consider your day, find positivity in your day. P.A.C.E.- my daily motto, Positive Attitude Changes Everything. Not everything that happens to us is positive but it is our choice to find understanding and a positive perspective in the struggles, obstacles or fears.

The Negative- a stroke from birth (Cerebral Palsy on my right side), 7 seizures, 12 casts with no broken bones, multiple procedures, 13 different doctors, 3 hospitalizations, a learning disability, numbness in my limbs for 6 weeks, many doctors appointment and bullying.

The reason I state the negative first is that I always save the best for last. This blog is not a platform to compare my struggles to anyone else’s and it’s not a political statement. This is my story, my life. I know that there is more than physical disabilities that makes life hard. I fully understand that people have faced more or harder challenges than I have. I know I am extremely lucky, things could have been worse  No matter what we face day to day or if we weren't dealt the best hand of cards from the beginning, I want to use this blog as a happy place, a moment of calm, peaceful understanding in a world that finds it hard to slow down.

My Happy Place

My family, friends, playing sports, the Berkshires, camp, a college degree, reading, intellectual conversation, a half marathon, road trips, travel, laughter, living in England, South Africa and Greece, love and staying happy and healthy….

Nothing has ever stopped me from achieving my goals, I haven’t let it. I’m definitely the kind of person that if you tell me I can’t, I fight harder for it. Achieving my goals may not be pretty or the exact way anyone else would do it but I’ll get the job done.

People always ask me,  your disability must be hard, you must think about it a lot, it must have limited you. My response is always no it hasn’t, I’m proud of who I am and to tell you the truth, until some one points it out I don’t think about it. One of my best friends once told me “Katie, I don’t wake up and think I’m Asian, why do you think you should wake up and say hi I’m Katie and I have Cerebral Palsy every morning.”

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."