lifewitharwen
At the age of 40, Kristen Brokaw was told by her doctor that she could potentially lose her vision when she found out that she had unknowingly exposed herself to toxic mold. With permanent scarring and vision loss, she didn’t just learn to see the world differently–she also found her mission. After her diagnosis, Kristen…
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When she was 23 years old, Fahren Johnson learned that she was born of rape to a mother who was institutionalized with severe paranoid schizophrenia. Her mother’s condition resulted in Fahren being a ward to the state with no contact to her biological family. From there, she bounced from home to home in the foster…
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In 2009, when the Becker’s 4-year-old cat, Lewis, was attacked leaving him with a broken jaw, the entire family faced a very difficult decision; find a way to fund a $5,000 bill in the midst of the greatest financial difficulty of their lives and with no guarantees, or put him to sleep. The commitment and…
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One day around the age of seven, an extended family member told Jen Du Plessis, “You’re going to be just like your father, you’re going to be worthless, you’re going to be poor, you’re going to be an alcoholic…you’ll really basically amount to nothing.” And just two short year later, she walked in the house…
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After growing up with an alcoholic father, Debbie Page was told in college “If you have alcoholism in your family, you’re going to be attracted to that in a partner.” Being a very level-headed woman, whose father got sober when she was 16, she thought that was ridiculous, until she met her gregarious, fun-loving future…
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Marcella Allison was told that a “glorified bookkeeper with an English degree” does not become a venture capitalist after she enthusiastically approached the guest speaker in her MBA class. He continued to tell her that since she didn’t get her MBA from Harvard, didn’t have a 4.0, wasn’t captain of the lacrosse team, this was…
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Randy’s youth was forever changed when his mom was diagnosed with progressive Multiple Sclerosis when she was just 26. It was the accident that she experienced early in her diagnosis that permanently relinquished her to a wheelchair and thrust him into a place of caregiver while he was still in elementary school. Yet it was…
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It’s one thing to lose your parent, it is another to lose your mom, dad and father-in-law in a span of 2 years, while dealing with your own health challenge. Megan Jones found herself fighting through the fallout of her mom’s dementia diagnosis, and her father’s hidden battle with metastasized lung cancer, the same cancer…
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For many years, performer and singer Kerstin O’Shields found herself privately dealing with abuse at home, all the while living a very public life. About five years into the marriage, when she asked for help from family, the message was disheartening, “You’re married, you need to go fix your marriage. It’s not about you.” Even…
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After 24-year-old Jessica Conness told her then-husband that rent was three months behind, he picked her up and threw her through the glass dining room table. When child protective services arrived later that day, they told her that the next time the police were called, they would take custody of her infant daughter. She knew…
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