Join me in a stroll back to 2015.
I’d been diagnosed with MS for a year.
I was living on 60 acres in the middle of nowhere, Texas. With my parents! At 36 years old! Anyway….
Up until the diagnosis, I was your typical hard-charging New Yorker, but had developed a strong meditation practice to handle the stress of becoming an entrepreneur (I left my corporate job in 2011 to run the content site Girl Around Town full time).
That stress catapulted me into a meditation practice that saved my sanity. After a while, I started to share it with other entrepreneurs, and was on my way to becoming a full-time meditation guide when multiple sclerosis came out of nowhere.
Through my diagnosis I used a lot of those mental exercises to process what had happened, and started a site (thanks to my insatiable proclivity for content creation) called Thrive with MS to share resources with others.
I filmed this video a year after the diagnosis, talking about one of the most powerful mental tools I used to help my sensitive and still recovering body move through emotional stress (You can skip to 2:45 in the video above). The lessons still apply because: stress is stress, y’all!
You don’t have to have a chronic disease to feel it in your body. But, let’s also acknowledge that the epidemic of chronic diseases in the U.S. is likely due to chronic stress. And 2025 ain’t helping no one…
Stress in our mind will affect the body in some way. And vice versa.
This is a quick video about the onset of MS symptoms after an argument, and how I worked to keep my mind in the present moment—which is perhaps one of the most difficult and elusive mental achievements. (I should make Fierce Resilience award badges for our community to commemorate things like this.)
On a completely different note: if you’re wondering what I tell aestheticians I want to look like now, it’s obviously this 10-year younger version of me! That baby face with collagen for dayyyys.
If you’d like to comment, I’d love to hear what you think of the throwback!
Life Update
Thank you so much for the love and support that so many of you shared after hearing about my husband’s job loss last week. What’s worse, that wasn’t the worst event in the past 10 days.
Life will beat us up from time to time, but we have to keep going.
What this shocking few days has reminded me is that anything can happen at any time. And with that in mind, I’m working to stay in a place of gratitude for all I have. Cherishing my life, even as it’s shifting beneath my feet.
I love, love, love a reader who quoted me to me, writing to say that they were thinking about us and hopeful to see what putting one foot in front of the other will look like for us right now. I am too!
And to that I say, let’s keep going. It’s really the only thing we can do.
Share the Love
And while it feels a little on the nose to mention, I will say that if you’ve ever considered becoming a paid member of Fierce Resilience, those votes of support mean so much, and similarly, when you share these newsletters with others who you think they might help, I really appreciate it!
My goal for each newsletter is to arm readers with a perspective that can create quick shifts into a better state of mind; to help us see a way to keep going, even when you don’t know how you will.
And if you’re having a hard day, week, or year, here are a few of my favorite tools and bits of inspiration for changing the world around you, starting from the inside.
Until next time,
xxM
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