THE POWER TO
TRANSFORM
How did growing up in communist-era Poland and later fleeing the country shape your resilience and determination to create the life you love?
They wanted their own lives to look differently. They followed their dreams. So, I grew up refusing to accept anything as a rule I couldn’t break, if it was harmful for me. I grew up with a tough skin, a tolerance for pain but also very aware of the power I had within me to change anything that I did not think was working.
This was probably the biggest and most important lesson my parents taught me – if things are not how you wish they were where you are – change them. They taught me that we have the power to change our own circumstances and change our lives by taking charge of our destiny. This was such a powerful thing to witness as a child. First, they tried to create that change by standing up against what was unjust and unfair – speaking up against the corrupt government. When it started to cost them their safety and the safety of their children – they did the scary thing of packing up and leaving, leaving without telling anyone. It was such a lesson of standing up against what’s wrong, what’s toxic, what’s intolerable. They wanted to give their children a better future.
Some of that resilience and power was dimmed when I arrived in America as a teenager and was met with ridicule, abuse and disrespect as a foreigner. Some of it came at the cost of shutting down my heart just a little bit in order to protect myself. There was this dance between the toughness and the tenderness that I had to navigate and the waters around were sometimes murky. The path forward wasn’t always clear. I could get “too hard” sometimes and get lost in the harshness of life. But then I fell in love with my husband and opened my heart. Then I had my daughter and then my son – and they each reminded me of the tenderness and warmth f love that was within me.
