Who’s your hero? Tell us a story about why that person plays such an important role in your life.
It’s taken four attempts to write and re-write this, no thanks to a glitch in the WP app, so let’s try for number 5… And see if I can remember what I wrote…
So I kind of struggled with this because I don’t necessarily idolise people. I think that a lot of people would answer this going on about how some kind of celebrity is their hero (eg Beyoncé), but I’m not that kind of person.
I don’t really have ‘heroes’, per-se, but I do have a lot of respect and admiration for different people for different reasons. The overweight person who decides they want to create change in their life; eating healthier and embracing fitness and losing weight to give themselves some longevity – that’s somebody I respect and admire. Or somebody who manages to overcome some kind of addiction and clean up their life. Respect. Or anybody who has suffered from bullying and learnt and grown as a result, becoming an incredible human being. You see a common theme here?
But apart from all of that, the one person that I truly admire and respect the most would be my mother.
My mum is perhaps the one person who truly knows me the most, but even then, doesn’t really know me completely. She’s the one person whom I’ve been able to admit some of my flaws to, cry about it, and then talk it through like civilised adults without the judgement and criticism. Mum has always, ALWAYS been my biggest support – she’s always stood behind me with whatever I’ve chosen to do in life, and I’ve never met anybody else who has given me the same amount of encouragement and support the way she has.
We have such an incredible relationship – she’s more like a close friend; somebody that I know I can always count on whenever I need to really just vent and talk about whatever is truly bothering me, and she’ll indulge me in my self-analysis and offer different perspectives and basically just indulge my crazy, manic state of mind.
Ever since I was little it has always been my mum and I… And then my brother and father. Even when we were all living together, I always felt there was a significant divide – perhaps it was inevitable that once I was old enough to understand things a bit better, that mum and dad separated and mum and I moved out. This alone truly solidified our relationship, and allowed me to really develop my own independence even further, which I embraced with open arms and never looked back.
I never really stopped to think of how hard it must have been for her, to be separated from her other child, my brother, whom we saw every other weekend, and whilst I may have only been young at the time, she was always very honest with me, and explained the situation to me – treating me like an adult, which I’ll always admire and respect her for.
When she was at Uni (college, for those of you in the U.S.), she was the one who would let me sit there reading her social work / social welfare text books – reading about human behaviour, and basics of psychology etc… and I was probably only 9 or 10? If I came across anything I didn’t understand, she’d sit there and explain it to me… just like she would explain it to any other adult.
I love her because she’s a realist. She doesn’t live in some kind of fantasy land, where everything is awesome, she accepts the harshness of reality, and the types of people around her, and whilst she’s certainly faced her fair share of hard knocks and hardship, she’s always managed to make-do and land on her feet, and she’s always taught me that something will always inevitably present itself, whether you want it to, or not, it will present itself and you might find you have no other choice but to take it… and it’s something that I always live by. She always taught me to have more than one backup plan, because you could quite easily find yourself exhausting such a list.
But above all else, she’s just ‘mum’ to me. And I miss her quite a lot.
…and if you ever read this mum, know that I love you so, very much and simply don’t know what I would do, or how I would function without you; without you there to talk me through things, and explore my thoughts and feelings. You really do mean the absolute world to me. xx
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