It always occurs to me, maybe more than it does to many people that the little things in life mean the most. The actual ability to move ones body, to clap your hands, to point, to tell someone a story, to have the ability to do just about anything you want to do; seems simple enough right? Well for people that have head injuries, from whatever source they may have acquired a TBI; these things that we may take for granted are huge and wondrous. To me just waking up and being able to have a good cup of coffee that I have made myself is a joy I savor every morning. This… this action I am doing right now, writing; well this is a amazing gift. There was a time in my recovery after my Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that I could not do this. I had to learn to write all over again. At age nine I had to go back to the beginning and I was just so very lucky to be able to do most everything that I had done before my victimization and head injury. So now I look very closely at the smaller things in life, how a small, kind gesture can make me smile, how I hold a pen to ho wit feels to move a pencil across a sheet of paper and then there is my laughter and my sometimes annoying booming voice, these beautiful amazing things, I can do!

This brings to something today that moved me to tears. Something that I thought was so amazing and I am sure I am not the only one in the world who watched and cried, tears of joy, I watched the news and listened very carefully to Millala as she spoke to the United Nations Youth Convention not more than a year after she was shot in the head by the Taliban for just wanting and education. She spoke so brilliantly that one can hardly believe that she is only sixteen and if you hadn’t heard her story for a year you would not know that she had been shot in the head.

She suffered a brain injury and she too had to learn how to live again. I noticed only the slightest alteration in her voice, the slightest difference in how her mouth moved. But that is because she too struggled not just to live but to fight for what she lost after a violence. I am not being critical it’s the little things that I see that many may not because I can relate.

She is an amazing young woman. She will change the world and how we look at not just violence or traumatic brain injuries or education but how we view woman and children and how important everyone’s voice is! I am happy tonight because she became more amazing by the thing that was supposed to kill her. She lives in spite of the odds and so do I!