Fifty-four-year-old
Liz Harris is smart, talented, nearly broke, and has a disability to which she
attributes her shortfalls in life. In desperation, she turns to life coach
Rhonda Jackson, whose business is thriving, even though her personal life in
not. Can Rhonda help—or will she be stopped as others have by disabled Liz’s
halting gate? Unnerved by her visceral reaction to Liz’s disability, Rhonda
pushes beyond her own tragic past as they launch a mutual journey to rise above
the hurdles to their success, thereby engaging Liz on a path to leverage her
ableism, rather than her disability, to forge ahead.
As
Liz starts to resolve her inner conflicts: feelings of rejection, self-doubt,
and inadequacy stemming from a childhood injury that left her disabled and reliant
on a wheelchair for mobility or a metal forearm crutch to walk; she identifies
events that strained the relationship with her adoptive parents, doomed her
marriage, and stalled her career. However, she’s unwilling to reveal the secret
of the injury which caused her disability and can set her free, because doing
so could irreparably damage the relationship with her sister, Carla. This
denial halts her work with Rhonda and breaks their relationship.
Accompanied
only with her forearm crutch named, ‘Steve’ and her wheelchair in the trunk,
Liz sets out on a sixteen-hundred-mile trip to lay to rest the horror of her
childhood trauma surrounding events that caused her injury, hoping to end the
haunting nightmares and transform her innermost resentment for the life she
dreamed of—but could never have due to her disability, into one filled with
peace, self-fulfillment, and promise for the future, through a life unknown to
her at the time, but one that we now refer to as ‘ableism’.
Inspired
by the life of Victoria Mavis
and her overarching attitude toward ableism, the characters in the book, Every Scar
Tells a Story, share insights to overcome daily adversities that inadvertently
or unconsciously place roadblocks for success through one disabled woman’s
journey to triumph over a crippling childhood injury that caused her lifetime handicap,
thus unleashing her true potential through her newfound ableism.
I
hope you enjoy and get inspired by the book, Every Scar Tells a Story—and trust
me—it goes far beyond overcoming disabilities; it’s about conquering
difficult times in life—despite your circumstance! ~Victoria Mavis
