Amanda Doulos is a digital editor for Love What Matters based in New York City. She will graduate from Binghamton University with a Bachelor of English Literature and Spanish in Spring 2023. She loves staying involved as vice president of the mock trial team and secretary of Spanish Honor Society. In her free time, she loves reading, traveling, and spending time with friends.
“Living everyday in an unknown, unpredictable state affects you more than people realize.”
“I participated in an online course about ‘positivity,’ which aligned perfectly with my mentality of sugarcoating all my symptoms. I thought to myself, ‘All this can’t be true.’”
“All my problems, physical and mental, changed me. I get more medical visits than visits from my friends. But I still need to see the positives in life.”
“I am pretty sure my grandparents were looking down on me that day.”
“I began to only stim in the privacy of my bedroom or the bathroom and treated it like a dirty secret I’d hopefully grow out of, along with my attraction to boys and all things deemed feminine.“
“There will be days when you have to take the pain minute by minute. You’ll dig deep and find a strength you didn’t know was humanly possible.”
“I started tripping. People called me ‘clumsy.’ I thought it was normal because people trip over things, don’t they? It all happened unexpectedly. ‘I’m going blind. I’m really going blind.’ It came on SO fast.”
“When I was a teenager, I completely lost my walking ability. It took time for people to realize what was inside me. The wheelchair always stole my role. It was like I was in a dress that didn’t belong to me.”
“I was able to help feed that little girl until she turned a year old and it was such an amazing feeling knowing that something my body created was able to nourish and help grow another human being other than my own!”
“We finally felt like becoming parents was in our foreseeable future. For 3 days, we lived in her NICU room and slept on the tiny couch together. But her birth mother chose to keep her. Our hearts SHATTERED.”
