why I've taken a pause racing

I always try to keep a balance of the amount or harassment and hate I’m willing to put up with to fight for myself and my community and the toll of putting up with all of it on my mental health and everyday life. Then you add to everything that happened after the presidential election to the mix, well, it I just didn’t want to deal with it and moved the fight off the race course.

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Erin
save redmond's old firehouse

The City of Redmond announced the closure of the Old Firehouse Teen Center (OFH) at the end of March; a historic rock venue and vital resource to teens for 30 years.

The Old Firehouse is the one truly safe, accessible, and welcoming place for local neurodivergent, LGBTQ+, and at-risk youth to go between home and school.

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Erin
coming out - let's talk about locker rooms... again

In March of this year, I moved out of the city and away from the gym (mentioned above) where I've been for the past three years. I moved into Seattle proper. New city, new gym. Going into this new gym I felt like it would be the same experience as before. I would take the same approach that I used at my last gym; the same level of confidence and respect. For the most part, everything was fine. I go in, change, do my workout, shower, change and leave. I was feeling positive. This validated that I am truly part of the tribe and at the very least tolerated in that locker room. I was rolling high!

On April 3rd things suddenly shifted and not in a positive way.

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personalErin
living and training with a brain injury

It's difficult to understand brain injuries until you have one, and it's a club you really don't want to be a member of.  It's a type of injury that is fairly easy to identify with a number of common symptoms, such as, difficulty remembering new information, difficulty thinking clearly, fuzzy or blurred vision, dizziness, headache, sensitivity to noise and/or light, issues with balance, drastic mood swings … just to list a few.  Determining the extent of damage, and it's long term effect, on the other hand is extremely difficult.  Unless you have a brain bleed, nothing is visible on MRI or CT, two of the most common methods of imagining the brain.  It's really a new frontier for the medical world.  We simply can't wait for people suffering from brain injuries to die, in order to physically look at their brain and see the CTE, or other damage that's a result from head injuries.  They're just starting to gather the data, and test how to find these problems while the person is still alive, which can lead to better rehabilitation, and change any many full contact sports/jobs.

This single event changed my life, and the lives of everyone around me forever.

That was two years ago, and here we are today.  I'm still recovering, still healing, still learning limits and how to adjust my life to accommodate my on going TBI and symptoms.

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personalErin