 Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, talented internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. This is going to be a short and to the point video, but it's just something that I was really excited to share with you guys. So if you don't know, this right here, this is one of my legs. I'm a bologna amputee. Got a nice little plastic foot there instead of my meat foot. And before I begin, I want to give a big shout out to Zach at Creative Technologies Orthotics and Prosthetics. He hooked me up with this foot, so I don't have to change out my leg every single time I get on the bike. This is my biking leg. Previously to having this one, I'd have to like unscrew all of these and then like get the alignment right and switch over my foot to my other sock. It was a whole process. And now I can just like hop on the bike and go, which is amazing. So thank you, Zach. But speaking of bikes, I wanted to share with you a little bit of a victory story today. As we dive in, if you like this video, if you want to give it a thumbs up, give it a like that really helps to get out to more people and helps my channel. If you feel like subscribing, I would love it if you did, but no pressure. So you and I, us, this channel, we have talked about quite a few struggles here on Footless Show over the past two years. And there have been a lot of moments of victory and a lot of moments of frustration. And I wanted to share with you a victorious moment today that is so small and yet, I should stop using this as like a emphasis, so small and yet really meaningful to me. So one of the hardest parts about this amputee life is all the little things, right? It's not the fact that I'm missing a leg that gets difficult to deal with. It's going to bed every night and not just being able to go to bed, going to bed and having to go through the process of cleaning my liner and cleaning my leg and making sure the shrink is on before I go to bed. I can't just plop down and sleep. It's those little things. It's taking my leg off when I'm sitting down to work is comfortable. But then I forgot that I needed a glass of water. So having to go through the whole process of getting my leg back on to get up and go do something. There are a lot of small moments of frustration that I've been learning how to better deal with, learning to adjust to, and I think it takes some time. But there's one thing that I have not been very graceful about ever in my life thus far as an amputee. And that is when my leg stops me from doing something. The moments when my sleeve, which is this black part right here, gets a hole in it. And if there's a hole, it means the suction can't stay to my leg and I can no longer walk without messing my leg up. Like when that happens, I immediately go from whatever mood I was in, even if it was fantastic, I go from that to like the pits of despair. This sucks. Everything sucks. I'm so done with this. I'm so tired of it. This is just terrible. This is the worst. I get really bitter and upset really quickly. And that usually passes fairly fast. But I mean, it's like a dramatic mood shift where if anything is wrong with my prosthetic or anything is stopping me that is in regards to my leg from doing what I plant on doing, I get really grouchy, really deeply, really quickly. And so this morning, I popped on my bike leg and it felt a little funny. Didn't feel right on my calf, what's remaining of my calf anyways. And I thought, I'll just, I'm sure it's just like the weirdness of putting on, no worries. So I hopped on the bike. I've been jazzed because this is my fourth day in a row getting on the bike and I've been trying to make it a point to at least exercise five days a week, which is really good for me. I get a lot more energy from that. I feel a lot better. It helps with migraines for me. I'm talking really fast in this video, aren't I? You can tell that I am well rested. I actually got like eight hours of sleep last night. So I got up, fed the dogs, got some editing done that was ready to get on my bike ride. I'm super excited about it. And then I actually got on the bike, I clipped in and something did not feel good. And I tried to push through it for a couple minutes, but I was like, I don't think this is a good idea to do. It was like there was a cramp in my calf and I can't get the cramp out because I can't really stretch it. And so I decided, I'm not going to continue this bike ride. I need to stop. My leg is not in good shape for this today. And I don't know why. I just know that it's not in good shape for it. And every time anything like that has ever come up before, that massive cloud of dark emotion has settled very quickly that I'm just, I feel disabled and I feel stuck. And my leg is stopping me from living my life and doing the things that I want to do. And just this whole narrative of poor me, honestly, like that's what it comes down to for those moments, just very, very poor, poor Joe. And I've recognized this and I've been trying to work on it for months now, because I don't like those highs and lows. I don't like getting so bitter and so angry so quickly. And so I've been trying to kind of like calm it down, trying to lower the volume on it, but it hasn't, it hasn't gone so well. It's been a long process. But today when I decided that my leg wasn't going to allow me to continue, instead of just getting upset and angry, I thought, okay, what else can I do about this? I can still pull out my yoga mat, which I got a couple weeks ago, and I can do an ab workout. I can do an ab exercises. I'll just pop on a video about that instead. And as soon as I thought that, I realized that all those like dark descending thoughts of you're stuck, your leg's not gonna allow you to do anything. This sucks so much. Weren't there? Like they just hadn't occurred to me that day, because instead of stewing in that, I just went on to, okay, so what can I do about this? Right? And I know that that sounds like a small thing, because it is. But for me, it was sort of a major step forward in the mental and emotional amputee journey to just simply take something as, okay, these are my limitations today. What can I do within my limitations, which I am accepting, instead of trying to like force those limitations out further, even though they can't go out further and getting mad that I can't move them, that I can't do what I want to do, simply accepting. This is how things are today. All right, I may not be super happy about it, but okay, what can I still do? And so I got down on my mat and I did my little 10 minute ab exercises, and then I went about my day and it was fine. And I wasn't haunted by this cloud of looking for the right word here, haunted by this cloud of anger and bitterness. I have a whole video about this coming out in the near future, but the mental and emotional toll of such a significant life change, like losing a part of your body, is exponentially more challenging for me anyways than any of the physical aspects that I've experienced or gone through. And this has been a major hurdle for me, and I'm sure that it will come back up, because guess what? Metal pieces break, things need to be replaced, things happen when you're dealing with a leg that isn't a human leg, it isn't a meat leg, and I'm certain that I will have moments where that is still incredibly frustrating to me, but taking a step forward and being able to switch my mindset from all that bitterness and anger to, okay, this is a bummer, but what can I still do about it was really encouraging to me, was really a vote of, okay, I might be moving in the right direction, this is a long journey, but maybe it's a journey going in the right direction. I just want to share that with you guys. I feel like it's a silly little story to talk about, but I was really happy about it. And I've shared a lot of the low moments here, and I wanted to share some of the high ones as well. So thank you for listening. Thank you to my patrons for continuing to support this channel, support what I'm doing here. It means the world to me. I always forget to mention this, but the patrons who support this channel also support my other channel, TraumaTalk. Check it out linked down below if you are someone who is interested in mental health or life in the aftermath of trauma. That is my second channel. It's actually my first channel. I had a four-footless show, but I continue to post videos over there if you're interested in more content from me. But thank you. Thank you to my patrons for supporting me. If you're interested in becoming a patron, you can check on the link on screen or down the description down below. There are some unique perks that come along with that. One of them is getting a video message from me to you. Another is getting a hand signed art print from me to you as well. And if financially supporting this channel is something you're interested in, that is how you can best do it. And I appreciate it to you watching this video. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. It truly means the world to me. I really, really, really appreciate it. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything, and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes. Thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye, guys.