Veronica

Veronica’s five words are Hardworking, Honest, Funny, Positive and Empathetic. Born and raised in a large Midwestern city in a Mexican American family, she trained as a cook and worked the line for about $5 hour...no tips before money pushed her out of school and into a job in health care, where she has stayed for many years. Food remained one of my therapeutic hobbies, alongside hiking. Her mother taught her to scramble eggs at five, and to taste as she goes: Never wait until the food is done before tasting.

She is the person her family leans on for health. Her father lives with a chronic lung disease and her mother with hypertension; diabetes and heart disease run in the family. I'm the one my family relies on when it comes to health care. I go to their doctor appointments and pay close attention to their medication needs. When she had COVID-19 that autumn, she was too sick to think much of it for myself and spent her worry on her parents, pressing celery juice for her mother for a week. Her philosophy of prevention: Its not about being vain, its about loving yourself and thinking about the future.

Her plate is deliberate. Coffee with honey and fat-free creamer (her family drinks coffee ALL DAY long), an English muffin with egg and bacon, no cheese, a strawberry protein shake and a mean green juice, steak and potatoes or meat with salsa and rice. Spice defines her family’s cooking: most of the dishes needs some type of salsa. She keeps powdered doughnuts out of the house, delicious but too tempting for me to have at home. The diary also holds a quieter fact. She often eats only one or two meals a day, a habit from years of working with no time to sit, and her Day 5 goal is, unusually, to Be able to eat more.

Her timeline is a story of coming apart and putting herself back together. Her grandmother died, and two aunts and uncles died young. Her marriage ended after thirteen years, and she was left with $0 in bank account-- started from scratch after separation. Therapy, which she had never expected to try, helped her heal and be very optimistic about the future. Recognition at work followed. Then 2020: a furlough, high blood pressure and shingles twice due to stress, and a decision to use the time to walk. She Hiked over 365 miles in 2020, and found in hiking the time to think and feel. Something I never did before. One reading is that the furlough, a loss, became the first unclaimed time she had had as an adult. She lists Time among the things she is grateful for: something money can't buy.

Her superpower turns care inward: Empathy, care, compassion...with myself. Her weakness is being over critical, which her mother says she was even in school. Her coping is breath, meditation and Analytical thinking. Her faith is her own: Believing in a higher power of myself. Her 2 a.m. person is her middle sister, a night owl who would also care for me and help me unconditionally. On animals, she wrote of awareness of another heart beating creature.

What stands in her way is money, having the money to buy healthy products, and the cold-press juicer she is saving for. Her letter is short and kind: Love yourself always even if you are heavy or thin. Laugh more. Read and explore the world! Keep your head high.