- Lewis Bartelle
- May 10
THE POWER OF NAMING YOUR DISABILITY
Hey everyone, Lewis here — and I want to ask you something before we even get started.
When someone asks what’s wrong with your speech, what do you say?
Do you wave it off? Say “I had a stroke” and leave it there, hoping they stop asking? Maybe you mumble something about a medical thing and change the subject as fast as you can? I did all of that. For a long time, I was fluent in vague. I had a whole vocabulary built around not quite saying it — and I didn’t even realize it was costing me something every single time.
Then one day, I just said it plain.
I have dysarthria. I have ataxia. I have double vision.
And something shifted.
What Happens When You Name It
There is a thing that happens in the space between knowing something and saying it out loud. Knowing it keeps it inside you, where it can grow and mutate and take up way more room than it deserves. Saying it out loud — clearly, without apology, without a lowered voice — that does something different. It makes the thing real, yes. But it also makes you real in relation to it.
I stopped being a guy with “some speech stuff from the stroke.” I became a man with dysarthria — which is a neurological motor speech disorder, by the way, not a personality quirk, not nervousness, not something a glass of water fixes. I became a man with ataxia — which is why my hands do what they do, why my balance works the way it works, why some days are harder than others for reasons that have a name now. I became a man with double vision — which is why certain environments light me up like a pinball machine from the inside.
Naming those things didn’t defeat me. It freed me.
Here’s what I think is actually happening when we refuse to name our disabilities: we’re trying to protect ourselves from the weight of other people’s reactions. If I say it, they might look at me differently. If I say it, it becomes more real. If I say it, I’m admitting something.
But here’s what I know after 14 years on this road: the shame doesn’t live in the word. The shame lives in the silence around it. Every time you dance around your diagnosis, you’re sending yourself a message — this is too big, too ugly, too much to say plainly. And you deserve better than that message.
And let me tell you what was happening during all those years of vague vocabulary — I was apologizing. Constantly. Every conversation where my speech drew a look, a pause, a confused expression — sorry about that, I had a stroke, sorry, I know it’s hard to understand, sorry. Over and over. Like my voice was an inconvenience I was inflicting on people.
That went on for a while. And then one day I just decided to stop.
I decided to stop apologizing for something I have no control over. This is dysarthria. I live with it now. There is nothing anyone can do about it — it is what it is. It goes on the list with ataxia and double vision and post-stroke fatigue and everything else in that Unseen 80%. It has a name. It belongs to me. And I will not waste one more breath apologizing for it.
That was the shift. Not some big dramatic moment — just a quiet decision that enough was enough. The apologies were gone and something that felt a lot like dignity walked in to take their place.
Name it. Take the power back.
Own It — Name It — Move Through It
This is something I talk about a lot in the Army of Warriors community, and it applies here as directly as anywhere: you cannot move through something you won’t look at.
This isn’t just motivational talk — there’s real psychology behind it. When we acknowledge a stressor clearly and specifically, we activate the problem-solving parts of our brain instead of the threat-avoidance parts. Vague fear spreads. Named challenges get managed. The moment dysarthria became a word I said out loud, it stopped being this formless thing following me around and started being a condition I could research, explain to others, advocate around, and yes — even laugh about when the moment called for it.
Watch out, I talk funny: Dysarthria. That line is in my book. I put it there on purpose. Not because it’s a punchline — because it’s mine. I named it. I own it. It doesn’t own me.
The Unseen 80% — all those invisible symptoms that nobody sees when they look at you from across the room — gets heavier when you carry it unnamed. Post-stroke fatigue doesn’t look like anything from the outside. Neither does the cognitive fog, the word-finding delays, the sensory overload, the emotional dysregulation that catches you sideways on a random Tuesday. But when you name them, to yourself and to the people who need to understand — something lightens. Not because the symptoms change. Because you change in relation to them.
Warrior to Gladiator is exactly this. A Warrior survives. A Gladiator claims the arena. You can’t claim ground you’re pretending isn’t there.
The Picture on the Wall
There’s another piece of this I want to talk about — and it might be the most practical thing in this whole article.
Take a picture. Or find one from the beginning.
I am absolutely serious. One of the most powerful motivational tools available to any survivor costs you nothing and requires zero equipment beyond the phone already in your pocket. Go find the earliest image you have from your recovery — day one in the hospital, first week in rehab, first time back home. Wherever your starting line was. Look at that person.
Now look at where you are today.
That distance is real. That distance is yours. And on the days when recovery feels like it’s going nowhere, when The Long Middle has stretched so far you can’t see either end of it — that picture is proof. Not proof that you’re fixed. Proof that you are moving. Proof that the work is working even when you can’t feel it working.
I have a picture on the wall at Methodist Hospital now. I go back there with Stroke INSPIRE and I walk those halls that I once couldn’t walk, and I talk — with my dysarthria voice, out loud, unapologetically — to people who were where I was. That picture, that distance, that proof — it matters more than any pep talk I could give.
Your Victory Journal is built on this same idea. Every S.T.E.P.S. you log, every day you show up and write something down — that’s you building a record of distance covered. Month one versus month six. Page one versus page sixty. That’s not just journaling. That’s evidence. That’s the case you’re building against every voice that says nothing is changing.
Document the journey. Look back often. That’s the fuel.
A Declaration, Not a Defeat
I want to be clear about what owning your diagnosis is not.
It is not giving up. It is not reducing yourself to a label. It is not resigning yourself to a ceiling.
When I say I have dysarthria, I am not saying dysarthria is all I am. I am saying: this is part of my real life, I am not ashamed of it, and I am equipped to deal with it. There is a world of difference between I am broken and here is exactly what I am working with. One of those sentences has nowhere to go. The other one is a starting line.
The worst day of your life became the first day of the strongest version of yourself. That sentence only makes sense if you’re willing to look at what that day actually handed you — by name, out loud, in the light.
Name it. Own it. Move through it.
That’s the hustle.
That’s all I’ve got for today, Warriors — and I genuinely hope something in here landed for you. If you’ve been doing the vague dance around your own diagnosis, I want you to try something this week. Just say it. To yourself in the mirror if nobody else. Out loud. By name. See what it feels like on the other side of that sentence.
Then come tell us about it. The Beyond The Shatter Facebook community is exactly the place for that conversation — find us there and bring your whole honest story. And if you’re ready to go deeper on the identity and recovery work, the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting for you — always free, always yours.
The complete roadmap — every piece of this, start to finish — lives in Beyond Shattered on Amazon. If you’re navigating this without a guide, that book was written for you.
See you out there.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Mar 25
Updated: May 2
Get Out of Your Own Way
Hey friends, Lewis here
I want to say something today that comes from a place of complete love and zero judgment — because I have been on both sides of this conversation and I know exactly how it feels.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Some of us are playing the stroke card. And it is time to talk about it.
Now before I go any further let me be clear about something. I am here for every single survivor on this journey. The ones who are grinding every day and the ones who are struggling to find the motivation to start. I have nothing but love and respect for anyone who is still in this fight — because just surviving a stroke and waking up every morning to face what comes after it takes a kind of courage most people will never be asked to find.
But I would not be doing my job — and I would not be your friend — if I did not say this out loud:
Some of us are using our stroke as a reason to stop trying. And that is the one thing I cannot get behind.
The Stroke Card — What It Actually Looks Like
The stroke card is not always dramatic. It does not always look like someone throwing their hands up and declaring they are done. Most of the time it is quieter than that. It sounds like this:
I can’t do that because of my stroke.
That’s too hard for me so I won’t even try.
Poor me. What’s the point.
It is the slow, gradual surrender to the idea that your limitations are permanent. That the ceiling you can see right now is the ceiling that there is permanently . That trying = falling/failing and that = DONT TRY. And once that thinking takes root and you stop challenging it — it becomes your reality. Not because it is true. Because you told yourself it was true often enough that your brain stopped looking for another way.
Here is a quote I love and carry with me: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t — you are right.” That is not just motivation poster language. That is neuroscience. What you tell yourself shapes your narrative. Your narrative shapes your effort. Your effort shapes your outcome. It starts in the mind every single time.
I See You — And I Want More For You
I want to be honest about something personal here.
It is harder for me to watch a survivor give little to no effort on their recovery than almost anything else on this journey. Not because I am judging them — but because I know what is possible on the other side of deciding to push. I know what the brain is capable of when you give it the consistent, effortful stimulus it needs to rebuild. I know what happens when you get out of your own way.
And I know what gets left on the table when you don’t.
I spent six weeks in a coma. Nine months in inpatient rehab. Three and a half years in a wheelchair. I shuffled ten agonizing feet in a pink gait belt with my daughters waiting at the end of the hall. There were days — plenty of them — when my body was screaming at me to stop and my mind wanted to agree.
But here is what I kept coming back to: how bad do you want this?
Because that question — answered honestly — is where everything begins.
The Warrior Scale — Which Level Are You At?
I believe Warriors operate on a scale of one to ten. And every single survivor reading this is already a Warrior — just by showing up, just by still being in this fight, just by getting out of bed and facing another day of this incredibly hard new normal. That baseline is real and it matters and DO NOT let anyone take it from you.
But there is a difference between surviving the arena and owning it.
Think about what it actually takes just to function on a daily basis with stroke limitations. The energy required to put on a smile and act like everything is fine while you are managing fatigue, double vision, dysarthria, ataxia… and everything else living in the unseen 80%. That is warrior level work and most people around you have no idea it is even happening.
So the question is not whether you are a Warrior. You already are.
The question is — are you going to stay at a level one or two because the stroke card is easier to play? Or are you going to dig into what is actually in you and find out how far up that scale you can go?
That is where Warriors become Gladiators.
A Gladiator does not just endure the arena. They master it. They are defined not by the stroke that brought them there but by the ferocity of the comeback. The blood, sweat, and tears it takes to rise up and — pardon my language — seriously kick that stroke’s ass. To look at the life you have now and refuse to let this be the whole story.
Get Out of Your Own Way
Here is the truth about limitations that took me years to fully understand.
Some limitations are real and they deserve to be honored and accommodated. Owning your disability — naming it, understanding it, working with it — is part of the journey and I talk about that throughout The Word. Pain is just weakness leaving the body, and there is a difference between the productive discomfort of pushing your limits and ignoring genuine signals from your body.
But a lot of what we call limitations are actually just untested assumptions. Things we decided were impossible before we tried. Ceilings we built in our own minds and then stopped looking up at.
The brain does not stop building new pathways because you hit a hard day. It stops building them when you stop giving it the stimulus to work with. Neuroplasticity is always available to you — but only you can activate it.
Consistency is the currency of recovery and you are the one holding the wallet.
So try. And fail. And try again and fail less. And try again and stumble. And try again and own it.
That chain — that persistent refusal to let the stroke have the last word — is what progress is made of. Not the dramatic breakthroughs. The quiet, daily, stubborn decision to try one more time.
I go deep on this in Beyond Shattered — the full mindset framework, the tools, and the honest account of what choosing ownership over victimhood actually looks like across years of recovery. If you need the complete roadmap it is on Amazon and it was built for exactly this moment.
The Choice Is Yours
I want to close with this because I mean every word of it.
I love you. All of you — the ones who are grinding and the ones who are stuck and the ones who are somewhere in between on any given day. This journey is hard in ways most people will never understand and you deserve grace and patience and a community that has your back.
And — you deserve someone who believes in you enough to tell you the truth.
The stroke card is a trap. It feels like protection but it is a ceiling. And you were not built for ceilings.
Get out of your own way. Put your mind to it. Do the work. Show the stroke who is boss.
How bad do you want this?
Because I promise you — the answer to that question, chosen deliberately and acted on consistently — changes everything.
Come find us in the Beyond The Shatter community on Facebook where survivors who are choosing to push show up for each other every single day.
And if you are ready to let your comeback story inspire someone else who is right where you were — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com is waiting for you. Always free. Always yours.
— Lewis
- Lewis Bartelle
- Mar 22
Updated: May 2
SMART Goals: Turning the Overwhelming Into the Achievable
Hey friends, Lewis here.
When I first started my stroke recovery journey, I felt completely lost. Not just physically — although that was its own mountain — but mentally. The whole process felt like staring at a giant, complex map with no destination programmed in. No route. No starting point. Just an overwhelming expanse of everything that needed to happen with no clear idea of where to even begin.
I knew I wanted to get better. But here is the thing nobody tells you: “get better” is not a goal. It is a wish. And wishes do not have action plans.
If you are sitting in that same fog right now — that heavy, directionless feeling where recovery looks like one enormous impossible thing — I want you to know something first. That feeling is completely normal. It does not mean you are weak or behind or doing this wrong. It means you are human, and something enormous just happened to you.
But I also want to hand you the tool that changed everything for me. The simple framework that took the overwhelming and turned it into a sequence of daily, winnable steps.
It is called the SMART method. And it became one of the most important pieces of my entire recovery puzzle. Determination)
Why “Get Better” Is Not a Goal
Before we get into the framework itself, let me explain why vague goals do not work — because understanding this is half the battle.
Saying “I want to walk better” is like saying “I want to drive somewhere nice.” It sounds good. It feels motivating in the moment. But how do you know when you have succeeded? How do you track progress? How do you know what to actually do today?
You don’t. And that uncertainty is exhausting.
Recovery is fueled by progress. Progress requires clear targets. And clear targets require a plan specific enough that you know exactly what you are doing, when you are doing it, and how you will know when it is done.
That is where SMART comes in. Think of it as programming the GPS. You still have to drive — but now you know where you are going.
I lay out the full goal setting framework in Beyond Shattered, including how I used it to work back from nine months in inpatient rehab toward getting behind the wheel again. If you want the complete roadmap, grab your copy on Amazon. But right now let me walk you through each piece of the framework and show you exactly how to apply it to your recovery today.
S — Specific: What Exactly Will I Do?
Your goal needs to be precise. Not a direction — a destination.
Instead of: “I want to improve my arm.”
Try: “I will practice lifting a coffee mug to my mouth three times during my morning routine.”
See the difference? The second version tells your brain exactly what pathway to rebuild. It eliminates the daily question of what am I supposed to be working on right now. You wake up and you know.
That clarity alone removes a layer of mental load that stroke survivors simply cannot afford to waste.
Specific goals move the needle. Vague goals move nothing.
M — Measurable: How Will I Track It?
If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. And more importantly — you cannot celebrate it.
Instead of: “I want to read more.”
Try: “I will read one paragraph without losing my place, three days this week.”
That second version gives you something concrete to mark done. And marking things done matters enormously in stroke recovery — because the Victory Journal principle I talk about throughout The Word is built on exactly this. Daily, specific, irrefutable proof that the work is paying off. Numbers you can point to on the days when everything feels like it is standing still.
When the numbers go up — even slightly — that is neuroplasticity doing its job. And seeing it happen is one of the most powerful motivators on this entire journey.
A — Achievable: Is This Realistic Right Now?
Here is where a lot of survivors accidentally set themselves up for frustration rather than momentum. We all want to run before we can walk — sometimes literally. But a goal that is out of reach today does not inspire you. It defeats you.
Your goal needs to be challenging enough to matter and realistic enough to actually happen today.
If lifting the coffee mug is too much right now, your goal becomes: “I will move my hand two inches closer to the mug during my practice session.”
That is not settling. That is smart. That is the car guy in me talking — you do not rebuild an engine by trying to install the transmission before the block is ready. You work the process. You honor where you are right now and build from there.
Small wins create mental momentum. Mental momentum creates the confidence that carries you to the bigger wins. Every single piece matters.
R — Relevant: Does This Goal Actually Matter to Your Life?
Your goals need to be connected to something that genuinely matters to you — your real life, your real people, your real Why.
If being able to talk to your grandkids on the phone is your biggest motivation, your speech goal should reflect that.
Try: “I will practice my articulation exercises for ten minutes before I call my grandkids on Saturday.”
Now that goal has a face on it. It has a reason. And on the days when the exercises feel pointless and frustrating and endless — that face, that Saturday phone call — is what keeps you at the table.
Relevance is the bridge between effort and commitment. Build your goals on things that genuinely matter to you and they will hold up under pressure. Build them on things that do not and they will collapse the first time recovery gets hard. Which it will.
T — Time-Bound: When Will You Do This and By When?
A goal without a deadline is just a wish with better vocabulary.
Instead of: “I’ll try to walk more this week.”
Try: “I will walk twenty feet using my cane by Friday.”
The deadline creates urgency. Urgency creates focus. Focus creates action. And at the end of Friday you know exactly where you stand — you either hit it, or you learn something useful about what needs to adjust. Either outcome moves you forward. That is the point.
I practiced this principle in one of my favorite recovery wins — I had a goal of getting back behind the wheel. Specific, measurable, achievable in stages, deeply relevant to my independence, and time-bound by the milestones I set with my care team. I even used a PlayStation with a steering wheel controller and racing games as a driving simulator to practice coordination and reaction time between sessions. Unconventional? Maybe. Effective? I drove myself to an appointment and traded in my wheelchair for four wheels. So yes.
The Power of Small Goals Adding Up
Here is what happens when you start building your recovery around SMART goals: the whole thing transforms.
Suddenly you are not failing to “get better” — a target so vague it is impossible to hit. You are succeeding three times a day by lifting that mug. You are winning on Tuesday by reading that paragraph. You are making measurable, trackable, moments to celebrate progress every single day — progress your brain can feel and your confidence can build on.
That is neuroplasticity at work. Every small, specific, repeated effort is laying down new pathways. Every win — however modest it looks from the outside — is a piece of the puzzle clicking into place. And pieces add up. I know because I counted mine, one by one, over thirteen-plus years.
Be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Give yourself the grace of starting smaller than feels significant — because consistency beats intensity every single time in stroke recovery.
And when you are ready to go deeper — when you want the full framework, the self care strategy, the visualization practice, and every other tool that helped me go from a six week coma and nine months in inpatient rehab to walking, driving, and building a life beyond the stroke — Beyond Shattered is waiting for you on Amazon.
Every chapter was written for the person who needed a roadmap and could not find one.
You are not lost anymore. You have a map. Now let’s program the GPS and get moving.
If you want to share your recovery journey with a community that truly gets it, come find us in Beyond The Shatter on Facebook. And if you are ready to let your story inspire someone else who is right where you were — the Army of Warriors program at BeyondtheShatter.com will give it a home. Always free. Always yours.
I am right here with you.
— Lewis
