In today’s post; Daily Pep Talk: Failure Isn’t Weakness. I will rip a page from my own life and share my experience of it. Offering you a deeply relatable topic that you might have experienced.
Youth Has it’s Advantages. Then it Don’t.
Hi, beautiful people! I hope you had an amazing weekend! Today, I’m sharing an experience that was costly and a lesson in failure isn’t weakness. I hate moving. Don’t You? If I could think back to how many times I have moved in my lifetime. It would probably be in the neighborhood of thirty times.
On one particular time, I had to do a move alone. My husband was working in another state and it was on me to move us. At the time, we owned a modular home and it had to be move too. Between packing boxes, making arrangement to have mover come and transport the modular home to a new location. Plus, add a three-year-old and a thirteen month old baby to the mix. Nothing but pressure and anxiety.
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The Move and the Fire
When we are young adults, we sometimes think we are invincible. I felt like a superwoman. But, exhaustion catches up with you and you don’t think clearly. Our modular home was settled into its new place. I wanted to do a little spring cleaning. It’s something some of us women love to do before we move into a new place. Nesting, I call it.
The modular home had wood paneling in it, and with the journey across two states, it needed some dusting and cleaning. I used a product called “Linseed Oil“, it makes the wood shine and it smells nice too.
Linseed Oil is Flammable With the Right Conditions.
Gramma watched my little girls at her house while I focused on cleaning and unpacking everything. After finishing and placed the linseed oil rags in a laundry basket on top of the washer. Now it was time to await the power and water to be turned on. So, I was gonna stay at gramma’s with my precious girls. Locked up and headed to grammas.
At ten-thirty the phone rings at gramma’s, the fire marshal is asking for me. What he told me dropped me to the floor. My home was engulfed in flames.
Everything burned. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream.
After hearing this bad news I just sat there numb for a moment, THEN jumping up quickly. I asked gramma to take me there. When we arrived, the firefighters were still putting out the remains of the fire towards the back part of my home.
That’s when I cried watching my whole life gone up in flames. There wasn’t anything we could do at moment, so we headed back to gramma’s house. It was time to share the bad news with my husband. He cried too.
The night was a restless one. I couldn’t sleep. I kept blaming myself, that I had done something wrong to start this fire in my home. This makes me think of the phrase; failure isn’t weakness.
Self-Help Resources & Books
- Heal From Your Past, Create Yourself
- It Ends With Us
- Things We Never Got Over
- The 5 Love Languages
- Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress
What I didn’t know at the time.
“Linseed oil is flammable in the right conditions.” Take a ninety degree summer heat, add a small closed area with linseed oil rags and no ventilation. Then, you get an effect like “spontaneous combustion.”
What is spontaneous combustion?
Spontaneous combustion is a process where a substance suddenly bursts into flames without an external spark or heat source. This will happen and occurs when a material that is prone to combustion. Like using oily rags, hay, or coal, is exposed to air and begins to oxidize, producing heat which ignites the material.
I was not aware of such a thing. It was a perplexing moment, that I had put that in motion.
Feeling lost and empty, I had to see the damage in the daylight hours. I went back to see if there was anything I could salvage. Nope. Do you know that the first thing you need to do is call your insurance agent when you have a fire?
Failure isn’t weakness.
An insurance adjuster will come and take pictures and analyze the damages. What happened in the days to come were one of the hardest times to come through. You have to humble yourself and ask upon family to help. Failure isn’t weakness.
We stayed with my husband’s sister. Slept on a concrete floor for over six months. Fought with the insurance company, because they didn’t want to cover our damages. We lost our home. In that experience of that fire. I found something inside of me that was profound.
I found courage to fight and protect my family. See, insurance companies will sneak around the truth. They will find any way possible not to pay out on a claim. At least the insurance company I was working with. Their excuse was that I hadn’t paid my insurance premium. That I was late thirty days.
Proof is in the Facts
Something the insurance company didn’t know about me was that I kept a copy of every footprint of my life. Expences and income. Guess what? I had proof that I had paid. Except for one time. I was late ten days. You have to do your homework and research things. I found that if I had been thirty days late they had every right not to pay on my claim.
Ten days late didn’t merit my claim being denied. Yet, the insurance company still denied my fire damage claim. This only fueled the fire of my courage even further more. I researched more and found that I could reach out to the state. To the Insurance fraud division.
Failure isn’t weakness, it’s courage to survive.
I found a number so that I could call the Idaho Insurance Fraud Commissioner. He was a wonderful man of understanding, compassion and great listening skills. He shared with me the steps I would need to take, so that he could further more assist me.
Homework: Write down everything that had transpired from the day I got the phone call from the fire marshal. I wrote a ten page letter and sent it certified to insure it wouldn’t become lost in the mail.
Something I learned about myself. I am relentless in my cause.
Two weeks had passed, then my phone rings. The insurance commissioner proceeded to tell me that the loan on my house was being paid off. The money we spent in rebuilding our home was being reimbursed. The loss of furnishings and clothing reimbursed. Everything was paid on that claim.
Also, that the insurance agent I had been working with was fired. Why? Because I was relentless in my pursuit of protecting my family and justice. The reason he was fired; I was the squeaky wheel that got the grease. My phone endless and relentless phone call created a lot of red alerts showing he had been framing the insurance company as well as myself and many other.
Failure isn’t weakness, it’s learning to find that amazing power you have inside you. Learn from the choices, and don’t be so hard on yourself. Yet, understand the lesson that you just passed through. Not with bitterness or hate. With love and understanding.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate you!
XO,
Linda J Wolff
Wow, that was a close call, Linda. I will also start organising every detail about bills paid. It’s very rare that insurance companies agree to pay for the claim. Your courage is commendable and of course the man in the insurance fraud department was very helpful. Thanks for sharing 🙏
Thank you, Ranjana! Appreciate your readership!