Unbroken: Loss, Resilience, & Reinvention with Egli Colon Stephens, Ed.D

Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast platform:

 

Bright bits from this episode:

“Every person you see has stories, and every person you see has a few that would break your heart. We deserve each other’s respect simply because we’ve survived all we have and kept going anyway.” (This is from one of Victoria’s books, probably Younger by the Day.)

From Egli: 

  • “I was very, very angry at God, very disappointed. I’m no longer angry but I am disappointed because…I was God’s brand ambassador…I felt that because of everything I did…I was entitled to a miracle, but perhaps our miracle was not to experience on this earth.”
  • “I can’t always pray with words. I offer my life daily and let my breath be my prayer, my presence in everything that I do to be my prayer. It’s almost like a prayer in motion.”
  • “I have to be true to who I am: I love color. I love fashion. I love life. Of course it’s changed for me, but in her honor I want to make my best of my time here. I want to make her proud. I want my life to align with the values I taught her.”
  • “I think I’m going to roller-skate my way to heaven.”

 

About the Guest

Egli Colon Stephens is both a professor with a doctorate and a professional lifestyle model. She is also the author with her daughter Natalia Harris (they’re pictured together) of Unbroken: A Mother-Daughter Journey of Resilience, Faith and Courage, detailing Natalia’s battle with bone cancer as a teenager. Natalia survived — sur-thrived as she called it — and went on to fulfill her dreams of becoming a model, with gigs including NYC Fashion Week, Project Runway, and landing the December 2019 cover of Vogue Knitting. But just over two years ago, at the age of 24, Natalia passed away from a rare kidney cancer.

Her mother, Egli, is now living for two, and doing that brilliantly. She is navigating life’s greatest grief with a strong faith, a conviction to sharing Natalia’s gifts with the world, and mourning in bright colors, rediscovering her childhood passion for roller-skating (“I call it roller-grieving”), using fashion as a distraction and a means of self-expression, and becoming an Instagram inspirier-influencer @iamnataliasmom.

 

Website: www.eglicolonstephens.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamnataliasmom/

Books: Unbroken

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Pretend that you live in a society in which women are valued more as time goes by, and create a mini-culture around you of people who actually do that.

—from Younger by the Day

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