Rebecca (Becky) Faye Smith Galli is an author and columnist who writes about love, loss, and healing. A Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was formerly employed by IBM, where she was the recipient of the Golden Circle award for marketing excellence. In 2000, The Baltimore Sun published her first column, a piece about playing soccer with her son—from her wheelchair. With over 400 columns, she then launched Thoughtful Thursdays – Lessons from a Resilient Heart, a weekly column that shares what’s inspired her to stay positive. In 2017, she published her first book, Rethinking Possible: A Memoir of Resilience. Becky resides in Lutherville, Maryland, outside of Baltimore.

If there’s one thing Rebecca Galli knows, it’s the importance of staying fueled—daily. She’s had a lot to power through: Her seventeen-year-old brother’s death. Two children with special needs that include autism and epilepsy. Divorce. And her own paralysis. Galli has lived a life filled with unexpected loss—and learning.

Infused with wisdom from Galli’s deep-thinking pastor father, her ever-optimistic, hostess-with-the-mostest mother, and other memorable family members and friends, Morning Fuel offers stories designed to inspire, encourage, or make you think. Sprinkled throughout are quotes from some of the greatest thinkers of our time—words that have bolstered Galli’s resolve to power through her darkest valleys. Each entry ends with questions that invite personal application and provoke further pondering.

How you start your morning sets the tone for your whole day. Let the wisdom of Morning Fuel help you make that tone a positive one.

Becky Galli was born into a family that valued the power of having a plan. With a pastor father and a stay-at-home mother, her 1960s southern upbringing was bucolic—even enviable. But when her brother, only seventeen, died in a waterskiing accident, the slow unraveling of her perfect family began.

Though grief overwhelmed the family, twenty-year-old Galli forged forward with her plans for the future—marriage, career, and raising a family of her own—one she hoped would be as idyllic as the family she remembered from her childhood.

But life instead presented her with situation after situation that derailed her: her son’s degenerative, undiagnosed disease and subsequent death; her daughter’s autism diagnosis; her separation; and then, nine days after the divorce was final, the onset of the transverse myelitis that would paralyze her from the waist down.

Despite these life-changing losses, Galli’s steadfast commitment to family has enabled her family life, far different from the one she planned, to be filled with creative love and acceptance. At once heartbreaking and inspiring, Rethinking Possible is a story of the power of love over loss and the choice we all have to shape our life circumstances—even when we’re forced to confront the unimaginable.