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HAWMC Day 27: Challenges and Victories

Today, I'm supposed to list five challenges and five victories having to do either with my health or my activism. Let's just dive right in.

Challenges

1) ...  ...  ...

Okay, I'm having a little trouble here. While I understand the value of identifying five challenges and five victories, I'm not sure I can. No, that's not true. I absolutely can. I just think that anything I say will be kind of arbitrary.

We do this kind of thing in dance technique classes all the time. Write down three things you need to work on and three things you do well. I always hated this exercise. Partly because, while it was so easy to think of the bad things, it was incredibly hard to define what you do well. Mostly, though, it just felt so superficial. Maybe I wasn't doing it right... but, to me, it seems the delineation between what's good and what's bad is completely arbitrary. Even in ballet, where there is a set ideal that you're constantly working towards, just because I need to work on something doesn't mean I don't do it well when I do really work on it, right? I mean, if I can identify what I need to improve and can tell you how I'm working on achieving that goal, doesn't that mean I'm doing something right?

Sorry... Got off on a little tangent there. But I think it's related. The difference between a challenge and a victory, especially in regards to something as complicated as health, is so murky. Sure, I have a hard time keeping perspective on my disease sometimes, but I would also count the moments I manage to maintain it among my victories. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Aren't the challenges just victories in progress? When you're in the middle of a rough patch, I know it's hard to see it that way, and maybe not all challenges turn out in victories. But the two ideas are definitely intertwined. Almost to the point where it's impossible to separate them.

Also, I'm really uncomfortable with the word victory. It implies that there's some kind of battle happening. There's not. Just my life. I'm not waging wars, I'm living.

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