The wheel turns, the leaves turn…

What is one thing that I’m proud of? I’m half-heartedly participating in a blogging challenge through Live Your Legend, a blog I’ve been following for more than a year now. That’s what today’s prompt is. While the challenge is to write daily, it’s also a challenge for new bloggers, so I’m just taking the prompts I’m interested in. This is also probably good practice for NaNoWriMo which is coming up next month! I’d been thinking of skipping it this year, but when I really got to thinking about it, I would be pretty sad if I didn’t do it. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade! Even though I never do anything with the novels I write, I get a lot out of just going through the process. And hey, maybe this is the year I do go ahead and try to get it published. But the blog challenge is also important for making me commit to a goal: I’m going to update this blog every Sunday and Wednesday.

Anyway. I was thinking I would write about something more mundane, like the computer certifications I’ve collected, or the relationships that I currently have, or something small, like a particular present I gave somebody one year (I’ve given away two whole granny square blankets! Those things take a long time). I usually avoid saying my bachelor’s degree, because it is a kind of obvious huge accomplishment. But then, that’s just it. I earned a bachelor’s degree from a very prominent institution. It took a lot of work, that’s for sure. But it didn’t just mean that I churned out a lot of papers and survived a lot of classes. I had a major health issue I was struggling with for the last couple years of my degree, and I still earned that degree. There were so many reasons I could have easily given up then and it would have been very reasonable. I’m only just now getting to a point in my life where I have that health problem under control and I can turn around and appreciate just how well I did, considering the circumstances. I didn’t just beat the odds earning a very respectable degree. I beat the odds just surviving what I have.

So that’s what I’m proud of. Accomplishing something amazing, even with huge obstacles to overcome.

I’m proud of me.

An inlet I walked to during lunch one day last week