“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it’s the quiet voice in the night saying we’ll try again tomorrow.” –Mary Anne Radmacher
This week has been challenging. A year ago, I would never have imagined that I could handle such a thing. But honestly, it hasn’t been the hardest week this year.
I keep seeing posts on Instagram about strength: about building mental strength to focus better and push yourself at work. About people building physical strength with big lifting goals or by training for longer road races.
And obviously, those are incredible strengths. But there are other types of strength that we don’t talk about. Those are the strengths I’ve used this week. The strength to ask for time off work even though I’ve missed a lot of work recently. The strength to give yourself time to rest. The strength to do a painful medical test that you know will make you sick because you need the answers it might give. The strength to get up every morning, even though you’re exhausted and in pain. The strength to decide that even if today was miserable, I will go to bed hoping that tomorrow is a new day.
I had two tests done yesterday: a colonoscopy and an endoscopy. I was terrified of both of them: the endoscopy because I was traumatized by the same test when I was 7 years old, and the colonoscopy because I’ve heard that it’s terrible. My whole life, I’ve been terrified of vomiting, and during the preparation, I vomited 12 times.
But there were also other parts of this week that were challenging. I had to talk to my boss over the long weekend to ask him if I could miss half of the work week to do these procedures that needed to be done this week. I had to ask a new coworker to drive me to these appointments because my other friends
people
liking
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Mary Anne Radmacher
