#smallcourage

Hello!

I swear I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. Seriously.

But what I have started doing is #100HappyDays over on Instagram. (I can be found here, and really, let's not talk about how unimaginative I am about creating screen names, though there is something to be said for being able to found across multiple platforms with relative ease.)

One of my favorite hashtags on Instagram is #smallcourage. And it's something I figured out last summer, after having surgery.

Being told you have to be cracked open like a walnut and patched up like a popped tire is terrifying no matter what age, but it's a special kind of horror when you're only twenty-three and feel like either the road will go ever on or you won't see another step of it. Signing all the papers and giving the doctors free reign to do what they need to is big courage. It's bravery on a whole new level (I'll write you a dissertation on the subject if you disagree with me, trust me, I can).

Small courage is different. It's the idea that, despite how much it hurts or how much you don't think it's going to be okay, you get out of bed each new day. It's how you say today will be different. It's how your sternum feels like it's healing together again and you have a few odd beats more in one day than you usually do, and yet you keep going. Small courage is the courage it takes to just keep on keeping on, day after day, even when it seems like the last thing you absolutely want to do. It's sending out one more query letter after five rejections. It's finding a way to go to NYC for a weekend even after your boss tells you no, you don't have any time off to use to take a Friday.

It's stepping onto an indoor soccer field 2.5 years after your last college intramural game, little over a year out of major traumatic surgery, and trying to find your footing again. It's knowing that it might not go like you want it to go, but damn it, you're going to try anyway.

Big courage decisions come every so often. Small courage comes on a daily basis, and it reminds us all that we are very brave, very courageous people deep inside. And that is something none of us should ever forget.

Have a lovely Tuesday.