Laura

words to live by

Nine thumbnail images in various illustrative styles, arranged in a 3 by 3 square. Each image shows a motivational statement of sorts. Examples. A line drawing of a girl wrestling a crocodile with the words "Do one thing every day that scares your family." A cross-stitch pattern showing flowers and the words "I was born to be wild, but only until 9pm or so." Colourful waves and a red sun with the words "Begin anyhow."

I’m still taking part in the daily-post challenge over on the Hearty Tales Instagram account and the theme for day 19 is “words to live by”.

I don’t have any one particular mantra that I live by, but I do have a collection called “true dat” on my personal Instagram, where I save any little images or mottos that ring true with me. They’re a mixture of positive and negative, silly and sensible, but taken together they are great reminders of the conclusions I’ve come to at various times.

Quite a lot of them seem to be about how it’s OK not to be productive all the time and how it’s OK to rest in unglamorous ways (e.g. sit down in the shower!) and how there’s joy to be found in the everyday and the smallest of improvements.

Living with heart failure, I guess these are the sorts of things I need to remind myself. Do you have any words to live by?

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Published by Laura

I'm an English Literature/Medical Humanities PhD student at the University of Glasgow, looking at written representations of chronic heart disease, 1980-present. Here I'll be blogging informally about my project's progress, sharing my responses to what I've been reading and doing and thinking. I've been living with heart failure since 2011, so I'll probably write now and again about what that's like. Eventually I hope some of the blog's readers will share their stories here too!

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