Today is Day 8 of my 90 day blogging challenge and I haven’t posted anything in two days. On Day 6 I had my heart broken for the hundredth time in my life and on Day 7 I felt what people must feel like when the world ceases to have meaning, when it seems like there’s nothing left to fight for or to stand against.

And the reason it feels like there’s nothing left to fight for isn’t because there aren’t things which are worth the fight. Sometimes, there’s nothing left to fight for because accepting defeat is the best thing we can do for the people around us, for those people we love more than we’ve loved ourselves.

Sometimes, fighting rips things apart and forgoing the fight, accepting defeat, can keep them together. This is the lesson I learnt yesterday. We just have to be smart enough to choose our fights well.

This morning I thought briefly of giving up on the 90 day challenge and then I decided that I wouldn’t. I would sit and write for the two days I’d been silent. But what could I write about from those days? Instead, Day 6 and 7 will remain blank days. Days that are testimony to defeat and failure.

Today, I learnt that defeat does not necessarily mean losing and that failure is not the end. It’s okay to lose and it’s absolutely okay to fail. The important thing is how we deal with things after. Do we give up and cease to act or do we continue living?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been recovering from what will come to be one of the most important surgeries of my life. Last week I went for a run and this week I’m trying to get out and about business as per usual.

My friend over at The Online Runway, Ashma John, asked me to write about my recovery and what it’s been like. The truth is I’ve had days when I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw but I took comfort because I knew I had people to see the beauty in me when I couldn’t do it myself. I’ve lost one of those people in a big way and I still can’t breathe right.

But one of the things I’ll be telling Ashma when I write for her soon is that it’s necessary to feel pain during recovery. We hurt and hurt and hurt and it slowly gets better because pain is necessary for growth and healing.