The prompt above leads me to two different answers. What was the hardest personal goal I’ve set to myself?

The first: In 2000, I participated in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk. To do this, I first had to raise $1000 for the organization. For the walk itself, I had to walk 20 miles a day for three days. This meant I had to train for the event by walking further every day. I started at two hours a day to a two day 13/14 mile event.

I survived the walk with a few blisters and a lifetime experience. The fundraising was the hard part, with a chunk of the money provided by Walter Cronkite. Yes, the most trusted man in America Walter Cronkite. (Anyone younger than boomers should look him up). No, I didn’t know him. But a friend of a relative of his called in a favor. Sometimes, I guess, the stars align.

The second: I wrote my first novel. I’ve been writing since third grade, when a teacher (who didn’t realize she was teaching 3rd-graders a high school curriculum) taught poetry. I remember doing well in haiku, struggling a bit with diamanté, and being totally overwhelmed with sonnets. I wrote my first published poem that year, if the classroom’s front door was a publication. I went on to write descriptions, short stories, a short play, more short stories … But never a novel. I thought I had irredeemable problems with plotting a long story.

Many many years after that, my husband is responsible for my writing my first novel. I was writing several stories around the same characters. I was almost obsessed with them. Richard said to me, “If you’re going to keep writing short stories, you might as well write a novel.” My instant response was “I can’t write a novel. I have irredeemable problems with plotting a long story (or something like that).

I started writing, and admittedly I did have problems with plotting at first. My novel read like a bunch of short stories at first, and I rewrote it three times until I came up with a result I liked. My other novels didn’t have the same fault as I learned the narrative shape of a novel. The first novel (not the first published) was Gaia’s Hands, which has been published on Kindle.

For honorable mention, I should mention learning how to drive. I didn’t learn to drive till I was 32. The first time I took drivers’ ed in high school I failed for stopping the car in the middle of the railroad tracks to check for trains. (It’s not incomprehensible if you take into account I have a learning problem with spatial and sequential relationships.) The second time, I barely passed but didn’t feel comfortable enough to drive. I learned for real at 32 with the most talented drivers’ ed teacher there ever was. There is talent involved in teaching people to drive. There’s patience, there’s talking someone out of quitting, and there’s the ability to explain things in a way that someone who processes things differently will understand.

I appreciate the goals I’ve struggled with more deeply than the ones that came easy to me. They built more of my character. They became the accomplishments I judged myself by. It’s strange, because I have a PhD and I don’t weigh that among my greatest accomplishments. My greatest accomplishments have been the hardest.