I kind of feel like no one here will care/be able to relate, but these are some of the things I am proud of:
* I graduated high school as STAR student and a national merit scholarship winner -- while missing 18 or 19 days of school every year and dragging myself to school sick much of the rest of the time and also being called "lazy" and told I "wasn't really sick". (I wasn't diagnosed with CF until I was almost 36.)
* I was also inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in 11th grade (the earliest you can be) and was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program in the subject of Journalism.
* I have a 22 year old son with cystic fibrosis who has not been on antibiotics in 12 years and has needed no medication at all in 3 years or so.
* My sons and I live without a car and walking is our primary mode of transit, in spite of two of us having CF which means we are supposed to be deathly ill.
* My divorce was amicable in spite of my family background. (In contrast, when my two siblings got divorced, their spouses made attempts on their lives.)
* As of last summer, I am drug free, having gotten off about 8 or 9 prescription drugs and then gotten off the OTC drugs that replaced them.
* I genuinely like men, as friends and lovers, in spite of having the kind of childhood that tends to produce women with multiple personality disorder.
* I am the one who decided to get divorced, not my husband, even though I was deathly ill at the time and had been a homemaker almost my entire adult life.
* Now that I am basically well for the first time in my life, I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me. I'm 44. :-)