Thursday, April 26, 2012

#HAWMC - Tagline


Today's writing challenge is... Wait. This can't be right. Today's challenge is: Health Tagline. It’s day 26, are your hands sore from all the typing yet? Don’t worry, today’s post is meant to be short. However, it’s not promising to be an easy one, as great taglines are an art form themselves. A tagline is a clear and concise statement promoting what one has to offer. Great taglines are inspirational and thought provoking and create a first impression, which your audience will use to remember you. Um... does anyone here not know what my tagline is?


Let me tell you a bit of how I decided on my tagline... It goes back to a story I read as a kid (and can't remember the source now). Two friends are teaching a boy with a peg leg how to manage his disability, so he can race with the other kids. To demonstrate, one of the healthy kids borrows the boy's peg leg to show him how he can race better, and even have an advantage over boys with two legs. The young boy complains that he can't do that because the peg leg hurts too much. The healthy boy responds by lifting his pant legs to show all the purple and blue bruises he got from giving that demonstration. The message was clear---of course it's going to hurt. Don't let that stop you if it doesn't have to.

The young boy with the peg leg goes on to win the race. Predictably, the other boys now claim he cheated and had an unfair advantage with the peg leg. The two boys who helped him stand up for him and explain how hard it is using a peg leg, and if they think they can do better, they can try. The other boys do, and are able to get a new perspective on what the young boy is going through. All the boys at the end have a new respect for the peg-leg boy, and he's welcomed back into the group. Like from Day 17, "It's not the mistakes we make that matters. It's out recovery from them that counts." -Deng Xiaoping

This story, coupled with the Mark Twain reference in my bio, lead me to my motto: Make this look awesome. I may not be able to do anything about my disease. But I can do something with how I react to my disease. I can make the best of a bad situation, so much so that people think my obstacles are unfair advantages. To me, that's beating my disease. I can't make my disease go away, and I can't always change how it impacts my life, but I can still keep it from winning. I can make this---whatever "this" is---look awesome.

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