#IDidItAnyway
Hello and welcome to issue 91, the #IDidItAnyway issue. I wanted the last issue of the 2017 to serve as a celebration of the women who didn’t give up.
Womanthology is built around incredible women and girls who help us to believe that it’s possible to power through any situation and come out of the other side. It’s about grit and determination.
Each of the contributors and their situations in this issue are very different but the common thread is that there’s great wisdom to be gleaned from what they learnt along their journeys, whether it’s overcoming personal adversity or flying the flag for women in male dominated fields, so I wanted to collect their stories together and share them with you.
Since setting up Womanthology I’ve learnt that there’s wisdom all around us and, despite how it might appear when we’re in the midst of a challenging time, there is always someone, somewhere who cares and is prepared to support, it’s often just a matter of finding that person, or group of people.
Building courage is like exercising a muscle
The #IDidItAnyway campaign started off as being about proving the doubters wrong, the doubters being those people who didn’t believe something was possible to achieve, so they would sit on the side lines and criticise. However, it has evolved into being as much about proving circumstances and fate wrong, about carrying on and persisting. Or sometimes it’s about overcoming your self-doubt, proving yourself wrong when you didn’t think you could achieve something.
So, is anything possible when you set your mind to it? Probably. Sometimes we are thrown a whole new set of challenges as a result of fate – a split second can change the whole course of a person’s life. Whether we steer our own course or we have circumstances thrust upon us we always have a choice as to how we react. I like to think that building our courage is like exercising a muscle and we can built up its strength through practice.
Hopefully the features in this issue will give you a little more courage when times get tough. Thank you to the women who shared their stories.
Thank you
As well as our regular content, in this issue I’d like to draw your attention to our new #IDidItAnyway Wall of Honour in recognition those who pledged in support of our crowdfunding campaign that ran in the summer. Other campaign perks are in the process of being distributed now.
I’d also like to remind you of the organisations who also backed us by pledging to be listed in our Womanthology Directory. All of these organisations are positive about gender balance.
So, I hope you enjoy the new issue. It’s been a wonderful year and Womanthology continues to grow and develop as a result of our contributors and also our wonderful community of readers and supporters. Special thanks to our sponsors and partners too.
We’ll be back in 2018 and we’ve got bigger plans that ever. I can’t wait to share them with you.
