Today’s post will be short and sweet.  As some of you know, I am an adult survivor of childhood medical abuse, and  I am writing a book that centers on that experience.  (Publishers, agents, feel free to contact me!)  It is not a tell all, nor is it sugar coating a tragic situation.  I have gone back into therapy while I am writing this so as to maintain my health which I have worked so diligently to acquire.  One of the things that comes up time and again in my sessions is how stubborn and tenacious I am, and how have persevered through a  of difficult situations and stages in my life.

So hang with me as I lean back against a good-sized willow tree down by the creek and expound on the power of persistence as evidenced by music, my own experience, and poetry.

Today, for the P entry to the A to Z Blog Challenge I am opening with this music video for a song that has helped me many times in the last decade plus.    “Don’t Give Up.” by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, and I will end with a poem.

The thing that has helped me survive, take a deep breath and go on even when I was experiencing what seemed like unending  pain and despair that would never even lessen, was sheer my stubbornness.

Please believe me, no matter what the challenge, you can make it through.  Perhaps you will physically not make it.  We all die eventually.  But you as an unbroken, proud, and positive individual will survive even that when your loved ones remember how you were always you and never gave in to being anything other than what you believed in being.  But that is a long way off.  There is much to be lived before that.

There was a part of me that might have been labelled oppositional-defiant by some folks had that been a buzz word when I was an adolescent.  I really was only protecting of myself.  It is okay to protect yourself.  I believe that far too many women in today’s world, here and abroad, are taught to give in… to something, some concept, someone, and this is done to the detriment of individual women and all women.  And for those of you who are thinking that I must be a heathen to say such things for the current incarnation of American Christianity requires subservience at many levels to many masters, all I can say that opening your heart to good and asking light and love to fill you and yes, even use you as an instrument of that love, is not subservience.

Don’t give up, persevere for yourself, for your children, for those you love, for the world.

The other P word that has given me strength is “path.”

…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.