On my laptop is a sticker that I purchased recently. It was an impulse buy, an added couple of dollars on my order of a print I decidedly had to possess. This sticker is about the size of my palm, and features a little girl in a bear costume roaring with all her tiny might. Around the edge, the words ‘You are stronger than you think!!!’ are etched in what I can only assume is the artist’s handwriting. It is a small, silly thing. However, I see it every time I sit down at my desk, and it gives me a little warm tingle in my chest. It reminds me that it is okay to sometimes be small and fragile, because for half my life now, my default has been to be as hard and unmoving as stone. And that has hurt me all the more.
I think that sometimes we forget what it means to persevere. We have this idea in our heads that we must always be stalwart and tough and exhaust ourselves trying to get through whatever has called us to this challenge. We run ourselves ragged to make ends meet, to overcome the struggles that life inevitably hurls at us. We must get back up immediately when life knocks us down. That was my belief for the majority of my life. Every time I fell as a child, my dad would stand some feet away and tell me to get back up. Rub some dirt in it, and keep on going! I never learned what it was like to just…not.
After a particularly harrowing experience in my late teens, I did learn what it was like to just not get back up. I laid in my bedroom floor, exhausted, broken, and I just cried. I wondered what would happen if I never got back up. For a while I didn’t. I just stayed right there, hoping that eventually I would just become one with the stain-proof berber carpet my mother had insisted on despite my hatred of it. At this time in my life, I was very, enthusiastically Christian. In the midst of my sobbing, I begged the god of my childhood to help me. I begged and I screamed and I bargained, and then …something changed. I allowed myself to become hard. I allowed anger to seep in. I’d done everything he’d asked of me, and this was my reward? A hundred sermons and verses and excuses played through my head. Perhaps I was being tested. Perhaps this was God telling me that I wasn’t trusting him enough. If it was a test, it was a test I decided that I was going to absolutely bomb.
When I finally did get back up, it was as a different person. In an instant, years of a child’s faith and hope had been totally erased. I squared my shoulders, I went downstairs to get some food, and from that point on I continued with my life, albeit changed. I drifted through life from that point as an observer. I dealt with things in the way that only those who are numb can. It wasn’t until I’d moved away from my hometown, escaped the thumb of the church I’d been beholden to, that I encountered this path, and was rocked yet again.
I’ve mentioned before that I first saw and image of Thor when I was four years old. I will admit that I’d carried a bit of a chip on my shoulder since then, not quite knowing what to believe in, but throwing myself into the only available belief system I had. From adolescence onward, I’d been exploring the world of witchcraft, polytheism, and the occult (in secret, of course) and had developed quite the penchant for divination systems. I was drawn to the runes in my very early twenties, and decided that I had better learn a bit more about their origins before really digging into the symbols themselves. Several questionable decisions later, I encountered Thor, again. And to say that he sat me down with a swift hammer to the gut would be an understatement. Over the next few years, working with him, I was disassembled, remade, broken again, and then rebuilt once more. He taught me the value of the things I’d experienced, and reminded me that I had lived through them…so why was I walking around dead?
This, to me, is the crux of the issue with our societal idea of what perseverance is. That we should have an endless supply of chutzpah with which to continually take on the world is an insane notion. We are not built for that. We are built to experience, to fall, to break, and to feel. Perseverance, then, is the idea of eventually getting back up. No matter how long it takes. In my case, it took a decade, and some days I’m still ‘getting back up.’ But that’s part of the healing process. That’s the scab that forms the scar that eventually disappears — no matter how long it takes.
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