When I was just a toddler I was adopted by a childless couple. My father who had a deep distaste for women resented my personality in every way. I grew up never knowing what to do or how to behave in front of him or around him since the punches and poundings came at me with not a consistent origin or cause. I made things worse for myself because I was headstrong and full of life, which meant, without meaning to, I defied everything about him.
Even though I managed to leave those two people at age fifteen, it took me a very long time to learn how to honor my own voice and to trust what I think and what I feel. As a grown woman, I am still coming into my full self.
A few years after I left them, my mother said to me, “if you had been prettier, softer, more girl like in your behavior, he would not have beaten you.” She may have been right in some ways.
All of his beating, physical and emotional, was to beat out of me who I was. My mother used to say to me when I was a little girl, “you are too smart for your own good. That’s why you are a bad girl.”
In response I used to pray every day for God to make me not so smart, so that I could be good.
What I grew up into, how I ended up responding to those two people in my childhood, so that I don’t let them win, is to become passionate about making a positive difference in the lives of children. I can call myself a survivor.
But I know another survivor. She has been through the hell and back and really not many think of her that way because she has never let anyone think of her that way.
The abuse that she has endured is not quite as obvious as a child abuse and the toll that must have taken in her life and her heart is not readily apparent because she will never tell you that or does she appear to even look at herself that way.
In the end she has turned herself into so much more than a survivor, but a super strength woman because she managed to power through the pressure of emotional punches and stayed on course of her life, her own hero’s journey and never allowed those immense pressures and roadblocks to stop her from doing her work.
She is a superhero because most normal humans would have quit a long time ago. She has fortitude unlike most.
Her abusers, GOP and others with motivations that I cannot explain have put her into awful positions. They have pushed her off balance with the games that continued to change. She has had to adopt and adjust so that she, a woman could survive in order to stay in the game, that which many now use to accuse her of being dishonest. But through all of this she does not complain or claim being victimized.
If she cannot express what is deep in her heart, we the world had forced it upon her. She would have been accused of being weak or she would have been cut off of her path.
If she had lived her life like Bernie Sanders, she would have never made it this far in the political game.
She has had to fight off million different forces that Bernie Sanders could never even imagine or understand.
I am with Hillary Clinton because I am so damn proud to watch a woman not let anything crumble her and she fights.
Her slogan that she is fighting for us, is so appropriate. She has fought an amazing fight and she is still standing. I cannot think of anyone who can match that strength, that tenacity and endurance.
Throughout this campaign, she never once wined. She never once said woe's me, look what they are doing to me. She never aligned herself with the imagery or the idea of victimhood.
That to me is a measure of a true leader.
Hillary Clinton makes me proud to be a woman.
-- Nancy
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