Resilience...

I'm writing this blog on my phone which was not how I wanted to craft this piece. Silly me, I wanted to actually use my laptop for once.  Alas, google has bought out blogger and their stupid password protection locks me out every time and for some strange reason, I simply cannot remember what my login info actually is. So there's that. 

  Resilience. As shown tonight, I can bounce away from the frustrations of security that is simply too secure and simply fall back on the phone 'back door' sign in method.  I prefer not to write this way but, well.. You know...

Screw you, Google. 

 I was speaking with someone who described me as resilient and I had to stop and think about that awhile. We always look at our lives through a certain filter of time and experience and, for some, censorship. I have chosen to live my life a very specific and admittedly difficult way but it's honest and I find that there's a level of integrity there. 

  Most people don't know or realize how poor my family actually was growing up. My sister and I often, to this day, joke about condiment sandwiches or how we used to dumpster dive at the local KUB Bakery down the street just to drive away the gnawing in our bellies. 

 Thin, undernourished, runty.  That's how I grew up. You learn very quickly to fight for any and everything in your life with no help whatsoever from anyone. Support is non existent and the nice things people say are usually lies meant for them to manipulate you into getting what they want.  

  Bleak? Yes

  Depressing? Kind of

  Honest? Unfortunately... Yeah. 

  This is by no means a pity party though, this is more of a soft understanding of a hard truth in a harder life. Someone important to me helped me understand it a little bit and the rest of it is my usual naval gazing, always trying to be better, to be the best person I can be through learning from mistakes and what life is trying to teach. 

  

  Oh I know, this sounds like so much hokey hyperbole, another rah rah 'band aid response to a shitty history'. Some people do that, they mask it all with platitudes, ignorance and sometimes simply hiding it like it never happened to them. 

  

  I'm not that person. I embrace the word resilient because it wraps me up perfectly.  From the starving kid who had to get a winter coat donated to him (one of my more humiliating memories) for Christmas to eating at school at the breakfast program because... You guessed it, we were starving. 

  For anyone who has never had the terrible wolverine of hunger digging through their stomach, it's truly an awful experience. You can't really think about much else; school, girls, homework, friends.  Nothing but the need to end the pain in the belly that drives you beyond focus or attention. It really sucks. 

Most days I'd go home ravenous and simply head to bed and try to sleep it off. Usually I'd wake up and not be so hungry... Usually.  Some days I'd wake up and it was hard to move for lack of energy. Again... It sucked. 

 Life hasn't been particularly kind to me, and that's ok. I have made bad choices and readily admit to my fuck ups along the way that haven't helped my lot. Again, that's ok. I have survived car accidents, nearly being run over on my bike a few times, bears, drowning (twice), suffocation, a brutal childhood illness , and siblings who were both my best friends and sometimes the biggest asssholes I knew. An apathetic mother wasn't helping matters either. 

  The whole picture being painted here is simply one of hardship. Most people aren't as lucky as I am. Somehow I've survived the ghetto and I'm a productive member of society, who'd have guessed??

 I can't tell you how or why or who got me here, but I do know this and I'll say it till my last day; I'm lucky. God or providence or whatever put the best of friends in my path and people that actually gave a shit about me, parentals for me to look up to, teachers to encourage me, and generally enough eyeballs on me to make sure I didn't get killed out there in the world. I've mentioned in a previous blog that the only luck I have is regarding life and death stuff, id say this qualifies. 

  It honours me that someone, anyone really, sees me as resilient. When I look back down the dusty road of my life and see the carnage and wildness back there, I often scratch my head and wonder 'how the hell did I make it out of there alive?'   There are still no silver bullet answers to that one but here I stand. 

  This is a story about hope, not of pity or any sadness. This is my tale, my life, and it's being lived as well as I can manage, and I'll tell you what... I'm pretty damn happy. With the life I live, with the people I share it with and with how far I've come down my path. 

  From a dirt poor ghetto runt with a big mouth to right here and right now, sitting on my couch in my house that I bought with no help from anyone at all. Well fed and comfortable, loved and wanted in my peoples' lives.  Not all the stories from the ghetto have a happy ending... 

But sometimes they do.