They Can Make Our Lives Miserable, But They Are Never Going To Break Us 1

I once had a dream, long ago when I was in my early twenties.  I had somehow got through a horrible wasteland full of destruction and horror and found myself safely on the other side.  I wondered what had happened and what I had just gone through.  Then I understood that I was going to have a hard and difficult life and that God was going to take me through it safely and bring me to a better life on the other side.

I am sixty now.  Thirty years and more have passed since that dream.  In a meeting today with one of my supervisors I mentioned that my life, my health, wellbeing, everything seems to be working in a harmony and balance that I have never known before: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional.  When I had that dream I had already been through a traumatic childhood full of abuse and neglect.  I had gone through it, not unscathed, but still able to function.

I was thirty when my Thirteen Year Nightmare began.  It began with some horrible professional betrayals, then neighbours threatening my safety and my life, then everyone around me seemed to be dying, in addition to my own mother.  my record is three deaths in one week.  More betrayals and deaths followed I ended up homeless with full blown PTSD at forty-two.  The nightmare ended a year later.

I had been through awful employers, family members who turned against me, churches where I was treated like a heretic of the Spanish Inquisition, betrayals from those closest to me and death, death and more death.  While coping with unemployment and underemployment and extreme poverty I had to endure a welfare system that was set to break its clients and grind them into dust.

Others have been through worse, much worse than me, and some have come through okay, even stronger, but not without damage.  We are living now in particularly scary times and I think that many of us are going to have to find ways of reconfiguring our lives and learn new ways of coping because the old ways are no longer going to work.  As our governments turn more and more into puppets of banks and corporations they are becoming so distant from the people who elect them that we no longer seem to exist to them. 

They are going to find more and new ways of making our lives miserable.  They might succeed but they don`t have to break us and if we accept that we are the arbiters of our own happiness and wellbeing, then they are never going to break us.  We will end up breaking them!