birthrightgreen | What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

That rather depends on your definition of strong, doesn't it? There's an argument to be made that what happened to me as a child made me strong. I survived it, at least and there's only one other I know who has managed to come through a rape on her Virgin Night still able to use her Craft. Most of them are at least broken, if not driven completely mad. So, one could say that was a strength. At 12, I managed to hold on to myself through the first rape, and the second, and the third. I survived and that has to mean something, yes?

Whether I survived intact...my inner web, yes. My use of Craft, yes. I held onto those, and yet part of me thinks that they managed to kill something else, and I was too young then to realize what I'd lost. Even now, I can't put a name to it.

I don't know. My instinct is to say, "Yes. If you come through the trials and you're still alive, then you will grow from what you learn and you will be stronger in the end." It makes such logical sense and it allows me to derive some pride in surviving what my life was. It allows me to say, "Look. I survived that. I can survive anything this damn world has to throw at me, because each trial just makes me stronger." There is peace in saying that. Pride. Defiance to throw back into the face of the world. I scream at the wind to do its worst, because it can't break me.

But the defiance, the fear, the darkness it bred...is it strength? Or is it another form of death. A death of self. Of gentleness. Of goodness. If I had come through it as Jaenelle did, wise and patient and kind and loving, perhaps I could claim it. But I didn't.

Oh, I'm strong. And you won't break me. And you won't bend me to your will. However, perhaps that's because the only strength I have left is my defiance, my determination to not be dragged down. Perhaps the rest of what I could have been is already dead.