Resilience

So I'm a couple months into my last year of grad school. It's been a pretty crazy ride. I've been put in situations I never thought I'd be in. My beliefs have been challenged on every level possible, and I've questioned more of myself than I knew there was. But it's the questioning... and the not being afraid of the questioning, that has made me grow.

This past week was the hardest yet at my internship. I'm placed at a youth crisis center. We focus on runaways and homeless kids ages 7-17, with smaller programs to help kids aging out of foster care. It's a seriously amazing program, but that's not what I want to talk about right now. I want to talk about the kids. The soldiers. The fighters. The ones that get dealt the hard hand in life for no reason at all, and they're left on their own to pick up the pieces. I met some girls this past week, 5 girls from 13-16. I'm pretty sure if I were to look up resilience in the dictionary right now, their pictures would be beside it. Abused by parents, looked over, not as preferred as the younger sister. Beaten by the boyfriend. Taken advantage of by someone almost 3 times her age.

Blamed.

                                                            Despised.

                             Rejected.

Broken
                Into
                          Pieces.


                                     They have to be hard so the world doesn't kill them.

                  Invisible so they can be

                                                                      SAFE.

On Tuesday I had to ask one of them if she really meant it when she told me she had wanted to jump off a bridge before. "Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to hurt anyone else? Do you have plans for either?"

I try to put myself in these girls shoes, no matter how long its been since I was their age. I try to imagine what it would feel like to truly know and feel like "my mother loves my little sister more than me"... "Why don't my parents want me? Why don't they love me? What did I do wrong...?"

            "Why?"


I had the chance to speak truth over the two most difficult girls before the week was over.

                                       As she walked out the door, more than likely to go back to her abuser boyfriend, I looked at her and said, "We can't make you stay here. It's your choice to go if that's what you want. But please, please know... we care about you here. We all care about you... and you know where to find us."
                 As she sat in front of me with tears streaming down her face pleading for the love and approval of her mother, yet feeling such strong disdain and anger for the abuse, I was able to tell her what I saw when I looked past the frustration. "You are strong. You're a survivor. You lived this and you made it through. And whether or not you see it, you are stronger because of it, in a way that no one else will be because they have not walked in your shoes. You will  make it through this and you will be okay. You will.
                                          Because you are strong.
                                                                                   You are resilient."