The choices we make

Throughout history, different people have come up with numerous ways to determine how to define a human being, or rather, a person’s worth.

The most common in the west is money, that ones value is determined by what a person gives to the economy. I tried so hard to give to the blessed mother economy that has given me so much. Say what you want but in the end I was its slave. A marker of adulthood is being a willing one, and I was, but I had fallen down and was thrown to the side with the chaff.

Worse of all, I am now applying for disability. I am asking money from the government, an act considered so heinous by many people I know I don’t deserve the donated clothes on my back.

Many conservative people will tell you a woman belongs with a man. I will not disclose why but I have decided my husband and I cannot do this marriage journey in our short time together. This will bring me shame from my surrounding conservative community.

Oftentimes when I volunteered to cook at funerals people would ask when I was going to get a man because my food was so good. It took me six years to find one, but it turned out to be a bad love.

At first I thought I would be relieved, but then the tears started coming every day. I’ve been listening to “The Redheaded Stranger” album by Willie Nelson on repeat the past two days.

I am afraid I will lose my sense of personhood through all of these losses, but I am doing what I can do hold on to Christ and what he says, that I am God’s child and his princess. I am royalty, even if the world says otherwise. No one can take my crown. If it needs adjusting then I do and keep marching on.

Does this all go down to the choices we make consciously?

Could I have foreseen being rejected by a dollar, or what was to go down with my husband?

I don’t know if I could have at all. But there were points where I could have demanded more or walked out. And I did try that, to no avail.

You end up where you are and there’s no use reminiscing. You straighten your crown and march on.

That’s a crown from God that no illness or man can take away, ladies and gents, and it’s on your head whether you believe in it or not.