That is the question. 
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to?
‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.
So why does she go on? Continue reading Going where others fear to tread
“I didn’t have a sense of purpose.”
“You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door. So I started to live as if I could die any day.” [Our emphasis, not hers]
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t live as if she had no purpose. It wasn’t in her nature.
So she had started her search, not knowing why or how, or even where. She didn’t even know that she was searching.
No ashes, no coal can burn with such glow.
As a secretive love of which no one must know.
She was.
But, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” [Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities]
She began her dark journey into light at the age of seventeen.
In that darkness, he had beaten her ‘on her bare buttocks’ in a ‘special room’ away from the family. In the light, she eventually confessed that she had felt sexual excitement when her father beat her. Her mother had raised her ‘in complete sexual ignorance.’
Suffering – both physical and emotional – with love.