Strength To Endure

https://music.amazon.com/user-playlists/253429478e174c9f94ba787f056d62e3sune?ref=dm_sh_be40-0965-bc77-1b37-a1e3c

This has been a year of incredible ups and downs.

These songs helped me to stay grounded and sane, as much as possible.

Every day, I woke up and put this playlist on as it evolved, and I danced. I have found a new level of physical fitness, lost 97 pounds, and overall improved my physical and mental health. Each song evokes courage and strength, the will to keep on fighting even when the outcome remains uncertain.

I have cPTSD and I have been fighting throughout the entire year to maintain a grip on my sanity. Dancing to this playlist helped me to do that, for the most part, and when I got lost in the darkness, it helped me to remember that there is still light, even when we can't see it.

You see, I am a retired child sex worker.

This year I was asked to testify against several of the people involved in operations like the 'Pleasure Island' you have heard about in the news. These things have been happening since the dawn of time, and 'good people' rejected our stories, when we were little children telling stories of what WE did on our summer vacation.

I was beaten, drugged, hospitalized, and even exorcised in an effort to shut me up. It never worked. After the island hit the news, I (and very many others like me) received a phone call from the FBI. They have begun a task force targeting the people behind these places. One of the things they've done is to reopen all of the old complaints that have a common thread.

'Student came home from summer break talking about how she was taken to a place where they dressed her up like a princess and made her dance and sing for a group of men, who then each chose one of the children from the stage and took them to a separate place and 'played grownups' with them.' (this was one from my own record)

Being asked to recount these stories that I had been told were delusions that my own mind had made up, being forced to confront what I had been told was a sickness, an evil inside of me, well, it broke me. I became suicidal.

Everything that came out of my mouth became colored with insanity. They had never shut me up, never driven me insane, no matter how much they told others that I was a liar and mentally ill. But, they won, finally. They made me crazy by showing the world their own true faces.

Imagine a child that saw demons everywhere. Not some kind of ugly, inhuman thing, but the true evil that humanity perpetrates on their children. And she's beaten and exorcised in order to prove to the world that she's crazy not telling the truth. And, one day, the rest of the world could see the demons. Their masks fell off. And THEN, after having tried to break her for years, the 'good people' began to ask questions.

They forced me to testify, giving depositions, on many events that I had put away from and survived. Suddenly, all of the ugliness, all of the truth, came pouring out of me and it was all I could see.

This playlist grew in the face of all of that, a way to keep touch with the things I loved about myself, and a war drum to keep marching. My testimony will help to put an end to all of the suffering of millions of children like the one that I was.

'We won't break. We're more than Flesh and Bone.'