2:23am June 11, 2014

Sometimes, all it means to have ‘coped with’ something, is to have lived through it.

I used to know someone who constantly told me she wasn’t coping, wasn’t coping, wasn’t coping, couldn’t handle this, wasn’t coping, etc. repeated as many times as time would allow.

I remembered a time when I felt exactly like she said she felt.

And I realized that I had been coping.

Because I lived through it.

I didn’t live through it gracefully.  I didn’t live through it without severe emotional and physical pain.  I didn’t live through it without considering suicide many times over.

But I lived through it.

And that means I coped with it.

That’s the secret to coping, the secret I couldn’t find back then.

The secret to coping is to stay alive.  Everything else is just details that, in time, work themselves out.  Stay alive, somehow, any way you have to, by the skin of your teeth if you have to, unhappy if you have to, miserable if you have to, but stay alive…

Stay alive, and you have coped as well as anyone can possibly cope.

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