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I have been through the depths of poverty and
sickness. When people ask me what has
kept me going through the troubles that come
to all of us, I always reply, "I stood
yesterday. I can stand today. And
I will not permit myself to think about what
might happen tomorrow."
I have known want and struggle and anxiety and
despair. I have always had to work
beyond the limit of my strength. As I
look back upon my life, I see it as a
battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead
dreams and broken hopes and shattered
illusions--a battle in which I always fought
with the odds tremendously against me, and
which has left me scarred and bruised and
maimed and old before my time.
Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to
shed over the past and gone shadows; no envy
for the women who have been spared all I have
gone through. For I have lived.
They only existed. I have drunk the cup
of life down to its very dregs. They
have only sipped the bubbles on top of
it. I know things they will never
know. I see things to which they are
blind. It is only the women whose eyes
have been washed clear with tears who get the
broad vision that makes them little sisters to
all the world.
I have learned in the great University of Hard
Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had
an easy life ever acquires.
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I have
learned to live each day as it comes and not
to borrow trouble by dreading the
morrow. It is the dark menace of the
picture that makes cowards of us. I put
that dread from me because experience has
taught me that when the time comes that I so
fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will
be given me. Little annoyances no longer
have the power to affect me. After you
have seen your whole edifice of happiness
topple and crash in ruins about you, it never
matters to you again that a servant forgets to
put doilies under the finger bowls, or the
cook spills the soup.
I have learned not to expect too much of
people, and so I can still get happiness out
of the friend who isn't quite true to me or
the acquaintance who gossips. Above all,
I have acquired a sense of humor, because
there were so many things over which I had
either to cry or laugh. And when a woman
can joke over her troubles instead of having
hysterics, nothing can ever hurt her much
again. I do not regret the hardships I
have known, because through them I have
touched life at every point I have
lived. And it was worth the price I had
to pay.
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