PERSERVERE

H.E.R. DEFINITION
To PERSEVERE is to whine, rise, and keep moving anyway - trusting that showing up for yourself, even mid-meltdown, is still showing up.

A few days back I was sitting at my desk, texting my bestie, basically unraveling. I told her I have so much to do in my personal life. I feel overwhelmed and completely unmotivated. She asked, Like what? So I gave her the list. The ex stuff and lots of leftover stuff I didn't think I'd need to do there. The unscheduled surgery. My messy home. The gym I continue to drive past. All of it. And then I typed the words, I want to disappear. For like a week lol.

She didn't let me have it. She said How is worrying going to help anybody, woman? Mmmkay. I mean she wasn't wrong, but dang. Can I whine a lil bit?! So I was mid-spiral, mid-vent, ready to lay on the floor and kick and scream about my life, when she asked me for a favor.

So let me back up a wee bit. A few weeks back I had run her resume through an AI tool, just to help her tighten it up. So when she said, Hey, can you do that same thing but for a cover letter, I didn't even think about it. I pulled up the thread. Typed a sentence. Sent her the output. The whole thing took seconds. It was mindless. It cost me nothing.

And that is exactly the moment she caught me.

She came back with, you just told me all the stuff you had to do. I would have liked you to tell me, B, I have a bunch of stuff to do. But you didn't. Stop putting other people before you. Damn.

I cracked up. Full on, out loud, alone at my desk, cracked up. Because she was right, and because of how she got me there. She didn't lecture me. She didn't send me a paragraph about boundaries. She just quietly ran a little experiment on her own best friend, watched me drop everything in seconds for her, and then held up the mirror. Sneaky. Effective. So her. Mind you she sure did use that output cover letter.

Anyway. What she didn't know is while I was busy whining to her about my never ending list, I had already started chipping away at it. Whining is just sometimes how I process. I need to say it out loud first. I need to complain a little, sometimes oftentimes a lot, get it off my chest, let somebody witness the overwhelm before I can move through it. The venting is not me stalling, well, for the most part. It is me clearing space to actually start.

So I whined. And right after that, I picked up the phone and called in reinforcements. There was some legal language I didn't fully understand that made my eyes glaze over the first two times I read it. I read it again. And again. Until it made sense. And then I called for help.

And somewhere in the middle of that phone call, it hit me. This is what adulting looks like now. There is no one else assigned to this job. There is no big, bad husband to lean on, to hand this to, to let carry the weight while I hover in the background feeling frustrated. He is not that person anymore. If I am being honest, he is basically the opp now. Which means if I want something, I alone am the one who has to chase it. I am the one who has to read the confusing paragraph three times. I am the one who has to make the call. There is no version of this where somebody steps in and handles it for me. I have to woman up. I have to take care of business.

That is what PERSEVERE has looked like for me lately. Not some cinematic moment of gritted teeth and quiet strength. It looked like whining to my best friend. It looked like getting playfully dragged by someone who loves me. It looked like laughing so hard I nearly cried, and then picking up the phone anyway.

So sis, because I think a lot of us think perseverance has to look noble. It does not. Sometimes it looks like laying on the floor, kicking and screaming about your life, for exactly as long as you need to. Vent. Whine. Fall apart a little. Text your people. Let them clown you if that is what it takes to snap you out of it. But then, at some point, you have to get up. You have to make the call. You have to read the paragraph a third time. You have to champion for yourself, because at the end of the day, nobody else is coming to do it for you.

Whine and rise. That is the whole thing. That is PERSEVERE.