Ya know, I'm not writing this trying to convince anyone of anything.  I guess if it helps just one tormented individual get through the day psychologically and/or physically intact, I have done my job.

I didn't ask to play this game, but I have learned during my 69 years you have to play the hand you're dealt.

I have suffered severe blows throughout my life, but I'm still standing after some fairly cunning, devious, crafty and unquestionably evil professional psychotics have lined up to take me down.  They still may succeed.  But if it happens, it won't be from lack of effort to survive on my part.

Our greatest enemy is being afraid.  A very notable warrior of the current era commented on being afraid.  He said something like being afraid is debilitating, but fear itself sharpens your instincts.  Your survival instincts.  Fear gives you the edge to fight.  Being afraid can overwhelm you if you allow it to, and you, regardless of evidence to the contrary and the erroneous judgements of others, are in control of your mind.  If you lose that control, you become helpless and therefore much more vulnerable to the attacks, which will then intensify, in my experience.  They seek to achieve the goal of making us constantly afraid. To bend us to their psychotic will. So don't succumb.  Use your fear to fight, in whatever small way you can, and build on that. Any small victory diminishes them.  Only when I stopped being afraid, when I refused any longer to succumb to the often hellish machinations that are regularly directed at us, did I begin to gain ground against my tormentors.

The odds against us are formidable.  Our suffering will only be relieved by death.  But self-immolation is the realm of the weak.

We are legion.  Never forget that you are not alone.

This is a war.  There is no reason for us to take all the casualties.  Work to make them afraid of you.  Dig deep down inside yourself and retrieve that primal urge that has sustained our soft-skinned species against the predators for a thousand millennia.  For that is what they are:  predators.  They prey on women and children, on old people, on small, helpless animals that we love, on anyone who they sense to be vulnerable and yet, often exceptional.  They attack those who march to the beat of a different drummer, those that don't quite fit in.

So hold that beat. Sometimes, it will disappear into the background noise, but it is always there. Don't allow their campaign of terror to diminish it, and, therefore, you.  Never quit.