I STOOD YESTERDAY I CAN STAND TODAY (BY DOROTHY DIX)
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 battle field strewn with
the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions – a battle
in which I always fought against odds tremendously against me and which had me
bruise and scared and maimed and old before my time. Yet I have no pity for
myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; 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. 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 future that makes coward 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 life whole edifice
of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never matters to you again
that a servant forgets to put the doylies under finger bowls, or the cook
spills the soup. I have learned not to expect too much of people, & 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 either to laugh or cry and when a
woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever
hurt 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. 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.”
1898 column
denouncing the selfishness of men in the Bourgogne
Disaster.
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