HARD TO KILL

This is a blessing of survival, an exploration of the things that shouldn’t, and a little truth about what must finally be laid down.

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It caught me off guard, but in the best way, this parting verbal love note, straight from the heart—

"I’m so glad you’re really hard to kill."

Just writing the words elicits the same initial inner smile.

I was startled by the force of this unexpected benediction. Not because it sounded morbid, but because it was sacred in the purest way.

Hard. To. Kill. His meaning was immediately understood—
a whisper into all my body has endured,
a solemn recognition of a daily defiance to keep living when my cells have tried to write a different end.

I am that girl. The one who carries unreasonable hope into every circumstance, even those seemingly impossible to endure.  “Rise above it,” my mama insisted. And like a good girl, it’s who I became.

Hard to kill. I’ve adopted the words as my new mantra, pressed them into the me that resides and rises above what often seems too much to take.

It was instant, this knowing that his was not some random biological reference but a spiritual diagnosis, speaking intently into the things in our lives that are hard to put away.

There are other things that are hard to kill.
Not beautiful things like hope…
 but insidious things that cling and tighten,
like vines around the lungs of our lives.
Stifling. Constricting. Suffocating.

Old beliefs that whisper their falsehoods so often they start to sound like truth—

You're too much.
You're not enough.
You're falling behind.
You'll always be this way.

Habits that wear grooves into our days, until we can’t tell the difference between survival and self-sabotage.

Between what's familiar and what's fatal lie the killers of hours, even days.

Emotions that rise before reason—
rage, fear, shame —
automatic, rehearsed,
so practiced we mistake them for personality, for authenticity, for us.
While the real us is far away.

These are the other cancers.
The quiet killers.
Hard to detect.
Harder to admit.

And yet — they shape our cells.
They bend our posture.
They flood our bloodstream with chemicals of defeat.
They write stories in the tissues of our bodies
long before a diagnosis ever does.

Some of us are hard to kill because we keep healing,
again and again.

Others are hard to kill because we’ve let the pain make a home inside of us.
Like a squatter, we don’t know how to evict this unwelcome part that has moved right in and made itself too much at home.

Some thoughts die slowly.
Some shame feeds itself.
Some suffering gets mistaken for identity.

Do we use our suffering to legitimize what we’ve become?

Yet, here we are.
Still waking up.
Still breathing in fresh, new air.
Still showing up with tattered faith and trembling hope.

Maybe you are what’s hard to kill.
Not the habit.
Not the pattern.
Not the pain.
But the holy part of you that won’t go down.
The part still reaching for light
even in a scorched field.

Maybe the most radical healing begins when we name the difference —
between what must be protected and what must be released.
between what’s still alive in us and what is only pretending to be.

And maybe part of the miracle is this:
That we are still here.
Still healing.
Still hoping.
Still hard to kill — for all the right reasons.

NOTES [my benediction to you]:

Sometimes what’s hardest to kill is the version of ourselves we no longer need.

Not because it’s strong.
But because it’s familiar.
Because it’s the one who got us through.
The one who endured.
The one who kept us alive.

We confuse loyalty with identity.
And stay tethered to the survivor-self.

The one who clenched her jaw and got through the chemo.
The one who swallowed her truth to keep the peace.
The one who built a whole life around avoiding the next heartbreak.

But what if survival was never meant to be the end of the story?
What if healing means blessing that version of ourselves…
and then letting her rest?
Letting her go?
Letting the alive one rise in her place — the one who doesn’t just resist death,
but chooses life.

Not just breath.
Not just pulse.
But radiance. Joy. Truth. Expression.
Beauty for its own sake.

Because here’s the other truth:
There’s a cost to being hard to kill.

And sometimes that cost is our softness.
Our trust.
Our voice.
Our capacity to receive love without suspicion or delay.

Maybe the highest lesson is, hard to kill must eventually become willing to live.

Willing to loosen our grip on the armor.
Willing to lay down the habits that helped us survive but now keep us small.
Willing to outgrow the suffering that shaped us — without needing to keep it around as proof.

You don’t have to prove how much pain you’ve endured.

You don’t have to keep dying slowly to justify still being here.

You’re allowed to be new.

You’re allowed to change the ending.

You’re allowed to live.

Ask Yourself—

What in me is hard to kill — and what in me refuses to die for a reason?
Where in my thinking or actions have I confused self-abandonment with survival?
What would it take to release what's killing me slowly?