Miss Simone, how do you find strength?

Dear Nina Simone,
In a world so foreign to your personal one - a world in which you are an anomaly, a genius exception - how did you find the strength to fight?
In every world you have inhabited, you have been at once alien yet simultaneously completely at home. In the Playboy Penthouse, surrounded by white women in expensive dresses, how did you find the strength to play music that they could never understand?
As a leader in civil rights, how did you balance your body and identity being torn apart by an abusive husband and still find the strength to stand up - against his commands - and rouse so many black fighters to curiosity and inspiration about their pasts and identities, which have constantly been stolen from them throughout history?
Nina Simone, your entire life you struggled with mental illness, abuse, racism, sexism all overlapping and interacting - and the list goes on. How did you find the strength to persist?

 With endless admiration,

Lucy Sandeen

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