The Unwinnable Battle Everyone Fights

Odds are, you are currently fighting it without realizing you already won. You will always win.

Today I woke up uninterested in the battle. 

For years I had been fighting with all I had, “You are strong. You are kind. You are important”. For countless years, I have been fighting, and fighting, and fighting this war. It’s like I put on this warrior armour and pledged victory over my dead body. “I will prove to everyone they’re wrong”, “I will die trying”, “I will succeed at all costs”, “I am unbreakable”, blah blah blah. 

First the war was with my parents and the thousand things they did “wrong”. Anger, anger and more anger fueled my thirst for victory. “Why did you do that to me?”, “You shouldn't have done this, or that, or that other horrible thing you did to me”. Too focused on the “shouldn’t” only to realize how fake it was. There is no shouldn’t. “Shouldn’t” shouldn’t even fucking exist because there is no way back to correct the shouldn’t, so what is left is grief for a possibility that will never exist.

Most of my life I spent fighting the first battle. All my energy focused on how I was wronged and how I should’ve been treated better. Then one day, I stopped fighting for a brief second and the fog cleared away long enough for me to see… the opponents were never my parents. Little did I know, they were too busy fighting their own battles so they couldn't possibly be fighting in mine. 

So I took a step to the side to see who was actually in my battle. 

First, the 4 year old girl that was beaten with a belt so hard she could still smell the expensive leather from miles away. She was the most relentless in the battle, ready to run for her life, nothing could stop her. 

Next to her was the 4 ½ year old girl too shocked to even speak. Naked dripping wet, she crumbled up in the corner trying to hold herself together after meeting the belt once again, this time inside a cold shower. Silence was her language, leave me alone was her favorite sentence. 

“Why didn't you do anything to help us?” they said, tightening their jaw with so much anger. 

In the back I could see a disoriented 8 year old girl going in circles, asking around “what is going on?”. Distrustful of the adults and their constant need to lie, she just wanted to understand what was happening. When no clear answer ever met her, she just kept circling around in an endless loop of false stories her mind built to protect her from spiraling. 

“Are my parents bad people?” asked the confused 10 year old. From the other girls before her, she learnt that speaking was dangerous. “Run” shouted the 4 year old. “Don’t speak” whispered the 4 ½ year old. “It’s all lies anyway” mumbled the annoyed 8 year old. Alone left in her question, anger just kept multiplying and feeding off the false stories she made up in her search for truth. 

“We know better than to speak, speaking = getting hurt, silence = protection”. A new rule order was established, with no exceptions, no one could speak up or say their truth. 

Then I saw the 11 year old girl, grieving her dead brother and a bunch of unfulfilled promises made by her parents. She felt something was off yet didn’t have words for it. When she finally gathered the strength to ask about it, silence or more lies made their way to her ears. “I told you so” said the 8 year old girl. 

What happens when you are left alone with all your feelings? When you have no conclusive story behind the pain? Even if you don’t know how, you must release the accumulated feelings because holding it all inside is making it hard to breathe. 

On the floor I saw the 14 year old girl with blood dripping down her skin. Scared, alone, unable to speak. “I don’t know how to hold it inside anymore,” she thought. So she used her remaining strength to build a castle around herself with walls so high not even the sun was able to peek in. “Now I am finally safe, nothing can get to me, nothing can leave” she proudly said while crying. 

And so came the rebellious 15 year old girl that was of course not having it. With extreme apathy towards the world and the people around her, she puts on the strongest armour to protect her castle. Full of anger and its continuous accumulation, she was the toughest of them all. 

This second battle went on for years.

One morning a bird passed by and they all stared. 

One ordinary pause unlike any other. 

Suddenly the battle was just… uninteresting. 

“What if we look at the trees instead?” I proposed. 

4-year-old: “run”

4½-year-old: “don’t speak”

8-year-old: “it’s all lies”

10-year-old: “what’s going on?”

11-year-old: “no one speak” 

14-year-old: “I can’t hold this anymore”

15-year-old: “we must all protect the castle”

Me: Is that so? 

2be2day