There is a lingering fog clouding the optimistic clarity we often experience at the beginning of a new year. Typically, the possibility of change, growth, and new adventures shine upon us like a rainbow breaking through the dark clouds from a winter storm, immersing our souls in innocent wonderment. My inner six-year old fancies it as unicorn kisses.
In our current climate, our shadowed enthusiasm, confused with apprehension and worry, cannot hope to find light and love when wrestling with the will to survive the bewilderment many of us find ourselves struggling with. We naturally seek the familiar, but lately it is obscurity we find.
This veil that hazes our confidence in our society and fellow humans holds us in a state of anxiety and fear. A familiar anxiety I regret. One I knew when I heard my mom say my father didn’t mean it. Flung across the dining room table or pushed down the stairs, he didn’t mean it was the excuse for the monster who didn’t pay attention to his actions or words.
The shroud obscuring our destiny of hope has exhausted us because we cannot find a trusted path out of the current dogmatic and closedminded circumstances assaulting our progressive intentions to change the world, to find happiness, or to help others. Unfortunately, there is no yellow brick road out of this dream; it never seemed plausible so it was never conceived.
Yet, here we are listening to a choir of delegates, comrades, and supporters making excuses for the emotional abuses pitched around during manipulative tantrums. My father never hit me physically. My emotional scars were earned while watching a man lose his humanity to satisfy his insecurities. He didn’t mean it is now everywhere.
We cannot change the past. We cannot intend to correct for a mystifying future because we cannot focus on the random parading of corrupted logic. We must grow despite the odds. Time does not heal the emotional wounds we carry and it shouldn’t. Our wounds exist for a reason.
Unfettered abuse is the kindling driving our collective anxiety. We are not waking from this dream; reality has already slapped us awake. But fear is not our enemy; fear drives the pulse, expands the breath, and awakens the spirit to fight. Fear courses through our veins to give us focus and determination. Fear is survival. We only lose when we grow fearful and anxious. The will to thrive matters.
We seek, nah, we need support and meaning especially now. Our time on this planet is too short to accept the abusers as friends. Darkness can only grow if light and truth are absent. We must recognize we are living in this moment in time for a reason, with a purpose, to throw light into the darkest corners where abuse thrives. The past is too present in the now.
As a community, we must gather to bring our voices into the light. Share our stories. Stand together. Give strength where hope has been lost, and to love all with open hearts and arms. We must fight open palms with compassion and kindness and not turn our backs to the shadows who haunt our waking dreams. Be heard is our cry. The beacon of wisdom, sanity, and conviction for which we are frantically searching will never be found; it must be forged by the choir of our wounded voices sharing the stories, the trials, and the effects of abuse on the human spirit.
Defeat is only a belief rooted in a false win-lose continuum. Why limit how we see outcomes when the spark to create change is the real plot of the story? Defeat, like suffering, is a choice. Stop denying the abuse because you only legitimize the abusers. They don’t need the help.
I choose to transform the fog into a force of nature instead of a prison. I resolve to sing with my wounded ensemble so our chant—you matter, we matter, I’m here for you—becomes an earworm steeping into the collective consciousness like It’s a Small World permeates the happiest place on Earth. I accept fear as the spark to propel us into action, and I vow to show love, gratitude, kindness, and acceptance within my community. Disappointed but never defeated, the only way you lose is to stop respecting yourself.