Believe in Your Bravery

tyunglebower ♦ February 6, 2022 ♦ 1 Comment

Believe in your bravery in all tenses. You won’t merely be brave, you have already been so. Yes, you’ve cut corners or embellished your story here and there–so have we all.

Yet you know that life at times has lacerated you, fattened your lip, broken your nose, chipped your teeth: all in ways the world delegitimizes.

You’ve taken bullets and fallen on swords that society refuses to see. It may have been out of reflex. It may have been in service to what you felt was the greater good. Or it may have been what you thought was expected of you.

You chose to suffer in silence, or others implicitly and explicitly silenced you. This might have numbed you to the pain of your own invisible wounds and travails–so much so you internalize the toxic positivity of the statement, “You are not a victim.” Well, you have permission to define victim however you need to, and to identify as such, if only to yourself.

You are not weak just because society has ignored your strengths. You are not always fine merely because your pain confuses others. You are not selfish because somebody on this planet has it worse than you do.

You are you, and you’re still here, reading this, thinking over what it might mean. So you haven’t lost yet, and you won’t lose by accepting your own boundaries of peace and safety.

It takes courage to do all of this, day in and day out. You don’t have to wonder about becoming brave; you are, and have been already. Proceed accordingly. Believe in your own bravery.

It’s nobody else’s damned business.