The War of Peace

Are our desires really honest reflections of who we are?

Makes sense?

I've always felt misunderstood. From a young age to my adult years, I've never felt that there was anyone that could relate to any thought or feeling I had. My expressions would often arrive as a simplified version of how I truly felt, even that never felt like enough. I always felt this deep desire to finally be understood by someone you know? Well at least I thought I did.

I encountered someone a few years back. Therapy session. Very unique. Beyond my slick words and creative sentence structures that would usually confuse any person remotely interested in who I am as a person, her empathy alone was enough to decipher every word I used. To my surprise, I felt that she was living through every sentence I tried to construct. It wasn't right. Made me feel insecure, because who is Benjamin without mystery, who is Benjamin without enigma, who is Benjamin when he's understood? From that moment I made it my mission to lay traps of misdirection and throw her off the trail.

Looking back, that moment revealed something unsettling about myself, but it made me understand something important: Pain tolerance should always be met with a strong desire and will to fight against it. To eventually overcome it. The ability to simply stay alive inside pain can look noble, but without the desire to move beyond it, survival mentality slowly turns into identity. People who endure long term emotional pressure often build identity structures around endurance. We grow comfortable being the warrior in a war where peace feels contradictory to our character. Goodness feels like foreign territory. Being understood feels like self-betrayal. 

And if that’s the case… were we ever truly searching for peace, or were we just searching for a better way to survive the war?