On this very day, something unimaginable happened. I found myself thinking a thought I never thought possible.

It was a morning like any other. As I washed myself clean of the day prior to start another, my mind wandered. It wandered to the future and to the past. It wandered to think of my loved ones, in all the good and the bad.

It wandered to tell me of possible troubles which may lie ahead. But mainly, it wandered in its anxieties to find the one aspect of my life which has been proven to be outside my control: The will of others.

This undeniable will of the others around me is what accounts for all the worries which stir in my mind. Just like you and I, they have the freedom to think their own thoughts and have their own feelings and make the choices which will define who they are. But why do we let this affect us so deeply that we give such power to the will of others to make us who we are?

Why do we concern ourselves with the impossible feat of guess-working how others will react?

Imagine a place where no one did so, and they were truly free to make the choices they desired without the looming dread of external impacts. Who and where would we be? Would we be completely unencumbered in our paths to find ourselves? And would we even have such a phrase as to “find ourselves,” if there would be no pressure from others to be someone else?

And what is this pressure we feel to be a person another can be proud of and to seek this validation from others? There is no real elephant bearing its weight on our heads or our chest, telling us to be a person who eats this or that, or to speak only when one is so sure of the validity of the words with which they react.

Does this pressure come from our adolescence, as we are raised by individuals who we admire, and those who hold us to the highest standards?

Does it come from the scars we carry from uncomfortable moments… when we felt shame or guilt for choosing to be ourselves?

Does it come from the moments when someone may have spoken a series of words directed at us, which made us think less of ourselves?

So, I ask again, why is it that we give such power to the whims of others who are each struggling with the same facts?

If we look closely, we can see a pattern emerge that is incomprehensible beyond our imagination: Each individual who we let influence our life and our actions, lives with the same burdens with which we live and act.

They all worry and cry of the same burdens.

They lose sleep over these same burdens, as they let their minds wander and carry them to places where their bodies quite literally feel physical pain, simply from reenacting those moments which cause them great distress. Or, as they think the dreadful thoughts of the future which are unknown to them at any given moment. They lose this sleep despite knowing that they could escape those burdens were they to drift into their dreams, where we are free from worry of these lively burdens.

If only we could be as free in life as we are in our dreams, we could settle in a place in which we have the reasoning to acknowledge the pain we all suffer in our daily activities. And this place would be free of anticipations of rejection and unpleasant encounters.

In reality, we would not question our words or our choices without the context of what another person might think of them. We would not question the fates of our futures were we to not to give any worry to what others might do to destroy them. We would not wonder what we could have done differently if we were to accept that the will of others is too strong a force to allow it to crush our own. Nor would we wonder the same were we to accept that the thoughts and actions of others are outside our control.

And try as we might to influence those individuals with our inputs, still, we cannot determine the resolve of another, just as we cannot know the thoughts of another.

Some individuals do and will try to exert their will upon others. They will be cunning, and ruthless in their efforts. They will speak some phrase which will ring in our ears, stew in our minds, and make us question the very nature of our souls. They will force us to doubt what we think of others around us. They will coerce us into thinking thoughts which we never would have once imagined, had they not spoken the words which rendered us so powerless against our own.

And once they have reached the effect they were looking for, they will exercise this power and wield their swords above us, as we bow to the potency of their words. And we live according to the feelings which they imposed upon our sense of being. Their words do not heal us, but instead they damage our sense of selves. This undue influence is unadulterated evil, and it is pure dystopia, and we are all hastily and willingly swimming in it.

And yet, all at once, we, too, are this evil to others.

In this description, you may picture a cult leader of sorts, brainwashing away the will and sanity of people across the world. But I do not reference any single person. This entity of which I write is simply a culmination of every single word you have ever heard, or you have read, or which has been spoken to you, from the day you were born, up until you read these words.

And I acknowledge the irony of writing these sentences, as I, too, am an external source who is writing the words that you read in an effort to influence your train of thinking. And I encourage you to take each one with a grain of salt – for, only you can and should derive the meanings which lie in between these words.

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*Any writing, ideas and art (or images thereof) you find in this post or on the site were created by Ahka Rhash ©