How is someone supposed to identify the cause of their pain if they have no conceptualization, or no marker, or no standards of what happiness is?

They were hurting.

They knew they were hurt,

but they didn’t know where,

because they didn’t know love,

and they couldn’t understand pain.

How was a child supposed to

discover the undiscovered,

know the unknown,

think the unthinkable,

learn the unlearned,

and intellectualize the “lessons”

with the eyes and brain only capable of rose colored lenses?

How was a child supposed to

live a life,

learn what’s been unlearned for centuries,

feel the pain of thousands,

ache for a lifetime,

go to school for a third of the day,

sleep for another third,

deal with psychological torture for the rest,

and burden themselves with the pains

of their fathers, mothers, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and further relatives and ancestors,

but shoulder the weight of the world without complaints, or sadness?

In the end,

how can the world, and fate, expect a child

to live a life for the burdens of thousands

and incur the weight of a life who only hurt them?

How can the world, and fate, expect a child

to live a life against their own volition,

and come back like nothing happened?

How can the world, and fate, expect a child

to live a life filled with confusion, emptiness, apathy, fear, and debilitating suffering,

and expect them to be a sacrificial lamb?

And the child’s world demands with audacity

that the sacrificed child remains docile

until a sudden push out of the door reiterates

the backhanded sentiment that “you should take care of your elders”.

The pain of the child snuffed away into a cupboard for some time

before the pain of the teenager and adult moved in.

However, the pain of the child merely stayed dormant until the volcano erupted:

the raw emotions of anger, resentment, loneliness, depression, anxiety, fear, and unfathomable levels of mixed emotions start dismantling the person’s reality one piece at a time.

Most of the time, these unresolved issues and emotions never gain closure,

for they remain at the back of our lives each day of our lives as we inevitably have to continue living anyways.

In life, we moved on.

But in our psyches, we haven’t moved on.

Our thoughts continue to remain a blurry and clouded blob of emotions and feelings that will take centuries to untangle,

but for the meanwhile, we meet new people, start families, travel abroad, enjoy new lunch snacks, and try new clothes.

The cycle, of a parentified child’s life, will inevitably repeat itself,

but only given that nothing changes.

We can either choose to live everyday without introspective efforts and allow the cycle to repeat in pain, or we can decide to better ourselves, not only for our own futures, but for the futures, happinesses, joys, and dreams of several succeeding generations to come.