Holding Space: With Clear Eyes, Scarred Hands

Choosing Survival Without Permission

The world does not ask your consent before breaking itself. Violence is not an anomaly, and it is not polite. It comes in tides and sharp angles, sometimes slowly with warning, sometimes fast without mercy. There may be days when you will be asked to stand under the blade, even if you never sought it, even if you thought you lived far from any battlefield. There may be days when you will hear the unspoken demand: bleed so others can feel clean.

You will hear noble words spoken in those moments—some true, some hollow. Words about standing together. Words about sacrifice. Words about courage. Some of those words will lift you when you need them most. Others will weigh on you like stones, pushed into your hands by people who will not stand beside you when the knife falls.

It is a beautiful thing to choose to stand for others. It is one of the finest things a human being can do. It must never be demanded, never coerced, never manufactured by guilt. True solidarity—the kind that matters—is offered freely, not extracted under threat of moral condemnation. You are not selfish for surviving. You are not cowardly for refusing to die on someone else’s schedule.

There is a seductive pull toward martyrdom, especially when the world is visibly unjust. It is easy to believe that noble deaths can heal ugly wounds. That if you bleed correctly, suffer loudly enough, some wrong will be righted. Sometimes, in rare moments, they are. More often, the system swallows blood and asks for more. Most sacrifices are unremembered. Most martyrs are turned into footnotes. An unremembered martyr is just another victim.

Survival, even when it is quiet and unnoticed, is an act of rebellion against the world’s machinery of consumption and disposal. To endure after the collapse of systems, after the betrayal of institutions, is not selfishness. It is resistance in its oldest form: to remain, to rebuild, to refuse annihilation.

When you carry a weapon, when you make plans to defend yourself and those you love, you are not preparing to be a hero. You are refusing to let your story be ended by someone else’s convenience. You are refusing to let your blood become proof of your virtue. You are choosing to live through the storm, to carry scars if you must, to build again when building seems impossible.

There will always be voices—some angry, some grieving—that tell you it is selfish to choose life while others suffer. They will say your endurance is betrayal. They will say your survival mocks their losses. But survival is not selfishness. It is the refusal to disappear quietly. It is the slow, stubborn work of carrying what others abandoned. It is the chance to build again, when mourning alone was not enough.

There are other ways to walk. There are those who refuse violence altogether, believing that no scar left by a weapon can heal what was broken in the first place. There are those who offer their lives freely for the survival of the group, accepting self-sacrifice as the purest loyalty. There are those who still believe the broken systems can be mended from within, and that endurance comes through patience, not confrontation.

I honor those roads, even if I do not walk them now. I chose this path for the time being—shaped by assumptions and beliefs that are not beyond scrutiny, not beyond revision. Clear eyes do not mean unmoving feet. Scarred hands do not mean closed fists.

Defense is justified. Violence is inevitable. Some enemies refuse peace. Every act of survival leaves a mark—on the world, and on yourself. These are not stone laws. They are working notes, provisional guides through broken terrain. You may find yourself at odds with them someday.

That, too, is survival. Stand if you must. Bleed if you must. Live if you can. But choose with your own heart—not someone else’s command. Your life is not their prop. Your death is not their absolution. Your survival is not their failure. There are no pure endings.

There are only scarred hands and clear eyes, carrying what must be carried, walking forward because there is no other way worth walking. You survive—not because it is easy. Not because it is clean. But because it is still yours to choose.