Never in my life did I believe the time would come for me to have to record this episode. I have buried these feelings deep, no matter how many times they attempted to resurface. This time, however, with a looming threat of an escalated war into a global affair, I believe we've had enough of pretending we didn't see these events coming.
We need to stop thinking that we have outgrown war. That we have understood its effects. That we will NOT do it again. Because every-time we do, somebody proves us WRONG.

My heart aches with the realization that we have yet again begun a cycle of destruction and hurt, on a mission to assert the ego of madmen that have long lost touch with their humanity. People who are in power because we cast our vote for them as they cast curtains over our eyes.

We need to accept the effects of war, such so we can begin to understand them, and thus begin a long yet conscious process of healing. This could be our path, of perhaps helping humanity evolve into the kind of humans we hope and crave to be. Peaceful.

As a citizen of a nation that has experienced war - a nation that has survived genocide and attempted ethnic cleansing - this open letter is a call to understand this deep trauma. A trauma that sits silently and quietly takes over our minds, our cultures. A trauma that was ruffled and brought our nation to an emotional stand-still and overwhelmed by the war in Ukraine - in seeing parents hold a strong grip on their children, fleeing from their countries and their futures brought to a full-stop, we saw ourselves. It is not the first time I've seen this image, not the first war that's happened since. It is not the first time I saw my 5-year-old self in every picture of a child shown escaping into the safety of neighborhood borders.

We do not understand how to preserve peace if we do not deeply understand what it means to destroy it. To lose it.

It becomes our duty to understand what happens to us as human beings when we experience these transgressions over our identities, our livelihood, and peace. It is us to understand what happens to us when we survive circumstances we were not meant to - or even worse, we were not intended to.

Our next step of evolution outside of these crude methods of establishing dominance can start now - or we wait until we do it again, worse each time, as technology precedes us and our imagination feeds into the egos of humans that represent a broken vision of humanity that we do not wish to perpetuate into our future.

We have asserted our survivor's instinct, and we have grown into true survivors, with real grit and integrity. We now need - as humanity - to lean into safety and comfort, lean into love and care.

If we as humans can share in each other's pain - then for sure we can also share in the light of safety and comfort, into the path of healing. 

And it all begins with awareness and understanding.