Victor vs. Victim

Life is beautiful. There is laughter, there is love, there is pleasure, but there is also pain. There are times when you wake up in the morning and you don’t know how you could possibly go on. Moments so horrible that they steal the breath from your body. Relentlessly it will seem, wave after wave will keep coming. Knocking you down into the glass-like sand until you feel one with the jagged rocks and sticky mud on the sea floor.

            When this happens, and I say when not if, when this happens you have two options. You can stay on that sea floor and become a victim of your circumstances. You can become a sea creature of the depths and learn to navigate in a world with no light. You can let your environment suck the color from your skin and the light from your eyes. You can grow gills in your neck. Constantly starving and fighting for what little sustenance there is down in the trenches. Or, you can fight your way back to the top. You can look around at the darkness and determine that you, in fact, do not belong at the bottom of the ocean. You can get out from under the oppressive weight of the sea. You can decide that you like the way your skin glistens in the sun.

Once you decide you do not belong at the bottom, you will have to embark on the fight of your life. You have to claw your way through the layers of the sea, all the while feeling like your lungs will burst from lack of oxygen. They’ll be times you’ll think the surface is close only to find it’s still far from reach. You’ll want to give up. You’ll think growing gills and living in a sunless world wouldn’t be so bad. It would be easier to simply sink back down to the bottom. You’ll doubt you have what it takes to make it to the surface. You’ll forget what you are fighting for and why the sun on your skin felt so good.

But what sets apart a victim and a victor is not that victims have doubts and fears and victors don’t. Everyone will doubt. Everyone will fear. Everyone at some point will curse the hard road laid out before them. The difference is victims let those thoughts sink them. A victor may get to the bottom, may even drift back down after trying to get to the top, but they will keep swimming up. They’ll keep swimming through the water that feels like mud until their muscles are carved of steel. The victor knows who they are, they know they belong in the sun. And no matter how long it takes, they’ll fight on until they feel it on their skin again.