Hope

whimsical wonderland

To all the warriors of their battles, whatever the war is,  do not be afraid to face the real monster --- the monster that lives in your head. 

All my life, I have been an incomplete canvas; a creation that was thrown in a room full of undecided plans .. and long forgotten. I was as empty as a void in a universe waiting for something to fill it. Maybe it explains why I am always longing for something to fill me. But I have learned to build firm walls as I was met with unpredictable hurts. Sometimes, I wonder if I was already fully equipped with armor to get numb by the pain life has always been blessing me with.

On the contrary, the outlet I was left with was a blank paper, a wandering mind, and a pen that fought uncut chapters and pages. But all throughout the years of being exposed in a library with various readers, I have come to see that I was only stored in the corner – sometimes in the front — but no one batted an eye to get curious and come to my row of books, and choose me, and keep me in their own bookshelf. I don't have an idea of what it feels like to be chosen because someone out there likes you for you.

As the time passed by, I have grown like Alice in Alice in Wonderland. I had lived in my own realm of fantasies coming to life. There was a talking cat that talks to me in ways I would always get intrigued. There was the Mad Hatter that loved to annoy me all the time I was there. There was the Red Queen – but in my world, she was never tainted with wounds from her childhood – she was a nice red queen that treated all people in Wonderland with fairness and love. In my world, she was just an innocent amicable lady with a crown she likes to wear every time she wanders about the garden of roses.

As I grew up and made friends like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, Thackery Earwicket, and the White Rabbit, I learned to wear my own kind of armor to fight the Jabberwocky. Thus preparing myself for a battle that put my life at stake. All my friends were looking at me. I felt the strong breeze of the wind touch the strands of my hair. I sensed that the Cheshire cat was intently looking at me even though it was invisible in the air. I could not disappoint them. But winning this war means losing them. And I didn't want to wake up from my dream yet.

It was then that I realized I was Alice all along. I wished for something to happen and I woke up in a huge castle with a bottle of potion waiting for me to drink. I was inside my own book hence it was full of things I desired the most – the things that were hidden in my subconscious mind where I would be accepted, and be seen as a brave warrior that everyone would look up to. And in a plot twist, I was also the Red Queen – a representation of someone who had to be mean behind the cruelty of the past that made her life full of revenge and anguish.

In hindsight, I was just a book waiting for the right reader. I got lost white waiting for someone to find me. And I got drowned by my own fantasies. But I still had to wake up from a dream that wasn't even real. I was a living novel with unfinished pages and an empty published book. But I learned it the hard way that I was the warrior that I had been wanting to be. I was my own version of Alice who fought the Red Queen's Jabberwocky – I was, in reality — fighting my own kind of monstrous hideous reality of life's struggles, antagonistic hurdles, and pain. I just have to feel it, and let things be. I don't have to control it to prove to anyone how strong I am – instead I just have to control how I would respond to things that would come into my life. And I am my own Alice; a warrior, a dreamer, and a queen in different circumstances.