Teenage Veracity

the battle of heart and mind

I've reached the point where I must face the greatest battle in life—the battle of my heart and my mind.

They say using our hearts conquers all, and others say using our brains rules everything else. I don't know what to do. It's impossible to balance the things that navigate your life. 

If our mind is too much, we are painted as someone who has no heart. If our hearts are too big, we are painted as someone who does not think at all. If we lack thinking, we are offering ourselves to be easy prey. If we lack kindness, we are offering ourselves to be mischievous predators.

If we use the other thing, we forget to use the other thing. One should always prevail; if not, we are stuck in nothing.

The world is the home of innocent offenders, and I need to build rational bars to protect myself from being a hole in their strings. I need to use my mind. But when I use my mind, I can't recognize myself. 

When you are trying to protect yourself, you are making logical defenses, and oftentimes the defenses are cruel. I'm done being an innocent participant, and for that to never happen again, I need to control the game even if the means offend the highest and its workers. 

What can I do? It's the world that's cruel, and if I'm not going to use my head, I'm going to be a slave to their selfish intentions. I want to be fair, but the world will never be fair. So, I need to learn to be unfair to afford the fare to a better life.

But it's not easy. The guilt is always eating me alive. One vicious decision led to sleepless nights of guilt. I've made a lot of vicious decisions, so that means I have been awake for a long time now. I'm still going to make a lot of vicious decisions, so I guess I'm going to be awake forever. 

You know, they often tell me I'm smart, and I guess I am. I never knew that being smart also meant being a discreet villain, learning to cut the veins of your heart to feel nothing.

That's only fair to me. I've come a long way to build delicate barriers, and if I let them abuse my heart, I'll be nothing again. I need to decide who I want to be, and that requires my mind, and our mind is the only one who gives us a logical definition of who we are down to everything that we do. I need to be smart, or else people will outsmart me. I can't live in inferiority. It'll only make me worse.

But it's beating. My heart is beating. It's beating so loud that my head can only hear its beat. It's trying to compete with rationality. Its beat is like a wave that is always reaching for the shore. The shore is my mind. 

Its softness embraces the hardness of what I stand for. It never stopped beating, no matter how hard I tried to eradicate its influence. The haze of love fills my mind, and it never fades, and that's the reason why I still have a soft spot for everything.

The world is a rotten place, but it is full of hopeful people. Their present is painted by their history, and every history is painted with different bittersweet experiences. 

It's not their fault. If we all came from the same good and sensible environment, they would never hurt us. They are just trying to survive, and they are saving themselves in a way that they think will save them, no matter how cruel it is. Sometimes, that's what I do.

My mind pushes me to understand, but my heart pushes me to understand with compassion. It's two different things that lead to different outcomes. 

I want to use my heart more frequently because, deep inside, I believe that love can change ruthless patterns. If the world is filled with so much love, something will change. We are here to love, and to understand the depths of its definition is to fully surrender your mind to death.

My heart is the reason I am alive. My heart gives me the real meaning of living, and it has always opened my eyes to see what truly matters. The world is rotten enough to add our stink to it and that's why I still want to walk with my heart and spread its scent to the world. In that way, we are spreading hope in the face of hopelessness. What will this world be made of without kindness?

But when I love, I constantly ignore the signs of what I should deserve. I love so much that my mind tells me 'enough'. But I still want to love. I want love to radiate so that they will think and see that love still exists, though I'm becoming weary while waiting for them to realize that. Still, I want to fight.

I never built love but love built itself because it's that powerful. I believe that it's always there. I believe that it's always in our hearts. It was there first. Our hearts beat first, so that means that we are capable of loving and showing kindness. 

It's just unfortunate that we chose to desert it with an eloquent explanation. The world praises people who use their minds. We are afraid to appear soft. We are afraid to be seen as someone who is capable of loving because it's not cool. We are afraid to show that we care because that means that we are susceptible to a lot of things. We shake our heads at vulnerability.

It's hard. It's hard to love because loving means giving a part of yourself without getting the same love back, and what does that leave us? 

Instead, we are always suffering from it. We don't want that. It will make us pitiful. They will say that we are pitiful and that we need to think more. We think that we deserve more, and if we give love, they should return it because that's what we deserve. But that's not how our hearts work. It's always ready to accept nothing and still continue to let it work no matter how many arrows we're thrown just to give love. 

No wonder a lot of people have bruised hearts. No wonder a lot of people work with their heads. No wonder this battle never ends.