A life of constant insecurity is led by people living under the
claws of war. Everything appears imminent but nothing is indeed. A life to be
lived at the precipice. A baseless internal hope that things might be fixed the
coming morning. A substantiated fear that things might get worse the coming
day. Abrupt internal shifts of hope and despair causes internal agitation.
Weariness becomes the constant. An ongoing plight, a seemingly endless
distortion, a progressively deteriorating life, render one’s senses unable to
sense. The inability manifests due to the difficulty of comprehending the
situation. Our brains aim to find patterns that seem sensible, then lead our
bodies according to those patterns, but when the brain fails to do so for some
time, it might lose its pattern recognition capacity as everything around seems
“chaotic”.
The beautiful morning cup of tea becomes a tasteless colored liquid
that is sipped in a ritualistic way. The stroll to the market is a forced
activity replete of internal humiliation, as the hopes of being capable of sustaining
minimal rations to stay alive, dwindle day by day. Terrified faces all around.
Hopelessness mirrored at every corner. The muscles that allow one to smile seem
to have atrophied as they are present but unused. Children no longer ask where
will they enjoy their weekend, but if they will live till the weekend. A
teenager no longer thinks of revenging on his classmate who tackled him on the
football game yesterday, but what will his father do to pay the rent of the house,
as it seems they will be removed before he can have another physical education
class. A junior student no longer wonders on the smile of the gentle guy who
shared his pen, but she finds herself wondering when the miserable grimaces of
her younger siblings shall fade. The sunset is no longer a divine beauty, but
rather a path to a darkening sky sending a heartbreaking sign of another closed
door, which might have led to the chest of hope.
The sweet outlines of normal daily routines are invaded. The
background that gives life to actions is suspended. The very slight nuances
that happen are no longer experienced. Internal apathy accumulates and
suffocates. As an arrogant neuroscientist would say, “it seems that the
receptors on the neurons that make one experience some form of pleasure have
been ‘down-regulated’, and it seems that the neurons are insensitive, rendering
the person ‘apathetic’”.
The impact is extensive. Just like a depressed person wonders how
people might be experiencing pleasure, a person living between the canines of
war may wonder what life without war is. The inability to see anything beyond
it can takeover. The constant fear, and the intensifying despair “rewires” the
brain. The intensity of the situation hijacked the mental apparatus fully, even
though it has experienced some form of life before being hijacked. The capacity
of looking back at pleasant memories could be lost. Darkness triumphs. A
depressed person can ask himself if he was ever happy, so can a person who
lives in an ongoing war ask himself if he ever slept peacefully.
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