The battle we fight

The tragedy of life is, we never know the sufferings of others unless they cry.

Three days ago, to be precise on the day of diwali, I came across an Instagram handle (@vaishaki_Krishnan). A content creator who creates light hearted, funny , quirky wits that touches the malayali audience. As a malayali myself, I was able to enjoy her reels and the next few days I stalked this account. From reels, to stories …I checked everything (which includes her interview with @pinklungikerala).

While watching here reels, the one thing that annoyed me at first was her ceiling. The ceiling looked like the lead from ‘the elephant man’ and I wondered ‘why can’t spend a few bucks and make this ceiling look good ?’. Little did I know about the path she had been traveling on.

Her Instagram bio says ‘ The reason why I make video’ and has a arrow pointing at a link. And when I clicked that link, what I saw was the story about a completely different person. This wasn’t the person who made me laugh with her reels. A person carrying  the whole family on her shoulders. A person who is asking for donations for the treatment of her father. A person who has dreams of becoming an actress, but is forced to ( happily choose to) be there for her family.

Though she is carrying a lot of pain, nothing reflects on her face. As a viewer, we could only see her smiling/laughing face which shares happiness. And that is when I realised that, we humans won’t know anything about the suffering of others unless they cry.

Even if a person share their sufferings , since they had smile on their face,we might wrongly judge them to be fake. Very often we think of them to be strong, to be a fighter who is fighting a new battle everyday and yet never shows the pain of their battle wounds.