The Women We Failed – A Poem

A girl sitting in a dark corner,

she was trying to realise her dreams,

with the society burying her under expectations,

since the time she learned how to breathe.

Her head bows down in sorrow,

for in herself she doesn’t believe,

her heart has been crumbled to pieces,

for its drained of love and filled with insecurities.

There hasn’t been a day in life,

that she’s felt good enough,

the monsters of her failed past,

have been haunting her ailing heart.

So she cries herself to sleep every night,

and wakes up each morning with a smile,

with the stains of tears on her pillow case,

she rises only so that she could try again.

Try again to fit in to the so – called life,

to be considered beautiful and a delight,

to live up to society’s image,

to demolish every inch of what she truly is from within.

She’s turning into an emotional wreck,

hiding behind the perfectly done eyes,

struggling to keep herself maintained,

failing to fulfil the desires her soul contains.

Congratulations to us as a society,

for there’s yet another woman we failed,

she who could have done so much more,

but was restricted by the mind games we played.

But that time will soon befall,

the new little girls will stand strong and tall,

building images of themselves above us and beyond,

breaking any stereotype set for her at all.

And that is when our women will be liberated,

from the shackles of the chains our society created,

no work, body size or color will matter,

and no dreams will be too big or shattered.

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The Burden of Expectations

They often say in life, your greatest enemies are not the ones who live around you to put you down, but it is the demons that reside inside your head. You are what you are today because of the greatest gift given to mankind, a mindset and a thought process. We as humans are mere puppets dancing to the strings of our feelings and hopes. There exists an entire different universe in our minds, which is constantly fighting a battle trying to decipher between the right and the wrong. And to top it, everyone has their own set of beliefs and expectations. And expectations, as they say, is the root cause of all evil. And more often than that they say, you will end up very disappointed if you grow up thinking that everyone is going to have the same heart as you. A line so simple, yet so insightful and powerful.

For the only thing that can affect you in ways undefined, and is the underlying foundation of all those sorrows and tough times, are expectations. Expectations out of your own self, or even worse, expectations out of those around, or the worst of all, expectations of out those for whom you are proudly willing to burn those bridges for. Expectations break your heart piece by piece, when they’re not even understood, let alone be fulfilled. There are people in life, who give too much of their soul to someone, and expect a soul in return. But two people never think alike and an eye for an eye is not everyone’s philosophy in life. But people who are kind always believe there’s a good in others, and those who have been hurt in life let go of the idea of trust altogether. That’s why often those who love the hardest end up being wounded and cut through the deepest.

Often, the biggest mistake we end up making is believing that you’re going to get exactly what you give. While the probability of getting less in return is always more, but lucky are those who have their expectations surpassed and filled above all. We often end up going great lengths for certain people presuming that they would do the same for us if the tables ever turned. But people define priorities with infinite combinations, and the one you rank up as the first may not even give you a five or a nine. As a result of these expectations, we end up dwelling deeper into ourselves to find faults within us. We sink deeper into the well of over thinking and let go of the peace inside us. And this entire act of expecting and being let down ends only in one way, being crippled into feelings of loneliness and destruction of your own self-worth. For it is a tendency of the human life, to feel unworthy when you see yourself not being loved in the way you would like love to be defined.

But is life so unimportant to be defined by things that never came your way? Absolutely not. The other aspects of life are to move on or to reform. To move on from things and people who make you feel low, to things and people who help you grow or most importantly, to a version of yourself that requires no sort of approvals validation. Or to transform yourself into engaging yourself with selflessness, doing away with the concept of returns and believing in the power of endless giving. For you may have many more lives yet to live, but the one in the present deserves to be lived happily and to the fullest.