There was a time, not too many years ago, when I had thought that there was nothing much else to fight for in the world. I mean, when I looked around myself—around the cocoon that I then inhabited—a lot of things were alright. Not perfect, perhaps, but alright. And that there were few things—women’s rights apart—that warranted a battle. I would even mope in private about how I was born at the wrong time in history when all the biggest issues have already been dealt with and there was nothing much left for my generation to do; like I had been denied the opportunity to put some wrong right and change the world; well, denied a good fight, at the least.

I did say I inhabited a cocoon, didn’t I?

And now, when I look around the world I inhabit, I don’t even know where to begin the fight… or perhaps, I have been at it for so long already, I don’t see it as a fight anymore. It is just a way being.
Perhaps, at least some of the battles you pick—you have to pick them, because there are simply so many—are the ones you make a part of your lives. You don’t announce them, you don’t march for them, you don’t plaster posters for them, or (sigh) write Facebook rants about them, but you fight them every day, every waking hour. And sometimes these battles are fought in the confines of your own solitary mind.
There are days, and nights, when you question every thing you are doing, question the need for these unending hostilities, the futility of all the effort and pain and heartache. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply give in? Give up? Raise a white rag and say, ‘You win’?

But how do you then live with yourself for the rest of your life?