The Hidden War

The most violent, gory, cruel and costly war that I witness daily is not fought on land, sea or air. It happens inside the borders of my own mind. It is a civil war, which means the enemy never fully stands “over there.” The lines do not hold. The protagonist and the antagonist swap masks. The crime and the punishment blur into each other. I cannot always tell who is defending me and who is prosecuting me, and that uncertainty is why the war continues.

I carry the guilt of having blood on my hands—the blood of good moments, good instincts, good versions of me that could have lived longer if I had chosen better, understood more deeply, or had the strength at the right hour. I have lost innumerable good soldiers to bad decisions, incomplete understanding, exhaustion, and fear disguised as strategy. Sometimes the fighting is trench warfare—slow, muddy, and repetitive. Sometimes it breaks out in the open, as if the whole sky can see the humiliating battle I cannot stop.

The war is hard to map because it involves espionage. It involves backstabbing. It involves sabotage at every level. Allies turn into infiltrators. Weapons I reach for in desperation sometimes fire backward. The mind issues intelligence reports that justify today’s choices and condemn tomorrow’s self. There are entire operations inside me running on false briefings, missing context, and forged loyalties.

There is no stable authority that can preside over the ethics of this war. No court of justice I can appeal to. No international committee that can condemn the atrocities and impose consequences. National security is always at risk. The fighting continues while I am awake, and it leaks into sleep, because the battlefield is the place I am.

I am often running low on ammunition because my arsenal is finite: attention, restraint, patience, clarity, self-respect—these supplies run out. Sometimes I’m able to hold the line. Sometimes one well-timed act like an honest admission, a pause, courage or clear communication becomes a refusal to feed the loop and changes the outcome. But this war punishes delay. If I cannot tell which weapon fits which moment, I risk losing key territory: the day itself, my relationships, my ability to work, my focus. It feels like being outmaneuvered by something older than my reason and faster than my will, something built for survival that never seems to tire. Some call it samskara.

And then there is chemical warfare. A person, a room, a memory, a meal, a hunger, a touch—any of them can alter the chemistry in my mind. Dopamine runs misinformation campaigns, luring attention away from the real front. Adrenaline and cortisol can place the whole nation under emergency law. Oxytocin can broker trust for an hour and abandonment for the next. Endorphins are field anesthetics, keeping the troops moving through wounds they never properly got to feel. And before I even understand what I am feeling, the air inside me has changed, one story is armed, another is disarmed, and innocence is once again made to pay for the promise of relief.

Short-term victories do happen. I announce them to myself like a ceasefire: today was good, we held the line, we built a bridge. And then the war returns—sometimes the next day, sometimes within hours. Another reason rises. Another threat is perceived. Another old wound is triggered. Another lie sounds like protection. Another punishment dressed as justice. The more I try to banish certain thoughts, the more they return with reinforcements.

Nothing feels off-limits. Civilians are targeted: the parts of me that only want to love, to play, to rest, to trust. Infrastructure is targeted: sleep, routine, the basic systems that keep a life livable. Sometimes even the supply lines are cut—the smallest sources of steadiness and care. And one side seems to have endless ammunition, while the other lives in survival mode: running for shelter, scanning for danger, trying to make it back to daylight with something still human left in its hands.

Sometimes I contemplate the nuclear option: the annihilation of the battlefield itself since no one inside is innocent—everyone is a war criminal.

And still, I call it a holy war.

I'd like to think, maybe it’s not about destruction after all. Maybe it is about a buried thing in me that refuses to die, even after being shelled, starved, and betrayed by its own side. I do not know what to call that. Beneath all the smoke, all the sabotage, and all the casualties, I still hope that someday a protagonist will arise to end the civil war by gathering what is fractured into something whole.