Dear Nameless Child

Dear nameless child,

I hope that you know – or will realize at some point – that what the world keeps trying to convince you of, that it is not safe for you to live a life free of control, is a lie. This lie is manufactured and perpetuated by a society that actively benefits from your subjugation.

So much money and effort are spent to keep perpetuating that murderous lie. So much blood – blood of other children, whose only crimes ranged from being born to asserting with vigor that their lives are their own – has been spilled to reinforce this ideology. Adults need a regime of fear and control, for without it, they’d be nothing more than a bundle of what their parents did to them and their parents before them.

You might ask yourself, if it is natural that because adults are bigger and they are stronger, they deserve to brand you as something they can use, as clay to mold into a creation to show off to other adults, as a doll to dress up and throw against the wall if its disk of «I am so grateful» or «thank you mommy and daddy» breaks or becomes distorted. Why can they only reinforce it through mindless violence? Violence when you stay up too late, violence when you forget to do your homework, violence when they don’t like your friends, violence when your heart tells you the clothes they dressed you in do not fit or never did. Why do blood ties need blood to sustain themselves?

I hope you will realize that if you ever wonder why you seem smarter than they are, it’s because you are. When they talk about what those who are different «deserve» for their defiance, and it gives you chills, it’s because it’s horrifying. It’s true that «girls» and «boys» are made-up concepts. The idea that putting one’s elbows on the table is impolite, or that you need to drown in homework to be worthy of maybe having enough food to eat one day, is also a construct.

I hope that if you ever find yourself crying in bed late at night, you won’t feel ungrateful. No one is meant to be content as another’s plaything. I hope you will lie to them, chase your freedom, deceive them, take from them, and reject the message they forced upon you. If you do, you will be braver than any saint or god ever conceived. If you don’t, you will still be braver than any adult who would have their child hold up a sign that says, «please think of me as a thing.»

I hope that even when they try to take every scrap of your individuality, to tear away your skin and replace it with a camouflage to assuage their fear that the doll in their house might have its own will, you will find solace in your mind – a place they will never be able to penetrate and plunder. Imagine yourself free, and you will never be owned by anyone in a way that truly matters.