revisited “batman begins” after a years.
was a kid when i watched it.

even since the death of his parents,
young bruce puts the blame on himself.
the thought germinated in his mind as a kid,
and he clung onto it as he grew.
he still bears the guilt.

and what he did was bury the guilt with anger.
“my anger outweighs my guilt”, he says.
but ra’s al ghul tells him he’ll teach bruce to
overcome his guilt by confronting it.

well, the rest of what happens isn’t that noteworthy in my opinion,
cause ra’s just shifts the blame onto thomas wayne,
because he didn’t act.

why i noticed this is because,
whenever we go through tough situations,
what we tend to do is we bury it.
we are told to “shrug it off”, “deal with it”, “quit being a sock”.
it’s something normal.
and we pretend like it’s nothing.

we know the scars haven’t healed,
and they still are there.
but we gotta keep moving.
everyone knows we should deal with it,
but we don’t know how.

so we distract ourselves with stuff.
numb ourselves with media.
adopt questionable coping methods
that seem like it’s working,
but introduce more hurt in the long term.
we resort to anger and hatred.

on the surface,
it seems like everything’s okay.
no problems at sight.
so we go on living our life.
until one day, a slight reminder in the form of a remark,
a bruising memory, an image -
and then it all comes crashing down.

in this fast-paced world,
no one can be left behind.
so we keep on running.
running to new goals.
and running away from ourselves.

but is running away and distracting yourself
the answer?
or is being compassionate to yourself,
owning up to your doings,
yet treating yourself kindly, without bashing yourself,
and befriending yourself
the way?

i’m no expert.
i too have problems following my own advice.
but i have renounced the old ways of being hard on myself.
compassion must start from ourselves.