The Battles

Everyone out there is fighting a battle that most people know nothing about.

Some battles are visible. Illness. Financial struggles. Loss. But most of the important ones happen quietly. A person sits across from you smiling while questioning their entire future. Someone laughs at a joke while carrying grief they have not spoken about in years. Someone shows up to work every day, completes every task, appears perfectly functional, and still goes home feeling exhausted by a life that no longer feels like their own.

And somehow we learn very early how to hide these things.

The boy watches his father swallow emotions and learns that silence is strength. The girl watches her mother continue caring for everyone around her even when she is tired, overwhelmed, or hurting, and learns that her own needs can wait. We inherit these performances from the people before us. We learn how to say "I'm fine" before we learn how to explain what is actually wrong.

Sometimes I wonder how many of the battles we fight are truly ours.

A father spends his entire life worrying about money, and the son inherits the anxiety before he inherits the money. A mother spends years putting everyone else before herself, and the daughter learns sacrifice before she learns self-respect. Some battles begin with us. Many don't. They are passed down quietly through habits, fears, expectations, and ways of seeing the world. By the time we recognise them, they feel so familiar that we mistake them for our personality.

And perhaps that is why so many people keep fighting without even realising they are in a battle.

The exhausted person starts believing exhaustion is normal. The lonely person starts believing loneliness is adulthood. The unhappy person convinces themselves that this is simply how life is supposed to feel. Human beings are remarkably adaptable. We can adapt to almost anything, including things that are slowly hurting us. What begins as a temporary burden slowly becomes part of our identity.

Then something strange happens. When we finally recognise a battle in someone else, especially someone we love, we want to help. We see a friend struggling. A sibling making the same mistakes repeatedly. A parent carrying a burden they never talk about. A partner suffering through something they cannot seem to overcome. And because we care, we step into their battlefield.

At first, it feels like love. You listen. You advise. You support. You spend hours thinking about solutions. You carry parts of their worries with you. You lose sleep over problems that are not technically yours. Their battle slowly becomes part of your daily life.

And sometimes that is necessary. Nobody gets through life completely alone. We all need people who sit beside us when things become difficult. We all need reminders that someone is in our corner. Some of the heaviest moments in life become bearable simply because another person chose to stay.

But there is a difficult lesson hidden inside all of this.

You cannot fight a battle for someone who refuses to fight it themselves.

You can support them. You can guide them. You can love them. You can remind them of their strength when they have forgotten it. But you cannot do the work on their behalf. You cannot heal a wound they keep reopening. You cannot solve a problem they refuse to acknowledge. You cannot drag someone towards a life they do not want enough to walk towards themselves.

And sometimes the hardest battles are not against strangers. They are against people we deeply love. A parent. A sibling. A partner. A friend.

People often assume that love means endless tolerance. That if someone is struggling, we should keep making room for behaviour that hurts us. But understanding someone's pain does not mean surrendering your boundaries to it.

Sometimes the people we love are fighting battles that make them impatient, angry, controlling, distant, or careless. We can have compassion for their struggle without accepting the damage it causes. We can understand why they behave the way they do without allowing that behaviour to become normal in our own lives.

Because love is not the absence of boundaries.

In many ways, love demands them.

Perhaps that is why the Mahabharata begins with hesitation.

Arjuna's greatest conflict was never the battle itself. It was the people standing on the other side. Teachers he respected. Friends he grew up with. Family connected by blood. His struggle was not whether he knew how to fight. His struggle was whether he could bring himself to fight people he loved.

Most difficult battles are not fought against enemies.

They are fought against people we care about.

The lesson was never that relationships do not matter. The lesson was that love alone cannot determine what is right. Sometimes caring for someone and opposing them can exist at the same time. Sometimes the people closest to us are the very people we must stand against when they cross a boundary, demand a version of life we do not want, or ask us to sacrifice something essential about ourselves.

Those conversations are rarely pleasant. But some relationships survive because people are willing to have them, and many others break because nobody does.

And many people learn this lesson too late. They spend years trying to rescue others while quietly neglecting their own lives. They carry everyone's fears, everyone's responsibilities, everyone's emotions. They become experts at helping others navigate their storms while ignoring the flood slowly rising inside their own house.

The tragedy is not that they cared too much.

The tragedy is that they forgot to include themselves among the people who needed care.

Maybe that is why I have started thinking differently about kindness.

Most people hear that everyone is fighting a battle and immediately think it is a reason to be kinder to others. And it is. The world would probably be better if we all remembered that more often. We rarely know what another person is carrying. A little patience, a little understanding, a little compassion can go a long way.

But the older I get, the more I think the message is incomplete.

We should extend some of that kindness to ourselves too.

We are often remarkably compassionate toward other people's struggles and surprisingly unforgiving toward our own. We allow others to be confused, scared, tired, or lost. We understand that growth takes time. We understand that healing is messy. We understand that people make mistakes.

Yet when it comes to ourselves, we demand perfection. We expect ourselves to have all the answers. We criticise every failure. We treat our own struggles as weaknesses while treating the same struggles in others as something deserving empathy.

Maybe the battle is not to become stronger.

Maybe the battle is learning how to be as kind to yourself as you are to the people you love.

So yes, be kind.

Be kind to the people around you because you do not know what battle they are carrying. Respect their struggles, support them when you can, and remind them that they do not have to fight alone.

But be kind to yourself too.

Fight your battles. Respect theirs. Help when you can. Stand beside people when they need you.

Just do not abandon your own war while trying to win somebody else's.

I hope you fight ‘Your’ battles.

And if someday they become too heavy to carry alone, I hope you find people willing to stand beside you.

-Vimarsh Shah

May, 2026, Ahmedabad.

P.S. This piece comes from an advice my brother gave me some months back when I was trying to fight a battle for someone who refused to fight it themselves. He said something very simple: if they are ready to fight, stand beside them and fight as much as you can, even more than them if needed. But if they are not ready to fight, you are lost from the start.

At the time, I didn't fully agree with him. I wanted to help people I cared about. I wanted to solve things for them. But over time I realised how right he was. A lot of people talk about what is wrong in their lives, but very few are willing to do what is necessary to change it (including myself sometimes). I hope every one of us find the courage to fight our battles.