'Hero' is a word often mistranslated.

Dear Me, but not Me. Dear Me from several years ago with the young, shining eyes and bruised heart.

Dear Us.

To whom it may once have concerned. Those hero’s of my yesteryear and my child self who just didn’t know it yet.

Life is Life, it is tough, confusing, unfair and yet sometimes has the chance to be pretty decent. It is what it is - But it takes some time to figure that out. So this is an open letter to the unsung heroes, those who wore indifference as a cape and masks of many faces to protect their identities from those who would use it against them; the very same you saved me from. You fought in our defence without ever raising a finger against those who would watch us suffer. Not the villains the whole world knows to renounce but the ones who use snide comments and cruel titters as weapons and popularity as shields. The bullies who used ‘it was just a joke’ as a get out of jail free card only to watch you shrink further into yourself and do nothing to take it back.

This is a letter to say thankyou to those who never gave in, for you were just simple people, with complicated stories and open minds. This is also a letter to a much younger me who stood amongst the rest of the voiceless, the faceless, the defenceless and the quiet. Those of us who spent years barely hanging on; struggling and fighting a cacophony of things that the rest of the world was deaf to but that made us all too comfortable in darkened rooms.

This is a homage to the home-town heroes who never even knew they had come to the rescue.

A hero is often portrayed as a figure larger than life, stronger than gravity with powers to defy the odds, but I don’t see it that way. You see, the definition of hero is ‘a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities’ - none of which denotes a person who is larger than life but rather someone who is unseen, unheard, unremarkable, and yet still they change the world.

So this is for the librarians who never questioned how many books I checked out because they knew I read them like I needed them to breathe. Who never kicked me out of the quiet corners you weren’t meant to lurk in because they knew I needed that space to feel safe. For the science teachers who never got annoyed at all questions and gave me the answers they knew I already had because they understood the need for validation, and who never judged me for handing in my work two days early because I needed to prove something. The same for the English teacher that didn’t question my essay being eight pages too long and washed-out because I didn’t know how to put it in short form. This is also to all the other quiet, awkward kids that knew how much the whispers hurt, knew how it felt to always wonder if they were laughing at you, and those who shared the desks in the front row.

These are the people I idolize and admire for their courage to be themselves in spite of it all, for their outstanding achievement - to maintain humanity whilst suffering through the difficulties of adolescence, not to mention whatever else. For the noble quality of coming out the other side with pieces of themselves still intact, minds still open and hearts still gentle.

You gave me hope that I could do the same, that I could hear all of the taunts, the criticisms, the cruelty and still believe that I was who, what and where I was meant to be and the judgment of others was insignificant to the truth of myself.

This is to me in the hopes that I was or may one day be this kind of hero to someone who needs it.