The Battle Within

It’s strange how often life feels like a quiet tug-of-war.

Not between us and the world, but within ourselves—between what we want and what we have, who we are and who we think we should be.

This internal tension is subtle, but persistent. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we experience the world around us.

We feel it when someone else's success leaves us questioning our own.

When a fleeting moment of joy is shadowed by a whisper that it isn’t enough. When connection feels close but unreachable, like standing inches from a window we cannot open.

It’s inside us. It’s the fragmented nature of our own inner world turning against itself. And we don’t need extraordinary circumstances to feel this. It happens in the smallest moments.

Like comparison.

It isn’t the car, the house, the job, or the image that sparks it.

It’s the feeling that I want what they have.

It’s the desire for the love we haven’t received.

The recognition we haven’t earned. The success we haven’t yet reached.

Even when we have everything—we still feel the pull to want.

Because comparison isn’t about measuring what we see.

It’s about measuring what we lack.

And when we believe we are lacking, we want.

We want to possess.

We want to chase.

We want to become whatever it is we think will finally make us feel full.

But no matter how much we gain, the want doesn’t stop.

Because the battle within isn’t about what’s outside of us.

It’s about how we feel within ourselves.

And that feeling? That feeling of lack? It has a direct line to our emotions.

Emotions are fleeting, the body’s response is fleeting—one causing a chemical shift, passing a signal through the other.

But what stays—what lingers long after—is the story we attach to it.

It’s why anger can feel like it burns for hours.

Why sadness can sit heavy for days.

Why insecurity, once triggered, can become the undertone of an entire life.

Not because the feeling itself is permanent—but because we keep feeding it.

Replaying situations.

Reinforcing the belief.

Holding onto the past not as a lesson, but as proof of who we think we are.

And it’s not only the negative feelings we grip onto.

Joy, excitement, love—we hold onto those too. We try to stretch them beyond their natural life. We relive the highs, fearing their absence, trying to recapture something already gone.

But emotions are meant to move through us.

And when we resist that—when we try to hold, to grasp, to control—

We create a battle that consumes us.

A battle that seeps into the world around us.

Because how we hold onto emotions is how we hold onto life.

We grip tightly to pain, to insecurity, to the belief that we need to control.

We make our past a place to live rather than a place to learn.

And the battle within us—between peace and resistance, between flow and control—becomes the war we project onto everything else.

The rain will fall whether I complain or not.

Traffic will exist whether I stress or not.

People will act how they want whether I worry or not.

And in the same way—Emotions will rise and fall whether I cling to them or let them pass.

Maybe this is the part I’ve been missing all along.

There is something missing.

But I miss nothing.

Only something to let go of. Bradley J Cleary