See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Feel No Evil, Think No Evil
by: Ulysses Ybiernas ♦ June 28, 2016
A powerful reflection on returning to a heavy workplace environment, where quiet resilience and inner strength become the only way to survive emotional tension and unseen battles.
Stepping away, even briefly, felt like surfacing from deep water.
For a day or two outside the reach of this place, I could breathe again, properly, fully, without that familiar tightness in my chest. It was as if I had escaped a current that constantly pulls me under. The world outside didn’t demand anything from me. It didn’t weigh me down with silent expectations or unspoken tensions. For a moment, I was light again.
But I wonder why my every return carries its own gravity.
The moment I step back inside, it is as if the air itself changes. The warmth of freedom fades too quickly, replaced by something tighter, heavier, an atmosphere that seems to press against the skin. Not loud, not overtly cruel, but persistent in its unease. A place that does not shout, yet somehow still exhausts.
There is a kind of emotional weather here that is gray and unrelenting. Even silence feels occupied. Even calm feels temporary. It is not always what is said, but what lingers in between: the glances that last a second too long, the tones that carry more than words admit, the invisible friction that never fully settles.
And yet, I have learned something here, something not taught, but earned.
I have learned how to remain intact.
Not by fighting every storm head-on, and not by pretending it isn’t there, but by choosing a quieter form of resistance. A disciplined stillness. A decision, made repeatedly, to not let this place decide who I become.
So I build my defenses, not with anger, but with restraint. With a kind of internal vow that becomes daily practice:
To not absorb what does not belong to me.
To not carry what was never mine to hold.
To not allow darkness to take root where light still exists.
I learned how to:
See no evil. Hear no evil. Feel no evil. Think no evil.
It isn't a denial, but distance. It isn't blindness, but protection.
It isn't surrender either, but survival with intention.
A refusal to let external weight become internal collapse.
Because there is a difference between being in a difficult place… and becoming it.
So I endure. Not loudly. Not triumphantly. But steadily.
Like something that bends when it must, not because it is weak, but because it understands what it means to last.
And so I remind myself: survival is not always about standing firm.
Sometimes, it is about refusing to break.
The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must, and survived.
- Robert Jordan© 2016 ET PLUS . articles · All Rights Reserved | My Office Diaries