I grew up watching Magical School Girl series. They fascinated me, these warriors of love. Gather your friends, they told us, defeat your enemies, and believe in the power of true love. Their three-fold objective might seem overly simple and too optimistic for the grey-shaded age we find ourselves in. But when you strip our lives of the complex details, isn't the underlying core quite simple? At the end of the day, isn't our calling to simply love?
We are created beings of love, fractals of our Creator, who is Love. The fairer sex, they call us. The better half. The Light of the Home. Our mere presence is meant to bring delight. Our actions, warmth. The smiles we bestow come with magic that dispel fear and a bad day. And the love we freely give go with a multiplying effect not unlike bread and fishes at the hands of a messiah, and return to us a hundredfold.
But our hearts are not immune to the darkness of the world. And though we may be strong, our fortresses are not impenetrable. And when the darkness breaks our hearts, the demons with the whispering voices rush in, damning us with their persistent words, dragging us down dark pits we can't climb out of, imprisoning us in locked rooms with doors we cannot find.
That prison is a place our family and friends cannot reach us, no matter how close they physically are to us. We cannot feel their embrace there. In that darkness, we cannot see them. Their voices are drowned out by the persistent whispers that tell us we are too old, and not pretty enough; that scoff at us for wishing for love; that insist we believe that we are unloved because we are unworthy.
The isolation changes us. We develop callouses to dull the persistent blows. We bind ourselves in an effort to hold the shattered pieces together. "You must be strong," our mothers tell us. "This cannot defeat you." And so we trudge on despite our brokenness. We close our eyes in an attempt to forget the pain. We pretend we do not hear the screaming of the child within us as the demons relentlessly take piece by piece the shining fragments of what used to be our hearts. Who needs a heart that is broken anyway?
As the demons succeed in stealing away the joyful silver crystals of our hearts, we develop scales, armors. We grow fangs and forked tongues. We learn to breathe fire. And before we know it, the delightful Princesses of the Stars become the undead Dragons of the Dark Moon. We become strong. But while strength in itself is a good thing, the one we gain is accompanied by the desolate belief that no one will fight for us. We are released from our prison. But a part of us knows that such darkness has no place in creation. And so we find ourselves wandering back to our dreary pits, to our forsaken locked rooms, wishing some hero would someday come to slay our dragons, forgetting that it is we who are the dragons. And it is we who are the warriors of love.
