The Cards We're Dealt

I sit for my homemade dinner:
Roasted chickpeas, and sautéed spinach and mushrooms. A healthy meal.
Because an optimist eats healthy. An optimist, a lucky, privileged human eats for their future.
I sit with my healthy dinner and watch history repeating itself on TV:
I see a woman - my age, maybe even younger - and she is crying because she has no future.
She fears she has no future in Afghanistan under Taliban's control. And she is likely right.
There are so many other women like her... Women who are like me, but also very much NOT like me.
Women who were born in a different place, to a different set of parents, to a different set of rules, of society, of expectations. Women who were born into oppression.
Women who fear will die into that same oppression.

I take a bite after a bite and nearly choke from eating too much, and from crying inside from the tears of the woman on TV. Why her, and not me? Why do I get to have my dinner, and look at her suffering far away? Why do I eat like I have a future, and meanwhile, she cries in hopelessness, because she doesn't have one? 

It is said that life is about the card you are dealt. We don't choose the card, but rather we choose what we do with it. We can toss it aside - decide not to be a gamer, or a card collector, or maybe we'd build a fort with it, or pass it to another more card-hungry human. We can choose to take our biggest pain, and turn it into a triumph. And vise versa.

​But when I see myself sitting with my healthy meal, in my nice pajama, and my large TV, and on the other side - a woman just like me is counting her days... I think sometimes the card dealer made it unfair. Very unfair, and I wish I could toss the cards upside down and shake this world anew.