Between the Country’s Conflict and My Own
The heat in Juba doesn’t just sit on your skin; it presses down on you, heavy and thick, matching the weight of everything you carry inside.
For a long time, the conflict outside my window has felt like an echo of the conflict that shaped my life. Sudan, and now South Sudan, are places where survival is a daily negotiation. But for me, the war didn’t start with political conspiracies, cattle raiding, or the devastating collapse of the South Sudanese pound.
It started at home.
Part I: The Fault Lines
My earliest memories are fractured by the unpredictable storms of an alcoholic father. Long before I understood the math of economic inflation, I understood the terrifying calculus of domestic violence—predicting a mood by the sound of a footstep, learning how to make myself invisible. When that foundation finally shattered, My family was torn apart.
My mother, fierce and determined, tried to hold the pieces together as a single parent. But the gravity of survival in a harsh environment eventually led her to remarry.
Moving into my stepfather’s home didn’t bring peace; it just drew a different kind of battle line. I quickly realized that bloodlines dictate belonging. As a stepchild, I were met with a quiet, daily segregation—an invisible wall that marked me as an outsider at my own dinner table. I were there, but I were never truly *theirs*.
Part II: The Rebellion and the Descent
Pain that isn’t transformed is passed on or acted out. As a teenager, the weight of the unfairness at home turned into a burning rebellion. I refused to walk to school. The money meant for the tools of a better future—books and pens—was swallowed by the desperation of gambling tables.
When the truth came out, it brought severe beatings from my mother, a harsh physical manifestation of her own fear and frustration for my future.
As the years rolled on, the coping mechanisms grew darker. I found myself stepping into shadows, carrying the weight of dishonesty, theft, and choices that left a bitter aftertaste. After the milestone of high school graduation passed, the silence set in. The structure of school was gone, replaced by a vast, terrifying loneliness.
Depression doesn’t always look like sadness; in a young man in Juba, it often looks like danger. It pulled you into the numbing haze of alcohol and the transactional, empty encounters of soliciting prostitutes. It was a desperate attempt to feel something—or perhaps, to feel nothing at all.
Part III: The Two Wars
Today, I live in a country wrestling with its own severe trauma. I watch a society fractured by scarcity, where inflation strips away the value of hard work overnight, and civil conflict makes the future feel like shifting sand. It is incredibly exhausting to fight a war in my own mind while surrounded by a world that feels like it is fracturing around me. It is completely natural that my mental health has suffered under this double burden.
But amid the external chaos and the scars of my past, something remarkable is happening.
I am still here, and I am choosing to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow.
Despite the mistakes, the dangerous paths taken, and the heavy environment of South Sudan, I possess a stubborn, beautiful spark: **hope**. I haven’t resigned myself to the past.
Right now, in the middle of it all, I am building a new foundation. Every time I choose a new routine, every time I practice a healthy habit, and every time I reject an old, destructive pattern, I am reclaiming my narrative. I am proving that while my past and my environment shaped my starting point, they do not get the final word on who I would like to become.
