Slaying the Dragon: How a Child Found Courage

He always waited until my mother was at work. I heard her leave, and I squeezed my eyes shut — so hard. And then he came in, and I floated away, somewhere else.

But that morning, for some reason, I decided it would no longer happen. No more. I was finally big enough, if not to fight, then to run. Even though he raged at me, even though he threatened to kill himself with his German Luger, I said no. And I ran.

I told my grandparents about the dragon, and they were shocked and appalled. And then I realized: my two little brothers were still at home, asleep, in a house with a suicidal father.

I didn’t think. I just ran until my lungs hurt. I opened the door. He was still sitting there, gun in his lap. I crept past, went to my brothers’ room, woke them, whispered that they must not ask questions but run as fast as they could to our grandparents’ home.

I slew my dragon, and I rescued my brothers.

I didn’t feel brave that morning. I felt sick and small and certain that I was going to die. That’s what most people never tell you about courage: It doesn’t feel like fire in your chest. It feels like ice. Your hands shake, your thoughts scatter, and still you move.

Courage isn’t fearlessness. It’s what happens when love for someone else is louder than fear for yourself.

When I crossed that kitchen, when I slipped past the man who had broken me so many times before, I wasn’t thinking of heroism. I was thinking of my brothers' small faces. They cannot die here. I would rather die for them.

It wasn’t the first moral decision of my life. My brothers and I had already gone through the ridiculous process of trying to keep our grandparents from shoplifting, a strange sort of family loyalty test that still makes me laugh. But this was different. This was the first truly courageous decision.

It taught me something that has followed me all my life: Courage isn’t something that lives inside you, waiting to be found. It’s something you choose when the moment comes. You can be trembling, doubting, half-broken, and still choose it.

Slaying the Dragon

That morning, I learned something that has shaped every moment in my life: The dragon can be slain.

Once you’ve done that, you stop treating monsters of any kind as invincible. You may still tremble, but you no longer despair. The worst thing that can happen has already met your resistance and lost.

I don’t mean that life became easy after that day. I still had to grow up, learn trust, relearn faith, and make peace with a world that can wound. But the core of me stayed steady. When new dragons appeared — fear, grief, injustice, loss — I recognized their shape. They roar, they threaten, and then they fall, as all false gods do, before the will to protect what is good.

People sometimes wonder how I stay calm when the ground shakes. It isn’t that I’m fearless, not by a long shot; it’s that I remember the truth. Dragons are terrible, but they are not immortal. Once you have seen one die, you can never again be ruled by them.

That knowledge, won at the worst possible price, became the foundation of my stability. It made me capable of trust, because I know that even if trust is betrayed, I can survive it. It made me capable of deep and intense love, because love, too, requires courage. And it taught me to look at the frightened and the broken and say with absolute conviction: I am stronger than I think. The dragon bleeds. It can die.

This is the hardest thing I have ever written, but it is also the truest.

A child once found courage on a quiet farm, in the bright, terrible light of morning. She chose to act when every instinct said hide. She faced death, and in doing so, she learned that dragons die.

That knowledge has never left me. I still feel fear, of course, the cold pulse of it when the world tilts or the news turns grim or someone I love is in danger, but I do not panic. Fear is only weather now; it passes through me and moves on. Beneath it, there is calm, the same calm that carried a twelve-year-old girl across a kitchen floor.

People sometimes mistake calm for detachment, but it isn’t that. It’s the quiet that comes from having already stood before chaos and lived. Once you have seen the worst thing and refused to surrender, the ordinary storms of life cannot claim you.

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So this story ends where it began: with truth.

Courage is not magic, and it is not reserved for heroes. It is a choice anyone can make, even a trembling child in the morning light.

And once you have made it, you are never the same again.