06/15/2026
Aurora LaPorte, the winner of our peace essay contest, shared some beautiful remarks on PEACE and HOPE at our awards celebration. See her winning essay at https://gandhialliance.weebly.com/write-for-peace-2026.html
And read her wise remarks below!
We often think about peace as being the mediator, the one to de-escalate, but oftentimes in practice that can mean swallowing one’s anger, fear, sadness, and other negative emotions. In the process, we end up making ourselves smaller to accommodate for another person’s hatred, intolerance, or unwillingness to understand. I do not think that this leads to true peace, only resentment. But if peace cannot be achieved by expressing our negative emotions– after all, we don’t want to yell or throw things—and peace cannot be achieved by repressing them, either, then what are we supposed to do with them?
This was the question I was contemplating as I sat down to write this piece. At the same time, I was also trying to make sense of my experiences with my brother, who has schizophrenia. For a long time, “peace” meant controlling everything. Trying to monitor everything I said and did to prevent another outburst, trying to read research and figure out ways to heal him, but my attempts were futile, that version of “peace” never lasted. It was fragile, temporary, and exhausting.
Peace wasn’t something abstract to me. It was something I desperately needed in my own life.
When I was a young teenager, I watched a YouTube video where a man traveled to India. I remember him putting a recording of Gandhi speaking in the beginning of the video. In the audio snippet, he said, “In the midst of darkness, light persists.”
At the time I thought it was a nice quote, but I had never gone through anything truly difficult. I knew what it meant on a surface level, but it wasn’t the type of knowing that comes from lived experience, where you know the words are true because they’ve become a part of you.
That type of knowing came later, when the memory resurfaced as I sat down to write.
When my brother ran away from home the first time, we left the lights on in the front room, just in case he came back. Quite literally, in the midst of darkness, light persisted. That simple act of hope— hoping he’d come back, and acting on that hope, gave those same words a deeper, personal meaning.
At the time, I wasn’t sure I could be happy anymore after everything that happened to me, and I know I’m not the only one who has ever felt that way. If I were to find peace, it could not be through putting on a false face and denying what I had been through, even though it would be easier to write about something else and not put my family’s struggles on display for the world.
But that quote, and Gandhi’s philosophy, isn’t about denying darkness. It’s about choosing to respond to it with intention, not avoidance, or an eye for an eye. Not by erasing pain, or fear, or anger, or sadness, but by transforming it.
I didn’t want to present peace as “letting go” of my difficult emotions, because that wasn’t true to my experience. Instead, in this excerpt from my piece, I wrote about transmuting them:
“I did not find peace through letting go. I found it through acceptance. Peace, for me, did not look like forgiveness right away, and it was definitely not me deciding that everything we had gone through was suddenly okay, that we deserved it. It wasn’t, and we didn’t. Peace found me in the middle of the night as I lay crying, when I realized that I was crying because I believed what he did: that our family was destroyed because of his illness, because of everything that’d happened.
But it wasn’t. It was only the belief of this that hurt me. Peace did not mean letting go of my resentment, nor letting go of my hopes for the future and being “realistic”. Peace was holding onto hope– the realization that we are only destroyed by the storms of life if we believe that we are.
I did not let go of my anger. I transmuted it into passion at the lack of awareness around mental health issues. I did not let go of my sadness. I transmuted it into gratitude for the memories we made before his symptoms set in. I did not let go of my grief. I transmuted it into hope. Into belief in a better future.
Everyone has gone through things that hurt them. Things that they didn’t deserve. Peacemaking is not found in forcing ourselves to forgive and be happy. It is found when we hold to the hope that caused us to be angry in the first place. The belief in a better version of that the reason why they disappointed us.
Peacemaking, to me, is holding on to a vision of a better world through all the things that us want to give up on trying to build it.”
I have seen people broken by the storms of life, but it’s never because of the actual events that happen to them. It is because they give up on their hopes. They tell themselves that because this happened, then they will never be happy again, or have what they want.
But you are not a time traveler. can’t know that!!!
We cannot build a better future by giving up on the hope that that future is possible. Peace for our world, and for ourselves, demands that we hold on to our dreams despite all obstacles, and that we transmute our negative emotions into something that can help us build that better future—into compassion, into advocacy, into hope.
