Defeared

Story three of the D3 trilogy

Created on Midjourney

Stop!

If you haven’t read parts one and two of the D3 trilogy, follow the links below to do so prior to reading this story. Trust me, it will be worth it!

Dismayed

Dismayed

Defeated

Defeated

Defeared

Sofiy stood on the stage, delivering her TED Talk. At nineteen, she had seen and lived through more than most people do in a lifetime. One only had to peel back a layer of skin to see the deep wounds she bore. She had almost given up five years ago, ready to relinquish her life to the Russian soldiers crushing her city and its people beneath the tracks of their tanks.

But as she had sat in the rubble of her home, weeping over the too many losses she had already endured, her best friend, Natalka, who had just lost her family in the shelling, had found her. Together, they made a pact. They would survive and they would tell the world what was happening in Ukraine.

Defeared. That was the title of her TED Talk. Sofiy and Natalka had made the word up together. They had refused to surrender to fear. They had defeared their souls and stood up to the evil that had come to their country. They had survived and now thrived.

Sofiy was better with words than Natalka, who worked more behind the scenes in the charity they had created together to help refugees from war-torn countries, including their own.

Ukraine had survived Putin’s War, and continued to rebuild, just as Sofiy and Natalka had rebuilt their lives. There were still refugees who feared another invasion and refused to return. There were countless refugees in need of aid from other countries.

Sofiy and her friend had landed in Canada, so that’s where their charity was based. But that didn’t matter. They could work from anywhere, and often returned home to Ukraine to do what they could to help there as well.

Today’s TED Talk was designed to encourage others to do their part to be a positive force in the world. If Sofiy and Natalka could do it, anyone could. Yes, defeared was Sofiy’s word today, but it could have easily been empowered.

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Defeared is a word I inadvertently made up. I was creating images from one-word emotion prompts and rather than typing defeated, I typed defeared. I loved the images that came up, especially the one I used for this story.

I really loved the concept of being defeared. From this, came Sofiy’s fascination with words and their meanings and the thread of this that runs through the three stories.

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