I'm tired of being told I'm wrong when I know I'm right

The fan whirs overhead, pushing the humid air around my small room. Outside, a ferry horn sounds in the harbor, carrying across the water to where I sit scrolling through another pointless online argument. My thumb hovers over the screen, reading the same circular conversation for what feels like the hundredth time this month. I know what I saw. I know the numbers I calculated. Yet here I am being told I'm wrong by someone who didn't even bother to check my work properly. It's the same feeling I get when politicians promise cheaper bread or better hospitals during election season - that familiar sinking sensation that truth doesn't matter as much as being loudest. We live on these small islands where everyone knows everyone's business, yet somehow we've become experts at talking past each other. The man at the corner shop complains about rising fish prices while the government official on television talks about economic growth. Both are speaking, neither is listening. I find myself doing the same thing online - typing faster than I'm thinking, pulling harder on arguments that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. What exhausts me isn't being wrong - I can admit when I've made mistakes. It's the dismissal, the assumption that I must be defending some political faction or that I haven't done my homework. We're all so quick to categorize each other - pro-this, anti-that - that we forget most of us just want the same basic things: affordable food, reliable ferries, medicine when we need it. I put my phone down and look out the window where the evening light turns the sea to gold. The math problem I was arguing about suddenly feels insignificant compared to the real calculations we make every day - how to stretch the rufiyaa until payday, whether we can afford the doctor's visit, if there will be fuel for the fishing boat tomorrow. Maybe what we're all really tired of isn't being wrong, but fighting battles that leave us with nothing but exhaustion. The skip jack tuna seller at the market doesn't care about my online arguments - he just wants to feed his family. The ferry captain doesn't care about political factions - he just wants to get people safely between islands. I take a deep breath of the salt-tinged air. The argument will still be there tomorrow, but for now, I choose to let it go. We keep showing up, keep calculating, keep trying to make things right even when no one seems to be listening. That's our quiet resistance - not in loud arguments, but in the persistent truth of our daily lives.