No matter if you’d like to live in a world filled only with love and light, in perfect harmony and seamless altruism, wishing doesn’t make it so, and the real doesn’t care if you’re hurt by it, it just goes on.

We live in the kindest era in human history, not perfect by a long shot but viscerally better than it was. As a culture we’ve gone from enjoying bloodshed as a pastime to the society that overwhelmingly judges violence and tries to diminish it. It is not perfect but it is better, yet you still cannot walk around as just a soft squishy thing opened to attack, a willing victim of all you encounter. The attacks will come in many forms and you’ll need to grow fangs to be able to fight for yourself, those you love and what is right. Singing cumbaya won’t solve anything, but doing something might, and in order to act you’ll need self-respect and to have it you need teeth. Not to necessarily use them as coercion and dominance, but to know you are competent to fight if you need to. Not even an animal attacks if it doesn’t need to, it first gives out a warning by growling. Knowing you can fight will command you to respect yourself and to ask the same of others, it will save you from despising yourself for being weak. Being able to hold your own if the fight of any form will decreases the probability you’ll have to fight because you’ll express this confidence in your actions.

For you to do this you’ll need to come to terms with your shadow, the dark underdeveloped places you didn’t want to look at or acknowledge. Of course you didn’t, it is traumatizing to see these parts of yourself – to admit you’re prone to anger, judgment, that you may be spoiled, entitled, have a tendency to be mean if things don’t go your way and dig so deep that you’ll encounter things that are in their very nature monstrous. Deal with this first, handle it, grow through it and grow some teeth along the way to protect the person that came out of it. Once you see it all you have no need to act by default forces governing you, you are free to lick your paws and not act on the monstrosities you’re capable of. Wisdom is not in seeing only one side, it’s in seeing all of it. Be competent to fight and pray you never have to.