What It Took to Hold the Line: An Inhuman Amount of Processing & Ungodly Restraint In Goodwill While the Harm Was Actively Happening Because Another’s covert Malevolence Could Cost Everyone, truly

What some were willing to do, and what another set in motion, could cost us all. Another’s malevolence could very well have become everyone’s inheritance.

When another person’s malevolence can distort the room, rewrite the record, manipulate the nervous system, and manufacture consequences that reach far beyond what could ever be naturally owed, restraint becomes more than morality. It has to become architecture and the refusal to let harm reproduce itself through you simply because harm found you first. Because if you'd let yourself stay immersed in the feeling, you couldn't have built the thing that would make sure it never happened again. When the gun is to the back of your head and you still have to smile because one wrong expression could mean the difference between living and becoming the kind of tragedy someone else was trying to profit from, rewritten by the same people who would cash in on the ruin.

Harder than revenge is the rigorous discipline of choosing benevolence, while actively being treated less than human and put yourself through a conscious labor of standing at the edge of what someone’s cruelty could cost us all and deciding with your whole body burning, that the future still deserves someone disciplined enough not to destroy it back.

It is not easy, nor is it even reasonable to ask a person to walk through hell on purpose and hold the line of integrity with a grip that doesn’t slip because another person’s cruelty required your discipline, a burden no one else would carry, chosen because malevolence could cost us all a hell of a lot more than one life.