I read something recently.

"Do you understand the violence it took to become this gentle."

The words were not mine but they were words I have screamed to myself.

In the mirror.

In my mind.

To the dark when no one was around to listen.

They were words for me and me alone.

I did not speak them with English, or Spanish, or Russian.

I spoke them with emotion.

I spoke them with rage.

I spoke them with grief.

I was a proud thing once. an unstoppable force. a thing to be reckoned with.

I would force those around me to recognize my greatness or feel my wrath.

It was pitiful... I took a child and I built an unkillable unfeeling thing.

And I did it to protect myself.

I did it so I could tell myself when the bad things happened that it didn't matter.

I did it so I could smile when I had been ridiculed by those who were supposed to be teaching me.

I did it so I could laugh when I was touched in places I did not want to be touched by people I was told to trust.

I did it so I could stand tall when I had been stabbed and be proud that I could stitch up my own wounds.

I did it so that I could go into work the next day with a smile on my face the night after I had been drugged.

I built a monster to protect the child.

I built him mean and confident and unstoppable so the world could not hurt the child.

But the monster soon could not realize the difference between the horrors the child feared and the comforts the child needed.

Years went by as the child watched the monster take away the things they loved.

The child grew lonely.

The child grew angry.

It was a bloody affair, killing the monster.

The child almost did not survive.

But after years of fighting, The child came out victorious.

But not unchanged.

I am a different kind of monster now.

One of grief.

Of emotion held too long.

One of violent empathy for those I have never met but still wish to help.

One who knows that the heros in the stories were lies.

One that knows that the world does not suffer the kind and the weak.

One that is not willing to be the wrong kind of monster.

There is little room for those who wish to be good and yet wish not to fight for it.

I turned a child into a monster.

And the child became a new kind of monster.

A monster willing to fight.

To say you believe in something and not be willing to shed your blood for it is equivalent to having never said anything at all.

To be gentle requires violence.

Violence against your own transgressions.

Violence against those who mean to harm the helpless.

Violence against those who see kindness and humanity as an illness.

Violence against those who believe women are objects.

Violence against those who believe that those who do not share the same skin are chattel.

Violence against those who believe that those who love the same sex unabashedly deserve to burn.

Violence against those who would gleefully do harm unto children.

Violence against intolerance.

To be gentle is not the absence of violence.

It is committing violence against the horrors of this world while offering the kind, the tolerant, the innocent, your softest touch, your smallest self and allowing them to fill the space with their beauty.

To be gentle is to make the world a place where gentle people can live without fear of harm.

It took a lot of violence for me to become as gentle as I am.

It is time for further violence.

For the gentleness of the world is in peril.

And sitting back and spouting pretty words while watching horrors occur is not gentleness.

It is compliance.

It is becoming an accomplice.

It is time for Violence.

It is time for Gentleness.

It is time for Kindness.