Imagine a small child playing by the stream, maybe 3 maybe 9 years old. As she splashes around and giggles she sees a frog, or a salamander, or maybe a minnow, and delighted by all such small things and believing in friendship between herself and all creatures she goes to pick it up and coo over it and give it a sweet and affectionate hug or to rub it against her cheek and then she runs off and takes it to show her mother who will no doubt be delighted to see she's discovered a new type of friend in the world. But when she gets to her mother and beams with pride, she opens her hands and finds them slick with red and her new friend has become slippery and limp. Delight gives way to confusion which explodes into terrible comprehension. She has just learned what harm is, she has learned by killing something alive and beautiful, she knows this and she weeps and she will mourn it for the next month and well into adulthood she will find her self back there with the smell of grass and the revelation of harm.

I think we all go through that same loss of innocence. That moment of realizing that we can hurt things we don't want to hurt, that we have hurt things we don't want to hurt, is traumatizing. For me, I was 9 years old at a school outing where we learned to shoot bows and as I was collecting arrows I spotted a frog in the grass behind one of the targets, an arrow had grazed its leg and split the skin like a balloon. I watched it limp til the whistle of the instructor pulled me away. When I went to the market and for the first time I realized that the animals I loved were the same ones I ate. I couldn't look at meat for a month. That fear never really goes away. In adulthood it makes us small, tender, over yielding, unable to stand up for ourselves for fear of harming someone else. This might look like not asserting personal boundaries, being over-helpful, taking on too much responsibility, grinding through lunch hours, throwing yourself into activism without a thought to your own preservation or if your course of action is effective for your ends. It looks like living a life set out by your parents because you can't bear to bruise their hearts. It also looks like a fear of intimacy. I spent the early years of adulthood terrified of physical contact, every un-negotiated touch felt as if I had committed assault, the prospect of hugging someone would make me break into a cold sweat, the simple desire to reach out and connect with another living being felt as if I was admitting to being a rapist. The truth is that all it takes to harm someone is to exist. You don't even need to be alive. By the time the first life forms came to be they were at risk of being crushed by falling rocks, punctured by sharp debris, or asphyxiated in something they couldn't breathe. Harm does not require intent, emotion, or even awareness, it just requires that you are.

The answer, is to get violent.

We are afraid of the unknown. We shy away from our own lives, from our own well being because we don't know what could happen we imagine countless catastrophes that could befall us, all of them beyond our ability to cope. We imagine our friends terrified faces, we imagine them ashamed, scared, disgusted, angry; we imagine that we will be hated because we have fired chekhov's gun. The violence that stained our past has born fruit and now we exist as a threat, a butcher among gentle sheep, shamefully asking them to be his friend. The only way to treat that fear is to face it. When I play Jiu Jitsu I am realizing the capacity for harm that everyone fears. I shove my knee into my friend's neck, drive my thumb into their shoulder, grip their arm so tight it threatens to tear their ligaments and straddle my crotch into their chest. No matter the outcome of a bout I am liberated. When I lose, I'm relieved that I am not the unstoppable beast that I feared. When I win, the final curtain raises, the person I just violently ripped away control from smiles, compliments me on my effort, we shake hands and play together again. No matter what happens you are forgiven for the original sin of being corporeal.

Do that enough and you learn that taking up space is ok, you learn that confrontation is ok, that touch is ok. If you can wring the blood from a stranger's neck and be forgiven, be welcomed, then you can hug your friend without being subject to a tribunal.