Take no shit, but do no harm
Often I hear it phrased as “Do no harm, but take no shit.” Though I do agree with the general idea, something about that phrasing just hasn’t sat right with me. Like it excuses doing harm.
That if someone pushes you or something and gets all up in your face, tries to give you shit, busting their face is still on the table. You weren’t actively seeking to hurt anyone before, you were just chilling but then things changed and now you’re “allowed” to cause harm for the sake of not taking shit.
I don’t like that. It doesn’t sit well with me. It may not necessarily be wrong, as so many things are shades of grey and rulings can change form situation to situation, but for me it doesn’t feel right as a rule.
I prefer ”take no shit, but do no harm.” You’re fully and always ready to stand your ground. You know your boundaries and you’re not going to let them be crossed. You know you’re capable of physically, psychologically, and emotionally standing your ground; perhaps even able to throw another into the literal or metaphorical ground. You choose not to hurt another at ever possible turn.
Persons running after you trying to kill you, you get your hands on a weapon and instead of aiming for the head and aiming to kill, you use nonlethal force. In this particular scenario causing zero harm isn’t an option. You can’t out run this person, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a bat or a gun. You have a choice. You can aim for the attackers head and you’re aware that you’re likely to kill them if you do. On the other hand you can aim for their knee. It’s still going to hurt them, but they’ll likely live. You’ll also probably have tipped the scales enough that you can get away.
I can’t fault someone for killing a person who’s actively trying to kill them. Often refelexes and survival instinct take away a lot of choice in this kind of matter. You just shoot or just swing and hope it’s enough to get you out of it alive. Our brains aren’t designed to tell the difference between that threat to our safety verses a jack ass being a dick threatening emotional or psychological safety. The fear response is what it is and doesn’t care about difference in perceived threat. This leads us to doing the same thing in conversations and complex social interactions. In heightened states we lose an amount of rational thinking and we respond on instinct, so I try to control as much as I can about my own programming when I’m not in survival mode.
I try to phrase things in such a way that when I am put in position where need to survive takes over that I’ll be able to live with the choices I make when I can’t rationalize. It’s part of why I don’t let myself say that I hate myself when I’m frustrated. It’s why I get so precise about how I talk. I do’t think I ever really did truly hate myself but there was an era in my body’s life where my brain had convinced itself that we did hate everything we were, because of imprecise language. “I’m really frustrated and I wish that I Haden’s done______ so i wouldn’t be dealing with __________ right now,” turned into “I hate myself” or after time it even became “I wish I was dead”/“I want to die.”
If the words that my body speaks verbally or not have the ability to influence my brain that much in regards to myself, how much impact can it have on my actions and thought towards others?
This was meant to be just a small blurb about the difference between two sentences with the same words in different orders and has gotten a bit farther than that, as things tend to to when I start getting into recording my thoughts.
I’m not currently adding trigger warnings because I’m not 100% sure which I would need to add. If there’s any that someone reading this feels should be there please tell me and I’ll add them. If you can I’d love an explanation on why, not that it needs to be justified. Just that I hope to learn more about what sets of content and phrasing requires which specific content or triggers warning tags, so I can apply them on my own where needed with confidence in future.
