“Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave.”  

-George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords   (via kallissi)

Nope.  I wish it were like that.  The truth about bravery is that it requires someone hurting you so much and leaning on you so hard to try and eliminate you from humanity, that you finally wake up one day not giving a shit, with your kindness and goodness and gentleness choked to death and gone.  Then you turn around and start saying everything you were afraid to say, and threatening to do things you never thought you could do, and not caring about the legal or social ramifications, and suddenly you barrel straight toward them just for the fun and pleasure of ripping their head off because you actually no longer care whether or not you live or die, as long as you can launch yourself toward their face for the fun of biting off whatever you can get to.

Bravery is not a rush of sublime moral character at all.  Real bravery is actually not giving a shit about who you are ready to murder.  Bravery is blood for fun.  Bravery is realizing how much of a pleasurable rush it is, not to be capable of hesitating to kill the one who has pushed you to this precipice.  Bravery is laughing while you do this, and doing it harder because it feels good; in fact, it feels so good, that your opponent being armed is merely a barrier to work around.

Do you want to be brave, or do you want to be gentle?  Do you want to be brave, or compassionate?  Do you want to be brave, or kind?  Do you want to be brave, or do you want to be loving?  

Bravery is not character.  Bravery is necessity in a broken world full of sick people who will inflict their darkness on you if you don't fight back.  I don't want this necessity.  I don't want to be brave.  Not any more.  I want to be loving, kind, compassionate, and gentle now.  If the sight of a baby bird fallen out of the nest doesn't break my heart, if the tears of a child lost in a grocery store doesn't make me rush to pick them up, then I need to keep learning compassion.  

Because I have been in the head space where the helicopter raid and jungle napalm scene in Apocalypse Now would have been adequate treatment for my enemies.  I would have broken out the surfboard and shed not a tear after giving the orders.  

Anyone who cannot see the tragedy behind such necessity should not be viewed as any kind of moral authority.  This is why I read Tolkien, a master of moral allegory, a man who fought at the Somme- the epitome of unnecessary butchery- versus the wankology of most modern fantasy.  

Anyone who defines bravery as anything but the most tragic, compassion-killing, and unnecessary of necessities, does not understand bravery.  If bravery is strength, I want to be weak.  If bravery is the will to live without a heart, then let me die with one, no matter how broken it is by the end.  Because courage, not bravery, is the willingness to allow the world to break your heart, and choosing compassion to the end.