A friend of mine got very hurt in what turns out to be a very silly way this week, and as she fights for her life in a hospital, I can't help but think about how our simplest actions can completely change our lives and the lives our of friends and families.

Even basic comments, that we might not think about but just spew out to friends can change lives.

Human life is fragile. I am just as guilty as the next person of forgetting this fact. In under a second, in less time it would take me to rub my eye, we can pass away because of a simple mistake. And leave behind masses of hurting survivors. This concept never fails to blow my mind.

Simple statements have ruined careers. Angry words have started wars and killed sons and fathers or ended marriages, and those broken marriages have injured countless children and those children hurt strangers they interact with, repurcussions rippling through society.

It's easy to feel insular, isn't it, when your family and friends and lovers are healthy? When you join a loving community like in college or work or even online? It's easy to ignore the horrors that happen every day, that we watch on the news and dismiss as having happened to someone else. Strangers.

It's easy for me to dismiss those things that happened to me years ago, things bad enough to make the news.

It's easy for us to hurt people. The key is breaking the pattern; becoming aware. Some people walk among us, hurting so badly that the only happiness they feel is by hurting others. We forget that when we evaluate criminals for their actions detailed on the evening news. All we see is the hurt they inflicted and not the pain in them.

I am capable of incredible anger. It can make me do bad things. Things I would never normally do. The key, is channeling it.

Sometimes, anger should be spent. Uncaged and attacking. Other times, it's important to control. It's up to each of us to develop that part of the brain that filters that right and wrong sensor.

I have a strong sense of what's morally right and wrong. And very little tolerance for the morally wrong. Particularly the morally wrong against those that I deem unable to compete at the challenger's level.

I can fight at competitive levels. I don't like to do that anymore. It's not something I am proud of and it's something I work to control, because I know the repercussions. Also, I've learned that many people can and want to fight their own battles. But the fighter in me still comes out when I feel that someone close to me is being threatened, like my family. Perhaps it's maternal?

I don't fight fair, I fight dirty. Really dirty. A scrapper, they might call me if I street fought. I've only street fought twice, when I was younger and it was because I had the option of fighting or taking a cut from a knife. I choose to fight.

I've never been cut.

In truth, I hate confrontation and I always have. I also hate physical violence. I've been know to walk out of a bar because of two strangers starting a fight - I hate that shit. I don't think violence is the answer.

That said, I've seen some things that flicked a switch in me and made me want to taste blood. Guys that I saw hit friends. Girls with cuts and bruises from boyfriends; girls who couldn't take a drink of water because their lips had been split so viciously by a man's fist. Girls with broken ribs, who couldn't breathe without the assistance of a machine. Friends I've found in curled in the corner of shithole apartments, bleeding as a fetus slides out of them onto the decaying wooden floorboards, because their boyfriend wanted them to have an abortion and when they didn't agree, the boyfriend decided to do the job with his fist. And then he walked out for drinks with a fistful of her paycheck.

Non-violent guys hooked up to respirators because their lungs had been pierced and collapsed. Chunks ripped out of their thighs by fast traveling chinese stars. Broken vertibrae with the imprint of the heavy, metal chains used to break bones still imprinted down their spines.

A naive friend conned by an ex-con with HIV who fabricated an entire life and seduced her, wooing her to fuck him repeatedly over months time without protection, only to have his parole officer show up after he skipped town to deliver the news that she needed to get tested and that if infected, she could charge manslaughter.

Maybe I should have looked the other way during those times, and silently comforted my friends. But like I told you, I am capable of incredible anger. And it can make me do bad things. Particularly when the morally wrong pentrates my insular world.

Like I said, it's not something I'm proud of, but I'd do it all again.

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