When I was in grade school I used to get into a lot of fights with my brothers. I had the biggest rivalry with my older brother and I have to applaud my parents for putting up with the both of us for so long. Neither of us were very well spoken back then. We were angry, short tempered, and we settled our problems through yelling and violence.

When my brother would pick up a stick and whack me with it, I would go to pick up another stick to defend myself, but my mom would just take the sticks away despite my protests. As we got older, we also got bigger, and the harder it was for my parents to take our sticks away. We were also vengeful, it was never an eye for an eye, we wanted the whole thing. And so the sticks got larger. And the whacks got harder. And it came to a point where my whole family was holding our breaths because it felt like we were living on a minefield where one wrong step might set off an explosion. And then one day it did. By this time one stick had grown into a knife and the other, intended for self defence, was a chain attached with a dart at the end of it. The result was a family in tears, Regret finally making its acquaintance with my brain for the first time, a bloody drive to the hospital and several stitches in the head for my brother.

We still hated each other after that. But by then the idea of stifling violence by threat of force and intimidation was lost on me. So my parents took it all away and I lived unarmed and vigilantly as I waited for a day of retaliation. To this day I'm still waiting, but it turns out he also gave it all up, so I'm not gonna hold my breath.