Fleeting power

For a big part of your life, unless something took your innocence from you, you expect the best from others: classmates, teachers, family members, friends, coworkers, and such, but it isn't until you start to grow and experience life as an individual that you begin to open your eyes to the authentic colors of the world, and all the sorts of people who live in it.

When I was younger, I used to be very apart from everyone. I was a loner, and this behavior was partly a way to gatekeep myself from others, their power games, and their high-school hierarchy; the other part was an inner, repressed desire to make it, to be at the top, to be myself in a way that would allow me to be looked up to and to be admired. Coming from a heavily bullied childhood, I can tell that power games start very early for many reasons that I was unaware of until I began to study a bit about introductory psychology. I observed that the people who were the best at those mind-games and hierarchical "games" were the ones who grew up in the streets, whose naiveness was taken out at a younger age.

For some time, my parents refused me to go out to the neighborhood and mix up with the rest of the kids. In turn, I tended towards computers and the internet, and this took a big hit on me in my late teens, mainly because I experienced very harsh, real-world situations where I couldn't even understand how cruel some people could be, how cunning and manipulative they could be, and even worse: I grew up hating them for all the damage they did to me, all the advantage they took from me, It turned me into a resentful adult, very avoidant of others, who kept a very closed circle of friends, and even then, I was very reluctant to meet new people until some time ago when I started to go to therapy and started working on my spiritual wounds.

I'm not going to lie. As time passes and I learn more about people, I realize these manipulative behaviors are prevalent. My naiveness still makes me fall for cheap manipulation techniques sometimes, either because a part of me still refuses to enter the game of power or because deep down inside of me, I know I feel a lot of things very deep: love, anger, the euphoria of victory, and the sadness of defeat, however, this isn't about vice or virtue, this is about the emotional tools you get and how you can deal with the rest of the world as an adult. One part is light, which teaches you how to set boundaries and how to deal with people who want more than what you can give; another part is about learning to be dangerous, to understand their techniques to a degree where you can see just right through them and be wise enough not to enter their games, this doesn't mean rejecting innocence, neither leaving your roots as a warm-hearted individual; this means that to be an adult and be part of a world that is full of dangers in the wilderness of society, you have to arm yourself with tools that would help you to get through, you have to understand that being powerless in the middle of the woods will only lead you to be at the bottom of the food pyramid.

As cruel as it is, it is one of the hard facts you must accept. Some people try to put these tools into words, into books, and while different people's insight is critical for a broader world vision, the best way to learn is by putting yourself out there.

If you stay in the cave forever, you're going to starve. Still, outside of the cave, there is danger, and after multiple times of falling prey to this danger, you start to realize that you can become, in fact, dangerous.

By being dangerous, you become powerful; and It's mostly about putting yourself out there that you start to level up. Not to compare life with an Isekai, but it is only through hardship, through going on the journey of your life, that you start to become the real you, and not the scared of the world, the basement-dweller version that you were; instead of avoiding the very nature of the world, you have to embrace it, because in the end, is all the experience you get that teaches you how to deal with a lot of people, situations, and most important: it teaches you a razor-sharp way to see through the world's evil intent.

You realize other people's betrayal and deceitfulness through challenging situations and then start to trust your gut. As life goes on, you get wiser and can see the snake before it bites you. But it is only by being bitten that you understand that snakes can hurt. It is not through denying the world and its vice that you grow; it's by facing it and becoming a force, a power for good; Nietzsche believed that people learn by repetition while they don't comprehend, and only when they comprehend they can evolve.