By Pearl Biggers, TIWP student

I don’t want to fight. No, I don’t want to have to fight. Whether this is fear or laziness, I don’t know. But I am not a militant. I am a creator. I hold onto love and daydreams, not anger and weapons. I am not a fighter. My heart is too soft, my mind too kind. But while my own world may be made of light and dreams and compassion and hope, the one outside of my mind is not. In fact, it has become increasingly less so in recent days, and I fear it will continue to do so. I hope that it won’t, but I think that it will. So this leaves me a soft-hearted day dreamer with a choice. I can recede even further into my little universe with all its warm comfort of make-believe—or I can open my eyes and acknowledge the spectacularly horrifying shittiness that is the Real World. I can see it for what it is—the kind of place where I really don’t want to live—and I can accept that if I don’t like what I see, I have to do what I can to change it. I have to fight. I have to figure out what I want to add to this bleak mire of a world, and then I have to fight to do so.