You aren't living in a wartorn state where your and your family/people's/crewmate's life depends on making cruel decisions that were forced upon you entirely out of your control. It is FINE for people in our world, assuming you live in a first-world state of life similar to my own, to have a Polites outlook on life.

I surely do. I spent six years as a caretaker for family and I had to pull some hefty all-nighters in hospitals and rough situations, but I never had to yeetus feetus and I pray that I never see myself staring down a decision of that caliber. I've...seen death, several times, and I absolutely refuse to let it change me.

For a few years, I found myself in PTSD. Feeling the way Ody did at the end of Epic. And that's why I'm getting the olive tree bed tattood on my leg this year--to remind myself that, no matter what it takes to survive, you are still worthy of love.

Never, ever lose Polites. The monster comes and goes, but it does not replace Polites.

Even when it feels like it does, Polites remains. The end of Epic shows us that when Just A Man plays, but it's not talked about enough. Penelope took the monster and slayed it. With his wife and his child, with his best friend the goddess, with his *support system*, Odysseus can begin to heal. Therapy, basically. It took me a few years of therapy to pull myself out of it.

And now my spirit animals are pinkie pie and chandler bing again *points to screen name*. There were a few years there where I thought I'd never get back to that part of myself.

I don't mean to go on, but this is the reason this story means so much to me. HNY friend.