I lean leftwards because I want more people to get the help, dignity and peace they need and deserve. Now I feel a wave of being told to "harden my heart" and I feel scared and isolated. I don't have it in me to become a martyr and estrange myself from most people any further, I get nervous with the leftism I see so often expressed as wanting the bad people suffer, and that anything short of revolution is not just not good enough, but worse than doing nothing. And then I have constant guilt that I'm judging people more discriminated than me for how they express things; that my fears aren't valid and expressions of privilege.
By now I'm feeling emotional burnout, I get annoyed by any respone that isn't in-depth analysis because it just feels like watching the same responses happening over and over and never going anywhere.
I think the majority opinion on the site has long been the idealist position that sadism toward reactionaries is cool and good, which is simply backwards, but that needs to be separated conceptually for the inarguable necessity for violence to establish socialism because the masters of society, the owning class, will on the whole not simply surrender their power. If socialism could be established peacefully, that would be better, but either way torture, punitive execution (rather than the wartime necessity of killing actual threats to the revolution) and so on do not advance socialism.