Danger Doesn’t Hide Behind The Corner

The Hotpot | December 2025 | By Lisanne

14.12

We often look for danger in the dark corners.

We fear the shadowy figure on the late-night platform.
We clutch our keys tighter in the parking garage.
We scan the room for the stranger who “looks off.”

You could say that we’re wired to overestimate the unknown, and underestimate the familiar.

Because the real threats rarely bother dressing up. The danger we imagine is almost never the danger that finds us.

The fatality risk for a passenger on an airplane, for example, is roughly equal to that for a train passenger. We fear the plane crash, but the ordinary risk is far more mundane.

Or look closer to home: studies suggest that a large majority of people who get sexually molested comes from people within their own circle. Most of the harm they experience isn’t delivered by strangers—it comes from people they already know.

It sits next to you at dinner.
It teaches you to tell the time.
It remembers your birthday.

Or it’s subtler:
The colleague who slowly rewrites the narrative until you start doubting your own competence.
The friend who calls you “sensitive” every time you name a boundary.
The parent whose love requires you to shrink.
The boss who praises your work ethic while burning through it like gasoline.
The relationship that feels safe because the chaos is familiar.

These examples aren’t jump-scares. They’re erosion. A millimeter at a time. So subtle you only notice the cliff once you’re at the edge.

We expect danger to roar.
But some devastating forms whisper.
They feel familiar.
They feel like “just how things are.”

We’re afraid of the dark because it’s obvious.
We rarely fear the things close enough to look it into the eye.

But that’s where the danger lives sometimes—
in the places we’ve stopped questioning,
in the people we’ve stopped seeing clearly,
in the stories we’ve rehearsed so long they’ve become true by repetition.

The world isn’t out to get us. Not usually.
The danger isn’t the unknown.
It’s what we’ve grown comfortable ignoring.

Naming the pattern is the first step out of it. And once we stop giving the familiar a free pass, our world gets safer—not smaller.

Awareness rarely makes you paranoid. It makes you feel powerful.

Thank you for reading! The journal prompt of today:

What have you been ignoring?

Let me know in the comments.

Curious to see more reflections like this? Click through to see the rest of the series on emotional competency. I’d love to hear what resonates with you.