One. "When I grow up, I want to be someone like them." Or: "If you try hard enough, you can become a great person just like them." Around us, there are very few people whom we look at and say, "Oh, if only I could become like them!" On the other side of this coin are those people whose example parents invoke to warn their children: "You're becoming as bad as so-and-so!" Or small children who say, "Everyone thinks I'm as bad as them—when I grow up, no matter what else I become, I don't want to be like them." Indeed, it bewilders us to encounter such people who are human only in name. Sometimes these worthless sorts even know themselves that they are held up as "examples of badness." Yet watch—they feel not a shred of shame, and nothing anyone says pierces them. They were as they were before; they are as they are now; they will remain so. It never occurs to them to change. And among them are some who are a cut above the rest—they laugh these warnings away entirely. They say, "Go on then, try being as bad as me if you can!" Such people take pride even in their own filth. The tragic truth is that many of these bad people are themselves someone's parents. They live such wretched lives that after they die, their own children—and countless others—feel secretly relieved, thinking to themselves, "Thank goodness they're gone." Let me illustrate. There are many who borrow and borrow so much in life that while alive, they must endure reproach from their children and relatives for it; when they die, that reproach only multiplies. They bring no peace even in death—often, no one in their family earns enough to repay the debts they left behind. The consequences of one such person's life are visited upon three generations that follow. Two. If a man claims he understands a woman's mind completely, then either he is some kind of sage, or he is a liar—because a woman does not even fully understand herself. Girls do not know what they want, or why; what they say, or why; what they do, or why; what they think, or why. A man achieves maturity of mind only when he stops taking everything a woman says as literal truth. Three. Your own immaturity, your recklessness—flaring up at nothing, suspicion, withholding your time to make her dependent on scarcity—you pass all this off as "cute," as if it were love itself. Ah! But the moment she does something reckless, you call her "psycho" in that same cute way, or simply call her "mad" outright. Have you no shame, brother? Or is it that only your feelings count as feelings, and hers do not?
# Three Pieces of Truth There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that comes not from the absence of people, but from their presence. I discovered this on an ordinary afternoon, sitting in a room full of voices. Each voice was distinct, each person engaged in their own conversation, yet I felt as though I were watching them from behind glass. They existed in one world; I existed in another. The glass between us was transparent, which somehow made it worse. I began to wonder then about the nature of connection. We speak so easily of togetherness, of community, of love—but what if these are merely elegant deceptions we maintain to ward off a deeper truth? What if the human creature is fundamentally, irreducibly alone? But this thought, while comforting in its clarity, was also unbearable. So I looked for a third way—not the denial of solitude, nor its surrender, but its acknowledgment. I began to understand that perhaps the most honest connection between people is not the fantasy of complete merger, but the tender recognition of each other's essential separateness. To love someone, then, might mean to love them *across* the distance, not by pretending the distance does not exist. This was the first piece of truth. --- The second came to me in a moment of shame. I had said something unkind to a person I claimed to care for, and afterward sat with the weight of it. What struck me was not the immediate guilt—that came easily enough—but the realization that I had *wanted* to say it. In that moment of unkindness, I had felt a terrible clarity, a sense of rightness. I had not been possessed by anger; I had chosen it, because it felt true. We are taught that our worst impulses are aberrations, that our cruelty is a lapse from our better nature. But what if this is another comforting lie? What if cruelty is not something that occasionally overtakes the good person, but something that lives within us, woven into the very fabric of our consciousness? What if, in certain moments, we *are* our cruelty? To accept this is not to excuse it—on the contrary. Only by admitting that the capacity for harm lives in us can we take genuine responsibility for our choices. The person who believes they are fundamentally good and merely act badly in moments of weakness will never truly change. But the person who knows themselves capable of deliberate cruelty, who acknowledges that potential as part of their own nature, might learn to choose differently. Not because they are good, but because they understand the weight of what they are choosing. This was the second piece of truth. --- The third piece is the simplest and therefore the hardest to accept: nothing lasts. Not love, not beauty, not even suffering. The person you are today will not exist tomorrow. The relationship you treasure will transform or dissolve. The certainty you cling to will slip away like water through your fingers. We know this intellectually. We have all seen things pass, have all felt the ache of impermanence. Yet we spend our entire lives struggling against it—trying to freeze moments, to preserve feelings, to make the temporary permanent. We love as though the beloved will never change. We build as though our constructions will endure. We speak as though our words will be remembered. But what if we stopped? What if, instead, we loved precisely *because* the beloved will change and eventually be lost? What if we built knowing that all structures crumble? What if we spoke understanding that our words will be forgotten? There is a strange freedom in this. When you accept that everything passes, you stop grasping. You stop demanding that life be other than it is. You begin to see each moment not as a stepping stone to some future permanence, but as the only real thing—fleeting, unrepeatable, and therefore infinitely precious. This is not despair. It is, paradoxically, a kind of joy. --- These three pieces of truth do not fit together neatly. They do not form a system or a solution. But perhaps that is their truth as well—that life resists our desire to make it coherent, that we must learn to hold contradictions, to live in the spaces between what we know and what we cannot know. We are alone, yet we long for connection. We are capable of great harm, yet we hope to be better. Everything we love will be lost, yet we love anyway. This is not wisdom. It is only what I have seen, sitting in rooms full of people, standing before the mirror of my own nature, and watching the slow dissolution of all things. Perhaps you will see something different. I hope you do. The moment another person sees the world differently than we do, we know we are not alone in the dark. That too, I have come to believe, is a kind of truth.
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