We say the word so easily. Truth. We toss it around in conversations, claim to value it, insist we want it. But do we really understand what it means to hold it? To live inside it? To let it rearrange everything you thought you knew about yourself and the people around you?
Truth doesn’t ask permission to change you. Once you’ve seen it, the only exile is pretending you haven’t, and some of us lost that option long ago.
There was a time when seeking truth felt like a flaw. Something must be wrong with you. Why are you so intense? Why can’t you just enjoy the surface of things? Are you depressed? Are you drawn to darkness? The questions came from others, and worse, they came from within. We learned to doubt ourselves for simply wanting to understand what was real.
But here’s what they don’t tell you: truth isn’t darkness. Truth is clarity. It only looks dark to those who’ve built their lives in carefully lit rooms designed to hide the corners.
The loneliest part of waking up isn’t the seeing. It’s realizing most people chose the dream on purpose, and your presence reminds them they’re sleeping.
And so you learn. You learn that relationships shift. Some friendships quietly become acquaintances. Some acquaintances unexpectedly become friendships. The people who can sit with you in the truth, who don’t need you to soften it or package it or apologize for it, those are the ones who stay. Not because they’re better people. Just because they’re traveling in the same direction.
Some of us went looking for truth. Some of us were dragged there by lives that refused to let us hide. Either way, you can’t unknow what you know. You can only choose who you walk beside while knowing it.
This is the quiet sorting that happens when you stop performing and start living. When your values align with someone, the path forward feels natural. You move together from one stop to the next. When the values don’t align, the relationship zigs and zags, always slightly out of rhythm, always requiring effort to maintain something that was never quite built to last.
Not everyone can accept the truth. Not everyone wants to hear it. And that’s not a judgment. It’s just a distance. The distance between those who chose to look and those who chose not to. The distance between those who went searching and those who were given no choice but to find themselves there.
That distance is the difference.
And once you’ve crossed it, you can’t go back. You can only keep walking, grateful for whoever walks with you, at peace with whoever doesn’t.
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