There’s something quietly heartbreaking about watching human beings move through the world carrying wounds they don’t know they have.
We walk around with these invisible bruises, these deeply grooved responses to life that formed long before we had the language to name them. And we don’t know they’re there. We just know something doesn’t feel right. We just know we keep ending up in the same place, with the same feeling, wondering how we got here again.
Then we bump into someone. Their unexamined wounds knock against ours, and suddenly triggers are flying in every direction, each one activating the other in an elaborate, unconscious choreography neither person asked for or understands. And then, right in the middle of that chaos, someone appears and says exactly the right words at exactly the right moment. We feel seen. We feel safe. We think: this is the one.
What we don’t realize is we just found someone whose wounds fit perfectly against ours. We call it chemistry. We call it destiny.
And then we build a life together, and the triggers start their dance, and we wonder what happened to the person we fell in love with. We were never really meeting them. We were meeting the part of them that matched the part of us we hadn’t yet faced.
This is the web we’re all caught in. And it repeats. Generation after generation, person after person, relationship after relationship.
And what do we do collectively? We build things. We draft laws. We design policies. We fund programs and create frameworks and launch initiatives. All of it genuine. All of it attempting to address the downstream damage of people who never learned to know themselves. We treat symptoms and call it progress. We patch the roof and ignore that the foundation has been crumbling the whole time.
The uncomfortable truth is that almost none of the structures we build ask the deeper question, because the deeper question doesn’t have a clear ROI. You cannot monetize self-awareness. You cannot put a quarterly number on someone finally understanding why they keep choosing the same kind of pain. The currency of this world is survival, and survival doesn’t have much patience for inner work.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: when we die, nothing we manufactured follows us out. Not the policies, not the products, not the titles. And yet in the eulogies and the quiet moments after loss, we reach for the same words every time. We talk about how someone made us feel. Whether they were present. Whether they really knew themselves well enough to truly know us.
Imagine, just for a moment, a world where more people did that work. Where awareness wasn’t a luxury reserved for therapy rooms and wellness retreats but a basic expectation we held for ourselves and each other. How many cycles would break? How many conflicts would dissolve before they became laws that needed enforcing? How many people would stop marrying their unresolved wounds in human form and actually find each other instead?
We keep telling ourselves we’re solving the problem. We’re mostly decorating it.
The most radical thing a human being can do is slow down long enough to ask: why do I keep doing this? And then actually stay for the answer.
That’s where it changes. Not in the legislation. Not in the framework. In the person, finally willing to look.
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