There is a version of me that certain people still think they know. They call her name, and I hear it like a sound from another room – familiar, but distant. That version is receding. Not because I abandoned her, but because I kept growing when she stopped.
Awareness is not a gift you unwrap. It is more like a door that opens and will not close again. You walk through it, often without realising you have, and then you turn back and the threshold is gone. You cannot unknow what you know. You cannot unsee what you see. And the world, completely unbothered, keeps performing around you.
I have learned to sit in a particular kind of T-junction. On one side: directness, the truth of what I can see clearly through the noise of someone’s deflection or performance. On the other: compassion, the recognition that wherever they are in their journey is exactly where they need to be right now, even if it is not where I can follow. I do not always navigate it gracefully but I no longer pretend I cannot see.
This is why my circle is small, and why that is not a loss. The people I hold close are not people who agree with me. They are people who have done the work – or are genuinely trying to. The rest of the bandwidth, I simply cannot afford. Not out of cruelty. Out of necessity.
The loneliness that comes with this kind of awareness is real. I know that because others living it have found me and said so. But it is a different kind of loneliness to the kind I used to feel when I was surrounded by people who did not really see me. This one has integrity. It is the cost I pay for not going back.
What concerns me most right now is not personal. It is the view from a wider altitude. Watching people in positions of enormous power act from their wounds, their unresolved fear, their unhealed younger selves – and watching the downstream consequences ripple out across millions of lives. It is textbook, if you know what you are looking at. And I cannot stop seeing it.
I do not write this to be dramatic. I write it because some of you are sitting in the same silence, wondering if something is wrong with you for seeing what you see. There is not. You are just further along the road than you were. And the road only goes forward.
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