The awakening is not gentle. It is the sudden knowledge that no one is coming to save you.
That line hits like a cold wave at midnight, shocking, clarifying, impossible to ignore once it crashes through your chest. Awakening isn’t a calendar event. You don’t pick a date, set a reminder, and sip tea while enlightenment arrives on schedule. It arrives uninvited, rips the curtains down, and leaves you blinking at a world you can’t unsee.
What follows is messy. For me, it came with anger at the nonsense I tolerated, the stories I swallowed, the bargains I made with chaos just to keep the noise down. Then came compassion not the soft, performative kind, but the fierce kind that says: you did the best you could with what you knew, and now you know more. Both truths can stand in the same room without canceling each other out.
There’s no map. You only know you’re finished renting space to chaos, so you start walking toward quieter ground. You simplify. You let people go. You stop explaining yourself to juries you never hired. Some will judge; let them. Judgment is a self-filter, efficient, elegant, final. When someone shows you they’d rather project than understand, you simply move them to the far shelf and stop pouring your life into a bottomless cup.
The reward isn’t comfort; it’s freedom. Not the Instagram kind, the interior kind. The freedom to know what’s yours to carry and what isn’t. The freedom to stop rescuing everyone from their own lessons. The freedom to choose silence over spectacle. If offered the trade, enlightenment or wealth, I’ll take the state of mind every time, because money buys options, but clarity buys oxygen.And yet, awakening isn’t a cure-all. It doesn’t fix the world; it reframes it. The work is daily: pruning, noticing, choosing again. Curiosity becomes a discipline.
Understanding becomes a form of peace. Not everything becomes painless, some truths still sting even when fully understood. So you forgive yourself. Again. Because you are human, and being human is not a flaw to be corrected; it is the ground you stand on while you evolve.
If you’re in the blast radius of your own awakening right now, take heart. You won’t be who you were yesterday, and that’s the point.
You’re not walking toward a destination; you’re walking toward a different altitude. Less noise. More sky. And once your eyes adjust, you won’t bargain with the dark again.
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