What’s happening with the Epstein files is a real-time case study in gaslighting and erasure. We hear all the legal talk and technicalities, but underneath it is something simple and brutal: victims whose reality keeps getting questioned, minimized, or ignored. Can you imagine surviving that level of harm and then being told, directly or indirectly, that what you lived through is “not that bad,” “complicated,” or “unproven,” while the powerful people around it get endless protection and PR.
That’s what gaslighting on a systemic level looks like: reality being taken away from the people who need it most, while they’re forced to depend on institutions and power structures that keep failing them. It’s manipulation and control in a suit and tie, wrapped in legal language and media spin, and it mirrors the same dynamics many of us have lived through in our personal lives, just scaled up.
What a way to end 2025: not with a neat bow, but with x-ray vision. This year gave me more than memories; it gave me insight, lessons, and a level of clarity I used to pray for in the dark. 2026 isn’t a reinvention. It’s just the next step in walking as myself, unapologetically, without shrinking to fit anyone’s story of who I should be.
One thing I’ve learned: an honest person has nothing to hide. If you bring up their mistakes, they may flinch, but they’ll own it. They’ll sit in the discomfort, acknowledge the harm, and try to repair. A dishonest person will do the opposite; they deflect, gaslight, minimize, hide, or try to silence you so they don’t have to face themselves. It’s subtle. It often shows up in tone, in diversions, in changing the topic to your “overreaction” instead of their behavior.
Most people never see it. We’re conditioned to read surface signals like smiles, status, charm, and tears and decide, “This is a good person.” We confuse performance with integrity and presentation with character.
My biggest shift this year has been flipping that lens: if someone can’t or won’t see what’s actually happening, if they need the mask more than the truth, they’re simply not my people. My people are the ones whose eyes cut through the act, who can spot the quiet manipulations and stand with me in reality, not fantasy.
There’s a quote that says: truth doesn’t mind being questioned; a lie does. The older version of me would twist myself into knots trying to prove my truth to those committed to misunderstanding me. The version closing out 2025 understands this: if my honesty threatens your narrative, that’s your work, not mine. My only job is to live in alignment with my values, my story, my soul and let those who recognize that language walk beside me into 2026.
I wish more people are curious about psychology, not just as theory, but as a mirror. Really analyzing wounds, especially childhood wounds, and how they shape the way you show up in the world: in intimate relationships, friendships, family dynamics, and professional spaces. Everything else we obsess over feels layered on top of what is actually the core of so much human suffering.
Buddhism touched it with the idea of attachment, but the ego is so loud in this era that many of us can’t even hear ourselves. We’re distracted by technology, media, productivity, and performance. Meanwhile, unhealed wounds are getting transmitted across generations, and if you’re not aware you’re carrying them, you move through the world on autopilot, unconsciously hurting other people without even realizing it.
Sometimes there’s that one person who finally pauses and says, “What is going on with me?” That moment matters. Because at the end of the day, none of the external noise really matters as much as who we are at our core and whether we’re acting from ego or from something deeper. And if it is ego, why? What is it protecting?
Look around: so much of what is happening in the world is one big, loud ego driving us off a cliff and pulling more ego-driven people into its orbit. Power without self-awareness. Influence without integrity. Visibility without accountability. That’s why personal work isn’t just “self-help”; it’s harm reduction.
Going into 2026, that’s the lens: less obsession with how things look, and more devotion to what’s true, inside us, between us, and in the systems around us. The masks are loud, but they’re not the whole story.
(This is a good definition of what manipulation is)
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