Most people who are good at thinking are also good at maintaining the loop they are in.
Intelligence does not produce clarity by itself.
It produces explanations.
- Dimitri Vantorre
About me
I spent most of my life being the one who sees.
It started as something useful. I could read a room, a person, a system, fast, and usually before they could. People brought me their problems and I could find the thing underneath the thing. It built a career. It built the way people saw me, and above all the way I saw myself. What I did not notice for a long time is that the seeing was load-bearing in a way it was never meant to be.
It was not just something I was good at. It was the reason I believed
I mattered. If I was the one who saw what others could not, there was a reason for me to be in the room. Take the seeing away and I could not have told you what was left, or who I was.
I did not know that was the structure. I thought it was just "who I was".
The first time it cracked was not in a session or a book. It was at home.
I have a daughter. For years I could read strangers down to the root but could not see her clearly,
because seeing her would have meant feeling something I had sealed off so early in my life I did not know it was sealed.
The instrument that read everyone had a hole in it exactly the shape of my own child.
What changed it was not more insight. It was the opposite.
I had to come into contact with something before the seeing, not after.
The order I had built my whole life on, understand first, then you are safe, turned out to be backwards.
Contact came first. The knowing followed.
And the thing I was best at in the world, I could not do for the person closest to me until I stopped leading with it.
That is the work I do now.
Not because I resolved this. Because I keep finding it.
Here is the part most people in this work will not tell you.
I have not arrived "anywhere".
The structure that made the seeing supported, did not disappear when I caught it.
It relocated. Again and again.
It used to say to myself I matter because I see what others don't.
Now it tries to convince me I will matter once I am "fully realized", or once the work is complete.
Same thing, just a different story.
It is more convincing now because it sounds existantial instead of fear.
I can see it when it happens. I cannot always stop it.
I am not the man who "got out". I am the man who keeps catching the same borrowed assumption wearing a more sophisticated disguise, which is exactly why I can find it in someone else.
I am not pointing at your situation from outside it.
I am in it too, on the same day you are reading this.
The work is not me "fixing" you.
It is me being close enough to what you are carrying to name it accurately, and in a way that you cannot unsee it.
What you do after, that is your responsibility, not mine.
If that is the kind of contact you are looking for, you will know.