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 was a child who felt everything precisely and learned to say none of it.
My father died when I was six. A car, at night, a tree, a fire.
He was the warmth in the house, and when he was gone the warmth went with him. What stayed was a mother who loved me but could not be soft,
a family with no language for any of it, and a boy at the bottom of the stairs the night they came to tell us. I remember exactly where everyone stood.
I remember almost nothing of what I felt.
That became the shape of everything. I did not decide to stop feeling.
I decided unknowingly, that the real thing has nowhere to go,
so you seal and suppress it.
At school I was the "brown kid" and got the slurs that came with it.
I went to the teachers and they waved it off. For years.
Losing my father was absence. This was being seen and not met, which created a inner anger at "the world".
At seventeen I fell from a roof, two stories high, head-on to a basement staircase with my head.
A week in a coma, a year of rehabilitation, permanently deaf on one ear, working out alone what to do with a life
I had nearly lost. Two months before the fall I had met my girlfriend, who stayed through all of it and is my wife now, twenty years on. She was the first person who received me as I was instead of needing me to be useful first.
She did not fix me. She showed me, by living it next to me, what being met even looked like.
The timing is the point: safety arrived at seventeen, the actual softening did not come for another thirteen years.
Being loved was necessary but not enough.
The seeing came later, after I started doing the "inner work".
I got good, fast, consistent at reading a person, a room, a system, finding the thing underneath the thing
before they finished talking. It built a career and it became the reason I believed I was worth anything.
If I was the one who saw what others couldn't, there was a reason for me to be in the room.
I thought that was just who I was.
Then it broke in the one place it could not have expected.
I have a daughter. For years I could read strangers down to the root but could not see her clearly, my own six-year-old in front of me. Seeing her meant feeling the boy I had sealed off at her age, and the instrument that read everyone had a hole in it exactly the shape of that boy. What changed it was not more insight. It was the opposite.
I had to come into contact with the boy first, and only then did my daughter come into focus.
The sequence I had built everything on, understand first and then you are safe, was backwards.
Contact came first. The rest followed.
My wife showed me the door. My daughter forced me through it. I entered.
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 load-bearing did not disappear when I caught it. It relocated.
It used to say I matter because I see what others don't.
Now it says I will matter once I have "my thing clear" to offer to the world.
Same thing, just a different story.
I am not the man who "got out".
I am the man who keeps catching the same borrowed assumption wearing a more refined disguise each time,
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 moment 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, in a way you cannot unsee.
What you do after is your responsibility.
If that is the kind of contact you are looking for, you will know.