Truth Unseen - Chapter 8 – The Problem with Denial, Part II
These aren’t signs of failure. They’re invitations. They ask us to stop pretending and start listening.
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The world teaches us to perform, to perfect, to polish our image until we believe we are our own illusion. But the truth always waits. It waits in the parts of us we try to silence—the fear, the sadness, the confusion.
These aren’t signs of failure. They’re invitations. They ask us to stop pretending and start listening.
For most of us, the habits that nearly killed us didn’t start in darkness. They started in hope, in desire, in some pure part of us trying to feel alive, even for a moment. But when those habits became hiding places, the light got harder to find. So we adapted. We managed. We got clever at surviving. Some of us got so good at pretending to be okay, we forgot we weren’t.
But the soul doesn’t forget. Eventually, the truth shows up in symptoms—anxiety, numbness, rage, despair disguised as ambition. Pain doesn’t disappear just because we’ve hidden it well. It waits. And it grows.
This is where the stakes get real.
If you’ve spent your life trying to earn your worth, grace will offend you. It will insult your ego. It will ruin your plan for self-salvation. But it will also save your life.
What we call addictions are often just rituals around a deeper ache. They’re not about pleasure. They’re about protection. Not thrill-seeking—but threat-avoidance. The bottle, the binge, the gamble, the fix—they all begin with one question: