A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses. Love has its own agenda of contradictions and violence.
Alain Badiou
In my life as a lover, and as a writer, I have observed—again and again—an aversion to the truth.
An all too common intolerance for truth’s processes. A disgust for the spine the truth requires.
No one has the fucking stomach anymore.
Asking your lover for the truth should not be like pulling teeth.
It should feel like kissing.
At least I’ve always thought so.
And yet.
Everywhere I look, we have no faith in each other.
Where does the truth go?
Where can it fit?
Where is it welcome?
We have made a world unwilling to accommodate truth.
In doing so, we have resigned ourselves to act as little prisons for it, condemned the truth to rot inside of us, in some closed circuit loop forever and ever or until it turns into something that can and will kill us.
Friendship may be the last place truth can bloom, and even within those relationship dynamics, the truth faces increasing challenges.
The truth cannot prevail where the ego rules.
Therapy and other self-protective coping mechanisms have us in a chokehold, turning us into asocial little assholes.
The ego is all we nurture.
We have moved so far from each other that the truth appears threatening rather than what it is, that is to say: Liberating.
It is a liberation process.
But we like the prison we have made for ourselves.
We have gotten used to it. We like how small we have made the world.
We like the feeling of truth decaying in our throats.
Oh, we fucking love standing still in our shit!
A love incumbent on avoidance of truth is not love at all.
And that is where we are: bursting at the seam and pretending not to be.
Biting our tongues because we have learned that is what holds the status quo together, what won’t make waves.
We lack the surrender, the trust that love needs to thrive.
When we settle for never being truly known, the same way we have settled for the cruelty of capitalism in exchange for some bastard version of freedom, we continue to make ourselves less human and rob ourselves of the greatest joy of loving and being loved.
When will we recognize the true price of a pain-free life?
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