There is a particular kind of lie that does not require saying anything false. Sometimes all it requires is removing one person from the story while keeping everything that came through them.  And we are at the Thanksgiving season upon us... We are at the final harvest collection... 

You keep the books they introduced you to, the teachers, the practices, the language, the questions you had never asked before. You keep the places you learned about through them, the worlds they opened, the ways they taught you to look at your body, your psyche, your life, spirituality, intimacy, fear, death, love. You keep the inspiration, courage that was born in conversations with them. You keep the parts of yourself they challenged into existence. Eventually all of this becomes so deeply woven into your life that it begins to feel as though it had always belonged to you. Right? You say: “I became interested in this,” or “I discovered that,” or “I found this teacher,” or “I started exploring this practice.” Every sentence can be technically true while the story created by those sentences is a lie... it's not a 100% lie, but it is also not the full truth either. Because there is a difference between privacy and erasure. Privacy says that some things belong only to the people who lived them. Erasure says: I will keep everything that came through you, but I will construct a version of my life in which you contributed nothing, because it is safer for my "stability", it is easier to delete you completely from my life, so I don't have to be uncomfortable. 

The problem is that people do not pass through each other without leaving traces. Especially when they spend years together. ESPECIALLY when they meet each other in such a depth, in those places where identities are breaking open, where sexuality, spirituality, psychology, fear, mortality and truth stop being abstractions and become lived experience. We exchange much more than affection in relationships like these. We exchange worlds! 

One person gives you a book... The book opens your horizon and leads to a teacher. The teacher leads to a practice. The practice takes you somewhere you would never have gone before... That experience changes how you understand yourself. Then this changed self enters your like: your marriage, your family, your friendships, your work. And the change that was planted started growing... Ten years later EVERYONE can see the tree. They are SO happy to enjoy the fruits that this tree produces! but... almost nobody knows who planted that seed? Why is was even possible? 

And this is where erasure becomes exhausting, because eventually you are no longer hiding a person, you are hiding causality. You have to hide how one thing led to another. You have to make discoveries appear spontaneous. You have to separate the person you became from the experiences through which you became him/her. The greater the influence, the more elaborate this editing becomes, especially when the truth begins to threaten what everyone has agreed to call “stability.” Because acknowledging the planted seed eventually forces you to look honestly at the tree itself. And that is where hatred becomes complicated. What if I hate the seed, hate who planted it, hate everything its existence represents to me... but I have grown to love the tree? What if I love its shade? What if I eat its fruit every day? What if some of those fruits have become so precious to me that I can no longer imagine my life without them? Then what exactly am I supposed to hate? And what does my hatred demand from me? If I remain loyal to it, sooner or later I have to begin rejecting the tree as well. I have to cut away branches and roots, simply because I cannot tolerate where their roots lead. I have to tell myself that I never wanted this fruit, even while I am eating it. And this is where hatred quietly joins forces with pride: I would rather cut down a tree I have come to love than admit that something beautiful grew from a seed planted by someone I refuse to acknowledge and force to delete from my life. But once the tree is cut down, another question becomes unavoidable: do I actually want the life that existed before it was planted? Do I want the person who existed before it began to grow? Could we even return there now? Because a tree that has been growing for years does not simply occupy space. Its roots have changed the soil and its fruits became part of your body and your existence. And tearing it out will not restore the garden to what it was before. 

And then comes the most fascinating part of all: sometimes the people who hate the erased person begin to live among the fruits of their influence.

When you hate the source but love what came through it

A family can hate a person because of what their existence represents. Let's say, a person can hate someone because that someone represents some story in their mind: danger, humiliation, competition, betrayal, the possibility of losing the structure around which an entire life has been built. There is nothing mysterious about that anger. Pain creates enemies very easily... But time introduces a much more uncomfortable question. What happens when you begin to love some of what entered your life through the person you hate? People carry transformation home whether you like it or not. There is no separate nervous system for a marriage, another psyche for a love, another consciousness for friendship. When a human being changes, the changed person walks through every door! A person brings home the questions someone taught them to ask. They bring new language, new conversations, new emotional capacities, new spiritual interests, new inspirations, new ways of understanding intimacy etc. They bring books, teachers, practices, new life opportunities, experiences and ways of seeing themselves. They bring a different relationship with their body, fear, aging, sexuality, mortality. They may become more curious, more alive, more emotionally articulate, more capable of entering places inside themselves that they spent decades avoiding!

And another person living beside them inevitably receives some version of that changed person. This means that a union lives among the consequences of the very relationship it condemns. A woman can despise another woman while simultaneously loving qualities in her man that were awakened, strengthened or brought into consciousness through his relationship with that woman. Or vice versa, a man can despise... etc. A family can reject the source while gradually absorbing the influence. And then, years later, something almost absurd can happen. The family begins to celebrate it!!! All of a sudden, the interests are acceptable now, the spiritual search is acceptable, the teachers are interesting, the practices are meaningful, the transformation has become respectable. and oh, friends and colleagues admire the depth. They start giving gifts connected to the new world. They celebrate milestones inside it. Everyone is delighted with what has come through the door! But! there is one "but"... Only the hand that opened this door MUST still remain invisible...  

And I cannot help wondering.... are they grateful too? Or is it still easier to embrace what came through the door than the hand that opened it?  

Hatred is much easier than complexity

Hatred makes complicated histories beautifully simple. As long as one person can remain “the other woman,” “the mistake,” “the threat,” nobody has to become curious about who that human being actually was beyond the labels assigned to them. I recently heard someone ask his audience, “can you hate your enemy without ever meeting them?” Look at the world and the answer is obvious: of course we can. We do it all the time. Entire nations learn to hate people they have never met, whose homes they have never entered, whose stories they have never heard. We inherit hatred through someone else’s version of reality. Someone tells us who the enemy is, gives us the language with which to describe them, explains what they represent, and soon we experience our hatred as if it were born from our own knowledge. Unfortunately, even the professions we turn to for spiritual or psychological guidance can reinforce the same mechanism. Walk into a confessional and speak about a love that falls outside the accepted moral structure, and notice how quickly the complexity of that love can disappear behind the category of “sin, fear and punishment”. Walk into a therapist’s office and describe a version of yourself that does not fit neatly into the life you are expected to want, and there is always the risk that the work becomes less about discovering what is true and more about returning you to what is considered functional, acceptable, and socially coherent. Priests and therapists are human too... they carry traditions, frameworks, cultural assumptions, personal biases, and their own ideas about what a life is supposed to look like. At their best, both can help us face truths we would rather avoid. At their worst, they can become guardians of the very structures we came to question... And once an experience has been classified as “wrong,” it becomes dangerously easy to stop asking what it came to reveal, what it awakened, why it appeared, and why... even after we have obediently returned to the approved version of our lives, some part of us refuses to return with us. The same mechanism can exist inside a family. If another person can be reduced to “a mistake,” nobody has to ask what actually happened inside that mistake, what was exchanged there, what was learned there, or what survived it.

If another can remain simply “a threat to the relationship,” nobody has to confront the far more unsettling possibility that the threat itself changed the relationship, that what happened outside its walls eventually altered what was possible inside them. Hatred protects us from that complexity. It allows us to condemn the person without ever knowing them and, more importantly, without examining what their existence may have revealed, disrupted, awakened, or permanently changed.

Once a relationship has been classified as morally wrong, there is an enormous temptation to declare everything that happened inside it meaningless. Human transformation is inconvenient that way. It refuses to obey our moral filing systems. 

Something can cause enormous pain and still transform people. A relationship can contain deception and also contain love. Something can be impossible to continue and still alter the course of lives. Something can end and continue producing consequences for decades... To hold those truths together requires bravery, courage and humility. Hatred requires much less.

And then there is pride

Hatred alone cannot maintain this structure forever. At some point pride has to step in and explain why acknowledging what happened would somehow diminish us. For the person who was changed, pride sounds like this:

I owe them nothing. What I learned is mine now. These interests are mine. These practices are mine. This search is mine. The person I became belongs entirely to me. I would have discovered all of this anyway.

And after enough years, much of it is theirs. Influence is not ownership. Nobody gets to claim another human being because they once opened a door for them. But there is a tremendous difference between making something your own and rewriting the history of how it entered your life.

The pride on the other side sounds different but serves the same purpose: Nothing valuable could have entered the person I love through someone I despise. If I acknowledge their influence, I give them importance. If I admit that they changed something, I lose something. If I recognize their hand anywhere in this tree, I give them a place in my life that I refuse to give them.

And this is how two people who may disagree about almost everything can become strangely united around the same necessity: the person who planted the seed must not have mattered. Their role has to become smaller. The relationship has to become smaller. The influence has to become incidental. The tree can remain. Everyone can sit beneath it, admire it, photograph it, eat its fruit and feel proud of how magnificent it has become. And pretend... the seed must somehow become irrelevant... That is pride performing extraordinary mental gymnastics. 

There is another possibility, and it requires far more strength: I do not have to like the seed. I do not have to approve of how it was planted. I do not have to love the person who carried it. I can hate what happened and still acknowledge what grew and that I actually love it now.

That acknowledgment takes nothing away from anyone. It does not make the person who planted the seed the owner of the tree. It does not invalidate all the years of watering, tending, pruning and living beneath it that came afterward. It simply gives the tree its actual history.

But when pride experiences acknowledgment as defeat, truth itself begins to feel dangerous. So we choose a much stranger alternative: we falsify the history of something we love or we'd be approve of, rather than admit that part of it came through someone we have decided to hate. And that is where pride begins to manufacture secrecy.

Once I decide that the seed must not matter, I have to explain the tree without it. Once I decide that the person must not matter, I have to explain the transformation without them. Once I decide that nobody really opened the door, I have to reconstruct the story of how I somehow walked through it. And that is where the lie begins to grow.

The lie grows with the tree

This is what we misunderstand about secrecy: a lie does not remain the size it was when it began. When the seed was first planted and the first fragile shoot appeared above the ground, there was very little to hide. Nobody knew what the seed would become. Nobody knew whether the shoot would survive or bear fruit. At that stage, it could have been pulled out. Something else could have been planted. Life could have taken another direction.

But it wasn't pulled out. The shoot became a tree. Years passed. The roots went deeper. The branches spread. The tree changed the soil around it. It created shade where there had been none. Eventually people began gathering beneath it, eating its fruit and feeling proud of what it had become. Ten years later, the hidden truth is no longer seed-sized either. Nobody is hiding the tree. Everyone can see the tree! 

What is hidden is the story of how it came to be there. Who brought the seed. Who planted it. Who watered that first fragile shoot. Who protected it. Who made sure it didn't die. Who didn't sleep gazillions of nights. Who cried over the sick shoot and nourished it back to life... Who saw what might grow before anybody else could see it?

A conversation became an interest. An interest became a practice. The practice led to teachers. Teachers led to places, communities and experiences. A book became a philosophy. An introduction became a lifelong fascination. Something once shared privately between two people eventually became part of someone's public identity. And every new branch creates another tiny choice: acknowledge the root or speak only about the branch.

Once or twice, this costs very little. Ten years of it is something else entirely. Because hiding truth is work. You have to remember what can be said and what cannot. You have to know which version of the story each person knows. You have to construct explanations that remain technically true while omitting the one piece that would change their meaning. You have to disconnect effects from causes, discoveries from introductions, transformations from the relationships in which they began.

One omission protects another omission, which eventually requires another carefully arranged interpretation of the past. This consumes life force. The lie never ends... Hence, the one who is hiding never changes the inner state. The one who is protecting the truth gets to live in forever jail... The more energy we spend protecting ourselves from a truth, the less energy remains for actually living. And the larger the tree becomes, the more places that hidden truth touches. It enters other relationships, other conversations, other decisions, other celebrations, other people's understanding of who we are...

Silence does not make it smaller.... Time does not erase it... Life keeps attaching itself to it! And this is how a small omission eventually appears as an enormous lie without anyone ever consciously deciding to become a liar. It did not begin enormous. It grew because the life around it grew. Then, if the truth finally comes into the light, the deepest pain may no longer be only what happened years ago.  It becomes how much of the life I thought I understood was built around making sure I never knew? 

I helped maintain it too

And this is where I have to include myself. For years I believed silence could be love. Protect them. Protect some structure, some form, reputations etc. Protect people from consequences they were afraid to face. Allow pieces of myself to enter another person's world without ever requiring acknowledgment of where they came from. Make myself smaller whenever the truth of my existence becomes inconvenient for the outside world. I called some of that generosity. Some of it was love. Some of it was fear. And some of it was my own participation  in a system that could continue only while certain truths remained outside the room.

I see that differently now. Every time I agreed to disappear so that somebody else's reality could remain undisturbed, I helped maintain the distance between what was privately known and what was publicly permitted to exist. I helped protect the very architecture that was consuming all of us. There is a vast difference between demanding credit for another person's transformation and refusing to participate in the falsification of your own history.

And this is where my part of the story becomes much larger than relationships. I have reached a point in my life where I am no longer interested in building myself according to what other people can comfortably tolerate. I have spent enough years measuring truth against consequences, asking who might be disturbed by it, who might misunderstand it, who might judge it, what structure might shake if I stopped editing myself. There is a strange arrogance hidden inside that kind of self-erasure: the belief that I am somehow responsible for maintaining everybody else's version of reality. I am not.

My life is becoming my confession now. Not a confession of guilt, and not a performance of disclosure for people who are curious about what happened behind closed doors. I mean confession in its older, deeper sense: to speak what I know to be true and to stop dividing myself between the life I have actually lived and the life I am permitted to admit that I lived.

Some of my truth will be inconvenient. Some of it will contradict the stories other people need in order to understand themselves. Some of it will make me difficult to categorize as good or bad, loyal or disloyal, spiritual or immoral, victim or perpetrator. I have been all kinds of things inside one lifetime. I have loved beautifully and badly. I have hurt people and been badly hurt. I have stayed when I should have left and left when part of me still wanted to stay. I have entered places I was told not to enter and found pieces of myself there that I could not have found anywhere else.

I am not interested in amputating those pieces anymore in order to produce a socially acceptable version of myself. This is the scale I am interested in now: an undivided life.

A life in which I do not have to look over my shoulder before telling my own story. A life in which my choices are no longer organized around the comfort of the herd, the morality of the crowd, the expectations of a society, a group, a culture, a church, a profession, or anyone else who believes they have earned the right to decide which parts of my experience are legitimate. The crowd is always very generous with instructions for how another person should live. It carries almost none of the consequences. but I do. I am the one who has to wake up inside this life. I am the one who has to inhabit this body, carry this history, live with my choices, meet my own death and answer the only question that will finally matter to me: was this actually my life?

So I will build what comes next on the whole truth of what came before. Not because everyone deserves access to my private life. They do not. Privacy still matters. Boundaries still matter. Silence can still be sacred. But I will no longer confuse privacy with shame, discretion with erasure, or somebody else's discomfort with an obligation to disappear.

My truth does not require consensus to become mine. It does not become less real because somebody hates it. It does not become less sacred because somebody judges it. It does not become invalid because acknowledging it complicates somebody else's preferred version of the past. 

And I no longer need the herd to turn around and say, Yes, you are allowed to have lived this. I lived it! That is enough! From here, I want to build a life that can hold the full scale of the woman who lived it, without constantly reducing her to the size of other people's comfort. I would rather deal with the consequences of my truth than spend another decade paying for the maintenance of a lie. I do not have that kind of time, do I? Because that, finally, is my responsibility: not to preserve everyone's preferred story, but to make sure that when I look at the life I am creating now, I recognize myself inside it. Through and through. I do not own what another human being became through knowing me. Whatever passed between us has mixed with everything else they have lived, learned, suffered, chosen and loved. The tree belongs to the life in which it grows now. But I do not have to deny that I once carried a seed. I was there! However inconvenient this fact might be in someone else's story. I was there and the encounter changed me. It also changed other people! It entered other parts of our lives because profound relationships do that. Some consequences were devastating. Some were beautiful. Some are still growing in places none of us could have predicted when the first shoot appeared. I no longer believe that making myself disappear makes anyone freer. It only creates one more version of the truth that has to be managed. :-) And the longer we manage truth instead of integrating it, the more life force the management requires. The tree continues growing...  At some point the most liberating sentences become the simplest ones:

Yes, it happened. Yes, it mattered. Yes, some of what grew from it is still alive.

Imagine how much energy becomes available when those sentences no longer need protection? You can FINALLY breathe! 

And then there is the actual choice

There is still a choice. The tree can be cut down. We can decide that we cannot live with where something came from, remove what grew, clear the ground and begin again. We can plant something new, spend all that energy on nurturing, and wait to see what it becomes. That is a real choice.

But cutting down the tree does not return us to the moment before the seed was planted. The tree already existed. It already grew. We already lived beneath it. We already tasted its fruit. Its roots already changed the soil. Whatever gets planted next will grow in ground altered by what came before.

Or there is another choice. We can stop fighting the origin of something we have already come to love. We can say: I hate some of what happened around the planting of this tree. I hate the pain associated with it. I may still hate the person who carried the seed. And I can see that I love some of what grew.

Those truths can exist in the same human heart. Acknowledging one does not cancel the other. And this is where hatred finally has an opportunity to loosen its grip, because you no longer have to hate the tree in order to remain loyal to YOUR HATRED of the seed. You no longer have to mutilate the present to punish the past. You no longer have to spend enormous amounts of energy making sure the roots appear to lead somewhere other than where you already know they lead. You can simply allow history to be history...

Gratitude is not approval

Thanksgiving... Our final harvest before the new cycle begins... The tree grew more fruits this past year, and we all tasted them. It will continue growing more fruits and branches and more seeds for younger trees next year...

Gratitude does not mean being grateful for betrayal, deception, humiliation or pain. It means having enough humility to recognize reality. A person can say: I hate what happened. I hate how it happened. I hate what it did to me. And I can still recognize that this human being influenced the person standing beside me.

Another can say: I made choices that hurt people. I am responsible for those choices. And I can still acknowledge that this person profoundly changed my life. 

Neither statement glorifies pain. Neither absolves anyone. Neither requires reconciliation. Neither requires inviting anyone back. They simply stop falsifying causality. And there is something deeply freeing in that, because we no longer need clean heroes and villains in order to understand our own lives. Some people who transform us will also wound us. Some people we wound will have given us extraordinary things. Some of the greatest teachers of our lives will arrive through circumstances we would never publicly choose. Truth does not become less true because its origin makes us uncomfortable.

The harvest

And so I return to the harvest. To the tree everyone can see. To the fruit everyone is now able to enjoy. To the person who has become so accustomed to the tree that they can barely remember the garden before it. To the people around them who celebrate what grew without knowing the full history of the soil. 

Is everyone grateful? Or is it still easier to embrace what came through the door than the hand that opened it?

I no longer think this question is really about gratitude toward the hand. It is about our relationship with truth. Because there comes a point when refusing to acknowledge another person's influence stops diminishing them. They already know they were there. At some point, the secret itself begins diminishing YOU, the one who chooses to hide! It forces you to divide your own biography into what you know and what you are willing to admit. It requires you to consume the fruits of your own history while denying their roots, while forcing you to say how much you hate the taste of the fruits. It makes you protect stability with omissions until maintaining the appearance of stability consumes the very energy that could have been used to actually live and create something meaningful in your life. And the cruelest part is that erasing someone does not necessarily free you from them. To erase consciously, you have to remember what you are erasing... LOL Every omission requires knowing what must remain unsaid... Every carefully edited origin story contains knowledge of the real one. So you can hate the hand. You can refuse to thank the hand. You can decide that the hand has no place in your present life! You can even cut down the tree and begin again! But you cannot return to the moment before the seed was planted. The tree was here... and it grew! and you lived beneath it... You ate its fruits... And maybe freedom begins when none of those sentences need to be hidden anymore.