The only spell 

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The Only Spell


“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
An old Dane said we’re fooled two ways,
and both can feel like sight:
we take a lie because it’s warm,
or flee the truth from fright.
 
A voice comes through my glowing screen
with music, low and grave.
It says that grammar came from spells,
the ocean from the wave.
 
It says my cursive casts a curse,
that every loop’s a snare.
But cursive only means “to run,”
a pen that skims on air.
 
It swears that “government” means mind control,
that “-ment” is Latin for “brain.”
So “pavement” must be thinking hard
each time it feels the rain.
 
It says a “mortgage” is a “dead pledge,”
and there, at least, it’s right:
the pledge would die once debts were paid,
a detail kept from sight.
 
It says in nineteen forty-six
the roots of words were banned.
It names no law, no board, no vote,
just hopes I’ll “understand.”
 
It hands a famous dead man lines
he never had to say,
and calls my voice a frequency
that bends the stars my way.
 
And thousands nod and pass it on,
too busy to look twice.
The clip that tells me, “Check the roots,”
won’t take its own advice.
 
I do not have to rage or sneer;
the sneer’s a lie in kind.
I only ask, “How do you know?”
and keep an open mind.
 
The truth is quieter than the lie;
it doesn’t need to sell.
It only waits for us to look, and that’s the only spell.

…

DCG

“Words Are Spells”: A Viral Clip, Transcribed and Fact-Checked
A video now going around Facebook says that our everyday words are hidden spells, that grammar comes from a book of magic, that cursive writing makes curses, and that schools stopped teaching etymology in 1946 to keep people under control. I transcribed the clip, followed it back to where it came from, and checked each claim against standard etymological references.
Where the Clip Comes From
The audio is not from a named author or scholar. The earliest version I found is a 45-minute YouTube video titled “This Ancient Code Reveals EXACTLY How Your Words Control Reality… The Universe Obeys This,” posted December 11, 2025, by a channel called Beyond the Veil. Its description lists the same claims: grammar from “grimoire,” cursive from “curse,” spelling as “casting spells,” and etymology removed from schools in 1946.
A shorter cut with almost the same script as the Facebook clip later spread under titles like “They Stopped Teaching Word Etymology In 1946” (Mirror Mike 2 on YouTube). It was also reposted by The Mandeep Toor Show and turned up inside reaction videos about “Tartaria” and “the great reset” (AutoDidactic 2). Several uploads repeat the script word for word, with the same narration style and background music. That pattern points to anonymous “faceless” content, likely scripted and voiced with AI, passed between channels. Nobody named stands behind it.

Transcript

Look at the word grammar. Where does it come from? Grimoire. That’s a book of magic spells. The structure of language, grammar, was originally understood as a magical system. Then there’s cursive writing. We call it cursive because it creates curses. And spelling: you’re casting spells.
This isn’t hidden. It’s right there in plain sight. They just trained you to laugh it off as coincidence.
But here’s where it gets disturbing. In 1946, something vanished from American schools. Not prayer. Not paddling. Etymology. The study of where words come from and what they actually mean. And the moment they removed it, you lost the ability to see the trap. Because when you understand what words really mean at their root, you start noticing that almost every word you use was designed to program you into accepting limitations you never agreed to.
Let me prove it to you right now. There’s a reason they stopped teaching etymology in 1946. Before that, every kid learned to decode words, to understand the hidden programs inside language. Then it stopped. Everywhere. All at once. They replaced it with memorization and standardized tests.
Why? Because if you knew that “understand” literally means to stand under, to submit, you might stop saying “I understand” in every agreement. If you knew “government” breaks into “govern,” meaning control, and “ment,” meaning mind, you might start questioning authority differently.
They gave you a corrupted vocabulary and told you words don’t matter. But words are spells. And they’ve been casting them over you your entire life.
Listen. I know how that sounds. I know you’re probably thinking, okay, this is going to be some weird metaphor thing. But stay with me. Because what I’m about to show you isn’t a metaphor at all. It’s physics. It’s biology. And they’ve systematically hidden it from you, because once you understand that your words aren’t describing reality, they’re creating it, you become ungovernable.
Here’s the truth nobody’s telling you. You’ve been doing the work, right? Like positive thinking. This means you’re not lazy. And you’re definitely not missing some secret ingredient. But here’s what’s happening. You’ve been using contaminated language that programs failure directly into your nervous system. And they did that on purpose.
Think about it. You say, “I’m trying to lose weight.” What does your subconscious hear? Trying. Attempting but not succeeding. It means effort without result. You say, “I want to be successful.” Your body hears want. Lack. Desire. The state of not having. You say, “I need more money.” Your cells receive need, scarcity, desperation, emergency mode. Every single one of those statements is a spell. And you just cast limitation into your reality without even knowing it.

Now here’s what they don’t want you to know. The elite study etymology like their lives depend on it. They teach their children Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, these ancient languages that are basically frequency codes. While they’re learning to program reality, they give your kids tech speak and emojis. They dumb down the vocabulary. They remove etymology from schools. And they tell you the biggest lie ever told: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” That’s not protection. That’s programming you to dismiss the most powerful force in your reality.
Words aren’t neutral. I need you to understand this. They’re not just communication tools. They’re technology, frequency technology. Every word you speak creates an electromagnetic signature. Problem is, nobody told you that thoughts don’t create reality. Words do. Because thoughts are made of words, right? You can’t think without language. And if your language is corrupted, your thoughts are corrupted, which means your reality is corrupted. It’s that simple.
And get this: spelling and casting spells aren’t coincidence. Once you decode even five words, you can’t unsee it.
Mortgage. “Mort” means death, like mortal, mortuary. “Gage” means pledge, like engage, a binding agreement. Mortgage equals death pledge. You’re signing a death pledge, and they call it that right to your face.
Pharmacy comes from “pharmakeia”: sorcery, witchcraft.
Government equals “govern,” control, plus “ment,” mind. Mind control.
They’re telling you exactly what they’re doing. And you’re agreeing because nobody taught you to read the code.
So here’s what changes once you understand this. Once you get that language is literal reality-programming technology, you gain complete linguistic sovereignty. You stop speaking unconsciously. You stop signing invisible contracts. You stop casting limitation spells over your own life. You reclaim the creative power they’ve deliberately hidden from you.
This isn’t about positive thinking. Positive thinking is surface level. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. This is about understanding that you are a frequency generator broadcasting electromagnetic signatures every second. And language is how you tune that frequency.
Some people manifest easily. And listen, it’s not because they’re more spiritual or more blessed. They just understand that every sentence is a contract with the universe. And the universe always says yes.
Why decode language when you can just memorize what they tell you it means, right? Just trust us. This word means this. Don’t ask where it came from. Don’t ask what the roots are. Just memorize it and move on.
This was coordinated after World War II, after they saw what propaganda could do, how language could move entire nations, how words could convince people to do unspeakable things. They systematically removed linguistic literacy from education.
Edward Bernays. You’ve got to know this name. Nephew of Sigmund Freud. Literally wrote the book on propaganda. Public relations, he called it. He understood that controlling language controls populations. And his whole philosophy was this: a population that decodes language is dangerous. A population that understands etymology asks too many questions. They see through the manipulation. They recognize the spells being cast.
Fact-Checking the Claims
Grammar and Grimoire
Partly true, but backwards. Grammar did not come from grimoire. Grimoire came from grammar. “Grammar” goes back to Greek grammatikē, “the art of letters,” from gramma, “letter” (Etymonline). “Grimoire” is a later French alteration of grammaire, and it shows up in English only from 1849 (Etymonline). The real story is still interesting. In the Middle Ages, when few people could read, book learning (“grammar”) was linked with occult knowledge, and that link also gave us “glamour.” But that is a case of reading and writing looking like magic to people who couldn’t do either. It is not a case of grammar starting out as magic.

Cursive and Curse
False. “Cursive” comes from Medieval Latin cursivus, “running,” from Latin currere, “to run.” It means a “running hand,” writing done without lifting the pen (Etymonline). “Curse” comes from Old English curs, whose origin is uncertain (Etymonline). The two words sound alike, and that is all they share.
Spelling and Casting Spells
A real connection, but not a hidden one. Both senses of “spell” come from the same Germanic root, meaning roughly “to tell, say, or recite” (Etymonline). A magic “spell” was a set of words you recited. “Spelling” a word meant reading it out letter by letter. They share a family tree because both are about saying words aloud. Neither one shows that writing words correctly is a magical act.
Understand
Misleading. Old English understandan meant “to comprehend,” and the “under” in it probably meant “between” or “among,” so the word was roughly “to stand in the midst of” (Etymonline). Whatever the original picture behind the word, it has never meant “to submit.” Saying “I understand” does not sign you up for anything.
Government Means “Mind Control”
False. “Govern” comes from Latin gubernare, “to steer, to pilot” (Etymonline). “-ment” is not the Latin word for mind (that would be mens, mentis). It is an ordinary suffix from Latin -mentum that turns a verb into a noun, as in “payment,” “movement,” and “agreement” (Etymonline). “Government” just means “the act of governing.”
Mortgage as “Death Pledge”
True as a literal translation, but the clip gets the meaning wrong. “Mortgage” does come from Old French mort gage, “dead pledge.” It was called that because the agreement “dies” when the debt is paid off, or when the borrower fails to pay and loses the property (Etymonline). The word says nothing about the borrower dying, and nobody was hiding that meaning.
Pharmacy and Sorcery
Partly true. Greek pharmakeia could mean medicine, drugs, poison, or magic, and pharmakon covered “drug, poison, charm, spell” (Etymonline). In the ancient world, healing remedies and magic potions overlapped. That tells us about ancient medicine. It does not tell us what a modern drugstore is doing.
Etymology Removed from Schools in 1946
No evidence. I found no record of any law, policy, or curriculum change in 1946 that removed etymology from American schools. The claim’s own framing falls apart on inspection, since the U.S. has never had a single national curriculum that could be changed “everywhere, all at once.” Word-root study (Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes, and roots) is still a normal part of vocabulary teaching, and Latin was already fading from schools gradually over the 20th century. The date seems to have come from the original video, which offers no source for it.
“The Elite” and “Frequency Codes”
Unsupported. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew are ordinary historical languages, not “frequency codes.” Speech is sound, a pressure wave in the air. It does not give off a meaningful “electromagnetic signature” that shapes reality, and no physics or biology supports saying that words create reality in that sense.
Edward Bernays
Partly true. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, and he wrote a 1928 book actually called Propaganda. He promoted the term “public relations” as a gentler name for that work. But the “philosophy” the clip gives him (“a population that decodes language is dangerous… asks too many questions”) doesn’t appear to be his words. I found no source for it, and it doesn’t fit his writing, which was about steering mass opinion, not stopping people from studying word origins. Treat it as made up.
Self-Talk (“Trying,” “Want,” “Need”)
A grain of truth, wrapped in pseudoscience. Psychologists do study how framing and self-talk affect motivation and mood. But the idea that your “cells receive” the word “need” and go into “emergency mode,” or that “the universe always says yes,” is “manifesting” belief, not science.
Bottom Line
The clip mixes a few real and genuinely interesting word histories (mortgage, pharmacy, the shared roots of “spell,” the grammar-to-grimoire link) with false etymologies (cursive, government, understand), an invented 1946 policy, and a quotation pinned on Bernays without any source. Its own lesson works against it: if you actually look up where words come from, most of its claims don’t hold up.

The reportage 

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The dream:

The Reportage
I woke inside a dream, and I was a child again in my family home.
I found I could recall details I hadn’t thought about in more than fifty years. There I was, exploring the empty lot right beside our house. I’d had dirt-clod fights in that lot and jumped my bike off the ramps we built there. Years later someone built a house on it, but I can still remember what the lot looked like before. The people who moved in were a single mother, Cheryl Price, and her son, Jason.
What strikes me is that I can now often go back to an early childhood memory in a dream and keep exploring that vague memory while the dream is still going. I often wonder why these memories have so few people in them. Usually I’m the only one there, both participant and observer, and while I’m dreaming my mind asks itself why that is.
I also think about my father, who lived in that house from the time he bought it while he was in the Navy until he died. I have so many questions about what he saw over a lifetime on that small patch of land at the top of a hill.
Still, if I’m honest, most of my attention goes to my own observations, and to memories I question. In these dream memories I’m nearly always the only person there and the main character. The dreams send me on a lonely search to understand them, and since I keep coming back to them, they must mean something.
From my studies, I’ve found that these dreams help a great deal with the analysis and interpretation I use to understand the world around me.
Along with the empty dirt lot, I remember an old car dealership fairly close to our home: Pearson Ford, on Fairmount Avenue in San Diego. I can still hear the old radio ads with their slogan: “See Pearson Ford. They stand alone at Fairmount and El Cajon.”
Then the idea finally hit home. In a dream, I can rebuild memories that are woven together and check whether they’re accurate. I have to allow for confabulation, but I also try to recall some of the things that were influencing me back then.
What became clear was that the dream isn’t really a record of facts from my life. It projects me back into the person I used to be. I watch that dream self, predict how he’ll handle the dream as it happens, and try to remember what it felt like to be that younger child working through whatever problem the dream gives him.
You could call it metacognition inside a dream: thinking about my own thinking, watched as it happens, in conditions from more than fifty-five years ago. When you think about it, that’s a fascinating vantage point.
I suppose that’s just how my mind works, because this has become almost routine when I dream these days.
I’m fascinated by what I find, and the clarity of those years comes flooding back. But the memories need more feedback and input, such as my brothers’ experiences from those years. Their accounts could help confirm what I remember and remove as much confabulation as possible, along with the false impressions the dream adds to what really happened all those years ago.
This process I seem to be developing deserves more exploration. It gives me a strong reason to use my imagination and to put it into my writing. I’m not only looking for the truth. I’m also finding new ideas and new ways of seeing myself that I’d never considered.
Here’s an example. In one dream I was very young, maybe five, and I felt again the fear of climbing a tall diving platform above a huge public pool. It was like the municipal pool in my memory, which may have been in Balboa Park. The dream rebuilt the moment: I was willing to try the climb, and I was thrilled, excited and even afraid of going that high to make the dive. That event really happened, though I know I was much older than five. Even so, I relived how I must have felt as a kid, and I could look at it again on the level of feeling. I was alone at the pool, with nobody I knew to help me. It was just me, put back into a real event so I could ask again how I must have felt.
In these dreams, I live through the recreated events the way I would have back then. My mind looks again at how I react, how I behave, how I feel and what comes to mind the second time around. And when the situation is invented, I can still ask myself how I would have handled it as the person I was fifty years ago. That is where I see the real payoff: exploring remembered feelings that come from remembered behavior, a lifetime ago. Given enough detail from a memory, the dream supplies the context and builds itself around it. Then I can look into that impression and work out how the younger me, the main character of this story, will act.

…

DCG

The house that dreams built

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The House That Dreams Built
I moved out of my mother’s house when I was seventeen. Not long after, I was living with my two brothers in a particular house, on a particular street, in a particular life that was mine. That part is history. It happened. I can put my finger on the year, the faces, the fact of it.
And then there is the other house.
For something close to forty-five years, I have returned — in dreams — to that same season of my life. My brothers are there. The leaving-home is there. The being on my own is there. Everything is there except the house itself, which is not my house. It is a different house entirely: one I have never lived in, never driven past, never stood in front of. And yet I know it. I know its layout the way you know the layout of a place you have walked through a thousand times. When the dream comes, I do not wander it. I inhabit it.
Here is the part I want you to sit with: I can distinguish between the dream house and the actual house I lived in. Both houses live in me, side by side, and I have never once confused them. The real house belongs to memory. The other house belongs to the dream. I know which is which.
So my question — the one I have been circling for four and a half decades and finally sat down to examine — is this: what exactly am I remembering?
The First Question
Did I ever live in the dream house?
No. That one is easy. I lived in one house with my brothers. The dream house is not a foggy version of it, not a renovation of it, not a fuzzy recall of it. It is its own building, with its own floor plan, as consistent and inspectable as any place I have actually been.
Which raises a stranger question: is my memory of the dream house a real memory?
I think it is. Something happened to me on all those nights. I experienced that house, in the only way a dream lets you experience anything. The house never existed in the world, but the experiencing of it did. And that experience left tracks. When I say I know that house, I am not speaking loosely. I could draw it. I could walk you through it.
This is where I had to stop and admit that my own mind had been quietly doing something remarkable: it built a false building on a true foundation. The brothers are real. The leaving is real. The being seventeen and out in the world is real. Only the walls are invented. The dream took a true story from my life and rebuilt its set — and then, night after night, decade after decade, it kept re-opening the doors.
What the Researchers Say (Quietly, Without Presuming)
I went looking for people who study this, expecting to find either cranks or nothing. Instead I found a small, earnest body of science that seems to have been sitting there waiting for my question.
Memories do not come with return-address labels. That is the first finding, and it is the hinge everything else swings on. A memory doesn’t tell you where it came from. When a memory surfaces, the mind has to guess its origin — real? imagined? dreamed? — by reading the memory’s qualities: how vivid it is, how much detail it carries, how it feels. This is called source monitoring, and the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that does the paperwork (Johnson, Hashtroudi & Lindsay, 1993). Dreams are the paperwork’s worst nightmare. They arrive with the vividness of perception but without the mental fingerprints that imagination normally leaves behind — no sense of having constructed them. In one classic experiment, people couldn’t even reliably tell their own real dreams from their partners’ real dreams, while having no trouble spotting dreams they had invented or read while awake (Johnson, Kahan & Raye, 1984). Dreams are missing the “I made this up” receipt. That is why they feel like memories instead of inventions.
The half-true structure is a known pattern, not a personal defect. Dreams routinely take real people, real relationships, real emotional situations and rebuild the physical world around them. Memory researchers describe this as storing the gist strongly while the literal details are filled in or replaced (Brainerd & Reyna, on fuzzy-trace theory). My dream is almost a textbook case: the gist of being seventeen, out of the family home, with my brothers, survived intact for forty-five years. The verbatim layer — the actual house — was quietly swapped out. Schacter’s famous taxonomy of memory’s errors calls this misattribution, and counts it among the ordinary, everyday sins of an otherwise honest memory (Schacter, 2021). Ordinary. Everyday. I have been walking around for decades assuming I was carrying something strange, when I was carrying something almost statistically normal.

Repetition is the mortar. Each time I dreamed that house, then woke and remembered it, then told it to myself again, the memory of it got reinforced. A sleep-lab study found that even without any suggestion at all, an estimated 3 to 7 percent of dream reports people give a week or two later appear to be dreams they never actually had — the mind fabricates or imports them between the pillow and the telling (Beaulieu-Prévost & Zadra, 2015). Dream memories are not recordings. They are retellings, and retellings drift, and then the drifted version gets re-dreamed.
And the confusion itself is common. In surveys, somewhere between 12 and 26 percent of ordinary people report at least occasionally having trouble telling a dream from something that actually happened (Rassin, Merckelbach & Spaan, 2001). Which puts me at the healthy end of a very human spectrum: my version of the dream–reality overlap is not a failure to distinguish. I distinguish just fine. Mine is the version where the two houses coexist, labeled, in the same mind — and simply refuse to merge.
The Question Under the Question
Here is the honest limit I have to place on my own story, and I place it willingly.
I believe the dream house has been the same house for forty-five years. But I cannot prove it. I have no dated drawings from 1981, no notarized floor plans from my twenties. The philosopher Melanie Rosen argues that dream reports are always partly rebuilt at the moment of telling — that the waking mind assembles a coherent narrative out of fragments, smoothing, adding, omitting (Rosen, 2013). If she is right, then somewhere across four decades of remembering, I may have renovated that house without a permit. The porch may be older than I think. The hallway may have been widened to fit the story.
I find I don’t mind. There is something almost tender about it: even if the house has been rebuilt in small ways across the years, it has been rebuilt by the same builder, for the same purpose. The dream house is not a forgery of my past. It is a residence my mind constructed — and constructs — out of the true material of that time.
So the question shifts one last time. It was never really did I live there? and it was never really is my memory real? The question I am actually holding is: what is my mind keeping safe in that house?
Because it is keeping something. You do not return to one invented building for forty-five years for no reason. The real house held the facts: the address, the rooms, the rent of being seventeen and out on your own. The dream house holds something else — the feeling of that season, kept warm and walkable, always there when some part of me needs to revisit what it was like to stand on my own threshold for the first time. The facts got a street address. The feeling got a dream address.
Where This Leaves Me
I began with the assumption that I was carrying a confusion — a half-true memory I should probably straighten out. I end with something closer to the opposite. What I have is a memory of a real experience of an imagined place, and the ability — still intact after all these years — to know exactly which house is which.
That last part matters more than I first thought. The line between my two houses has never blurred. I never woke up believing the dream house was on the real street. The dream gave me a second home and let me keep the deed to both. If dream–reality confusion is the failure to tell them apart, then what I have is dream–reality correspondence — two houses, one truth each, standing in the same mind without trespassing.
The real house is where I lived. The dream house is where I kept living — the place my mind built so that being seventeen and on my own would never fully close. One of these days the dream will come again, and I will walk in, and the floor plan will be waiting, familiar as my own hands.
I know the way. I have always known the way.
That, I have decided, is not a symptom. That is a homecoming.

…
DCG

The solemnity of the cynic 

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Forty Thousand Feet
From forty thousand feet, the feuds
Shrink to a shimmer on the plain;
What looked like armies of the wise
Is one long river in the rain.
A man below, at his black mic,
Declares the world a hall of fools;
He says their minds can’t be repaired,
And he, of course, is not the rule.
He warms to it: the dumb, he says,
Can’t see the borders of their dark.
A tidy science, with one flaw —
It never checked him for the mark.
The blindness he describes so well
Is not a gift he got to skip;
From up here, every prophet’s fist
Looks like a hand that lost its grip.
And some are born with narrower light
They never got to choose;
They love, they grieve, they hold the door —
I will not laugh at what they lose.
From here, the clever and the slow
Are one bright blur of want and need;
Both fall in love, both fear the dark,
Both bleed when someone makes them bleed.
I’ve been the fool in someone’s feed,
Declaring what the crowd can’t see;
The one mind I have keys to still
Locks half its rooms away from me.
Reason is not a hammer, friend;
It’s a lamp you carry for your feet.
You cannot shine it through a skull,
But you can light your own dark street.
So let the loud man keep his niche;
Contempt sells tickets by the pound.
I’d rather ask what I got wrong
Than win the whole thing on the ground.
We land. The dots are people now,
With names, with debts, with someone who waits.
The mind I’m sent here to repair
Boarded with me — and it’s late

…

DCG

We are surrounded by idiots, outnumbered by fools, and the number grows greater every single day, because stupidity is immune to reason. Hear me again: stupidity is immune to reason. You can’t give them information to change them. You can’t give them data to fix them. Stupidity doesn’t accept that. And here’s the worst part. The Dunning-Kruger effect goes into play, because Dunning-Kruger says they’re so stupid they cannot recognize their own incompetence.

— attribution unverified 

When Time is our currency

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Time is our currency

The life that is lived

The mistakes that were made

A learning curve changes

Patterns and recognitions are surveyed

When the moment strikes

Maybe in a dream

Awakened, you finally recognize

The squandered moments

The legacy that is now seen

But now the clock becomes a stopwatch

And in the back of your head

You begin to switch gears

Are you trying to salvage the memories?

Or are you trying to salvage the years?

What mistakes you don’t change 

You choose 

The currency of time is unforgiving

Mistaken patterns can become traits

Traits can evolve into character

Just what will be my fate ?


Time is our currency,


The days we thought would stay.


We count the things we gather,


Not what we give away.


We see our old mistakes,


The choices we defend;


But seeing where the road will lead


Does not reshape its end.


A dream disturbs our sleep,


Old grief comes into view.


We need not know what stirred the ache


To ask what might be true.


We call our silence peace,


Our distance self-control;


Yet walls that keep out sorrow


Can keep us from being whole.


We hide the words we spoke,


The shame we cannot bear;


But looking back with honest eyes


Can teach us how to care.


Not every wound was chosen,

Nor every loss our own;


Still, we can pass our hurt along


And leave someone alone.


Some doors must stay behind us,

Some grief will leave its trace;

Forgiveness need not let harm in


Or give it back its place.


We cannot mend each breaking


Or make the past come right;


But we can hear who needs us now


And stay with them tonight.


The clock becomes a stopwatch;


We cannot make it slow.


But we can choose a kinder turn


Than roads we used to know.


Each morning offers something,


Though none can promise more:


A chance to spend our time with care


Where we withheld before.

If time is our currency?

Just how will you spend?

They say the ever present now

Must  eventually come to an end

…
DCG

Alexithymia 

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Alexithymia


Alexithymia — a word she’s never heard —
is where she lives: no language for the heart.
Her feelings come like weather, without words,
and leave her with no map of where to start.
I grew up fluent in the language of need;
I learned to read a doorway for a sign.
I have ten thousand words for how I feel —
she has a silence where I lay down mine.
We met the way two old scars recognize
a shape they’ve known before a word is said:
her fear of holding on, my fear of goodbyes,
two childhoods braided into a single thread.
The closer that I came, the more she’d leave;
the more she’d leave, the harder I would chase.
Two nervous systems, armored to believe
that longing is a dangerous kind of grace.
She never left because I wasn’t enough —
I was more love than she had learned to hold.
The child whom no one comes for, in the dark, grows up
believing warmth is something to withhold.
And when the shame inside her starts to swell,
she nitpicks, distances, and turns away;
she calls my open heart “too much” — to hide
the words she was never given leave to say.
I’ve studied every pattern, every name —
Bowlby, the chase, the great and quiet retreat —
but knowing why a wound burns is not the same
as being healed; my pulse still skips the beat.
And love, I’ve learned, is real but not enough:
the healing has to be a mutual art.
I stay — but I will not abandon me.
I keep my worth, and I still keep my heart.
And still I count this strange and aching grace:
she woke me to my wounds and to my worth.
If we should ever heal, it’s face to face —
two warriors, laying weapons on the earth.
RSP

…

DCG

Alexithymia

A Post about the RSP/DCG epistolary collection, and the words she never had.

The Epistolary Collection
For nearly 3 years this blog has carried a single story told in installments — a collection of poems and reflections signed RSP … DCG: two initials, two people, one story. It began quietly with “A Leap of Faith” in 2017, a poem about the wounds parents leave when they cannot show love, and it has run through dozens of pieces since — “Heal with me RP”, “R and D”, “A heart’s whisper”, and “The dissolution of entropy”, among many others.
Read in order, the collection is an epistolary record of one relationship seen through the lens of attachment theory: my anxious attachment — the boy who learned to read a doorway for a sign, who sought approval because an absent father never offered it — and her dismissive avoidance, the woman who learned young that needing was dangerous and that the safest way to be loved was never to ask for it out loud.


This post is about the condition that sits underneath much of her avoidance, a condition that is tragic precisely because it is so often misunderstood: alexithymia.


What Alexithymia Is
The word comes from the Greek — a (no), lexis (words), thymos (emotions): literally, “no words for emotions.” It was introduced by the late Harvard psychiatrist Peter Sifneos in the early 1970s (Psychology Today).
A person living with alexithymia has difficulty experiencing, identifying, understanding, and expressing their own emotions. They may struggle to distinguish feelings from the bodily sensations that accompany them — a tight chest, a restless night — and their limited emotional vocabulary makes it hard to communicate what is happening inside them (Psychology Today; Luminet & Landré, PMC). It is not a mental illness or a character flaw. It is a trait, often forged in childhood, where feelings were not welcomed and no one came when the child cried.


The research links it directly to the attachment story this collection tells: the more avoidant the attachment style, the higher the alexithymia — avoidant individuals are particularly prone to difficulty describing feelings (De Panfilis et al., PMC; Zdankiewicz-Ścigała, PMC). The avoidance and the wordlessness are not separate problems. One grows from the other.
What It Is Like to Love Someone Without Words
I recently heard a widely shared video on Facebook — attributed to a speaker named Patrick, though I could not verify the source — about loving a dismissive-avoidant partner. Its central claim has stayed with me: your avoidant ex didn’t leave because you weren’t enough. They left because you were more than they could handle. Your emotional availability wasn’t the problem; it was the trigger. And underneath it all is shame — the quiet belief that they were not good enough for you.
That is the tragedy of alexithymia in a relationship. It is not coldness. It is not indifference. It is a person whose feelings still arrive — the ache, the longing, the shame — but who was never given the vocabulary to meet them. Imagine a life where your own heart speaks a language you were never taught, where every emotion arrives as weather without a forecast: unnamable, overwhelming, and therefore best avoided. Imagine being asked “how do you feel?” and having nothing to say — not because you feel nothing, but because you cannot find the door.
I am her opposite. I have ten thousand words for how I feel; I have written them here for years. She has a silence where I lay down mine. And that contrast — my fluency and her wordlessness — became the magnetic core of our dynamic: my anxious reaching, her avoidant retreating, the closer I came, the more she would leave. Two nervous systems, each armored by childhood, each mistaking the other’s survival strategy for rejection.
What I Have Learned
The hardest and kindest truth this collection has taught me:
Love is not enough. Not by itself. Healing requires mutual work. One person cannot do the interior labor of another, no matter how patient, how fluent, how willing. I know this now — I wrote it into “Cliff notes from the heart”: love that saves another must not teach me how to lose.

I must not self-abandon. Staying in the push-pull is only survivable — only humane to us both — if I keep my worth, my boundaries, my self. Understanding her condition does not require dissolving into it. Empathy without self-erasure is the discipline.
Knowledge helps, but it does not heal. I have studied Bowlby, the patterns, the chase-and-retreat. My pulse still skips. Knowing why a wound burns is not the same as being healed — hers or mine.


And still — gratitude. She woke me to my own attachment wounds. Because of her, I found the boy in the doorway, and I have spent years learning to take his hand. Whatever else this relationship becomes or fails to become, that awakening is a gift I will not stop counting.

The poem below distills all of it — her alexithymia, my anxious heart, the shame she carries, the work only she can do, and the strange, stubborn, profound love that remains.


Alexithymia — a word she’s never heard —
is where she lives: no language for the heart.
Her feelings come like weather, without words,
and leave her with no map of where to start.
I grew up fluent in the language of need;
I learned to read a doorway for a sign.
I have ten thousand words for how I feel —
she has a silence where I lay down mine.
We met the way two old scars recognize
a shape they’ve known before a word is said:
her fear of holding on, my fear of goodbyes,
two childhoods braided into a single thread.
The closer that I came, the more she’d leave;
the more she’d leave, the harder I would chase.
Two nervous systems, armored to believe
that longing is a dangerous kind of grace.
She never left because I wasn’t enough —
I was more love than she had learned to hold.
The child whom no one comes for, in the dark, grows up
believing warmth is something to withhold.
And when the shame inside her starts to swell,
she nitpicks, distances, and turns away;
she calls my open heart “too much” — to hide
the words she was never given leave to say.
I’ve studied every pattern, every name —
Bowlby, the chase, the great and quiet retreat —
but knowing why a wound burns is not the same
as being healed; my pulse still skips the beat.
And love, I’ve learned, is real but not enough:
the healing has to be a mutual art.
I stay — but I will not abandon me.
I keep my worth, and I still keep my heart.
And still I count this strange and aching grace:
she woke me to my wounds and to my worth.
If we should ever heal, it’s face to face —
two warriors, laying weapons on the earth.

RSP

…

DCG

Sources
• Alexithymia — Psychology Today
• Alexithymia — Luminet & Landré, PMC (NIH)
• Adult attachment and emotional awareness impairment — PMC (NIH)
• Attachment Style, Early Childhood Trauma, Alexithymia — PMC (NIH)
• Understanding alexithymia: a review — Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmacology Sciences
• Thunder God Blog RSP/DCG collection: A Leap of Faith · Heal with me RP · R and D · A heart’s whisper · The dissolution of entropy · Cliff notes from the heart · Full RSP/DCG index
•

Alexithymia

Let me reassure you: your avoidant ex didn’t leave because you weren’t enough. They left because you were more than they could handle.
You were emotionally available. You were intentional, vulnerable, expressive, loving, compassionate, and invested. You offered real intimacy, the kind they never learned how to hold.


And here’s the part that hurts. They saw how special you were. They knew exactly what they had, and that is why they ran. Your emotional availability wasn’t the problem. It was the trigger.


People with dismissive avoidant wounds grew up without emotional safety. Feelings were not welcomed. Affection wasn’t consistent. Their needs were minimized, or even ignored. So they grew up believing: “My feelings are wrong. Love is unsafe. If someone sees the real me, they’re going to leave.”


Their childhood taught them to protect themselves by shutting down, by avoiding closeness, by suppressing their emotions to the point that they can’t even feel their own. So when someone like you shows up, open-hearted, expressive, and emotionally mature, it exposes every single wound they’ve spent their entire life hiding.
They don’t have the capacity for deep connection yet. That’s not because they don’t want it. It’s because they were never taught how to do it. They can only handle surface-level connections, casual intimacy, and relationships that require very little emotional depth.
That’s why many avoidants end up with emotionally unavailable partners: narcissists, other avoidants, people who keep everything on the surface. It feels safe. It’s not fulfilling, but it’s safe.
But when they meet someone like you, someone who loves with depth, who sees them clearly and cares anyway, it overwhelms them. Deep down, they don’t even feel worthy of that kind of love.


So instead of dealing with that shame, they blame you. They nitpick. They distance themselves. They make excuses. It’s not because you did anything wrong. It’s because facing their wounds is too painful. They tell themselves you’re “too emotional” or “too much,” when really, you were everything they wished they could be.


Until they’re ready to self-reflect, sit with their own insecurities, face their shame, and heal, they’re going to keep running from the very thing they long for.
Your love didn’t scare them. Their unhealed wounds did.
And please tattoo this on your heart: it was never because you weren’t good enough. It was because, deep down, they believed they weren’t good enough for you.

— Patrick Gaudet

I learned which self to wear 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

learned the weather in a face
Before I learned to write;
A spoon set down a shade too hard
Could change the shape of night.
“Do I fit here?” I ask the page.
“Is this what made me so?”
My stomach answers every knock
Before I say hello.
“You’re good with people.” Yes, perhaps.
I learned which self to wear;
Could make a joke, could swallow grief,
Could almost turn to air.
I hear the break beneath “I’m fine,”
Then lie awake till two;
My inner smoke alarm makes toast
A matter to review.
But does a silence mean contempt?
Must every pause mean rain?
I know how fear can forge a key
That fits the wrong old pain.
And still, a song can split my chest;
Small kindness makes me weep.
I watch someone pull up a chair
For one left out—and keep.
“Was childhood, then, a gift?” I ask.
“No. Children should feel safe.”
Whatever good my heart grew toward
Does not excuse the strafe.
“Must I repair each hurt I sense?”
“No. Ask before you mend.
You need not climb inside each wound
To be a steady friend.”
I cannot know each heart I feel;
I can ask, listen, stay.
The gift is not that hurt was good—
But love can choose its way.

…

DCG

You are allowed to feel things deeply, and I do not mean that as reassurance. I mean it as neuroscience.
Because the depth with which you feel things is not a flaw in your emotional regulation, and it is not a sign that you are too sensitive or too much. It is a measurable neurological capacity, and it comes with abilities that people who feel less deeply simply do not have access to.


Here is what is actually happening in a brain that feels deeply.
Research from psychologist Dr. Elaine Aaron identified a trait present in around 20% of the population called sensory processing sensitivity. In brains with this trait, several regions show measurably greater activation in response to emotional and sensory input: the insula, which governs interoceptive and emotional awareness; the mirror neuron system, which governs empathy; and the regions associated with depth of cognitive processing.


A brain that feels deeply is not malfunctioning. It is running a richer, more detailed, more thorough processing of experience than a less sensitive brain runs.
You do not feel too much. You feel accurately at a resolution most people cannot access.
Here is what that capacity gives you.
You notice the shift in someone’s mood before they have said a word. You feel the emotional undertone of a room. You are moved by beauty in a way that people who feel less deeply genuinely cannot understand. You form connections with people that reach depths shallower processors never touch. You experience music, art, nature, and love with an intensity that is the entire point of being alive.
And yes, the same capacity that lets you feel joy that deeply also lets you feel pain that deeply. You cannot have one without the other. They run on the same neural system.


But here is what you were never told.
The depth is not the problem. The problem was being raised in an environment that treated your depth as an inconvenience rather than recognizing it as a gift. You were asked to turn down something that was never meant to be turned down.
You are allowed to feel things deeply, not despite the pain it sometimes brings, because the depth is who you are.

And the world needs the people who feel it all far more than it needs the people who have learned to feel nothing.

— neuroscience with Nora 

What We Meant

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

What We Meant


We ache to let another in,
Yet guard the words we need to say;
Then blame the one outside our skin
For failing us along the way.
“Why are you late?” I hear me shout;
I mean, “I feared you would not come.”
My longing takes the long way out
And strikes the one I wanted home.
You say, “I’m fine,” and turn away;
I hear permission to withdraw.
We bury what we need to say,
Then curse the silence as a flaw.
A plate sits dirty by the sink;
You ask whose turn, I hear disdain.
How fast we claim to know and think,
How slow to ask what caused the pain.
You push; I leave to end the fight.
My leaving tells you I don’t care.
We each defend our lonely right
And crush the bond we meant to spare.
I call you cold; you call me blind.
One moment hardens into stone.
We judge the whole of someone’s mind
And wonder why we feel alone.
What fools: we know our words fall short,
Yet swear we know what others mean.
We drag our loved ones into court
For wounds their eyes have never seen.
I never meant to make you bleed;
But that won’t make the bleeding cease.
I must speak plainly of my need,
Not make you guess the price of peace.
Before I make your words a wall,
I’ll ask what hurt I failed to hear.
We cannot know each other whole;
We can stop pretending sight is clear.

…

DCG


“It took me years of taking things personally to understand this. And once you see it, you’ll start hearing people differently.
“What someone says and what someone’s trying to say are not always the same thing. We hear the words and we assume it’s the whole message. But people don’t always have the words to express what they’re actually feeling. And so we say what’s easiest to say and not what’s hardest to say.


“So something like, ‘Why are you always late?’ might mean, ‘I want to know that I matter to you.’ ‘Do whatever you want,’ might mean, ‘I’m hurt that what I want doesn’t seem to matter.’ How about, ‘I’m fine.’ We all know ‘I’m fine’ isn’t about being fine.
“The words are on the surface. The meaning can be underneath.


“And here’s where the conflict gets really interesting. The other person reacts to the words. One person feels ignored, so they criticize. The other person feels attacked, so they pull away. Now the first person feels even more ignored, so they criticize even more. And suddenly two people who both want to be understood are behaving in ways that make the other person feel misunderstood.
“At that point, the problem isn’t either person. It’s the pattern that’s happening between them.


“This is where we get in trouble because we start turning behavior into character. They’re selfish. They don’t care. They’re impossible to talk to. But what if before deciding who someone is, we get curious about what just happened? Not by assuming that we know what they’re really feeling, but by asking, ‘When you said that, what did you mean? Are you angry about this, or is it something else?’
“Because the goal isn’t to ignore someone’s words. It’s to understand the entire message. It could be words, a feeling, or even something that they’re having trouble saying, because a lot of arguments aren’t really about the thing that was said.
“The dirty dish isn’t just a dirty dish when what someone is really trying to say is, ‘I feel like I’m doing this alone.’ And being five minutes late can become a much bigger fight when what someone hears is, ‘I’m not important to you.’
“That’s the translation error. We think that we’re fighting over dishes and minutes when what we’re really fighting over is what those things mean to us.


“So the next time someone’s words hit you hard, before you decide what those words say about that person’s character, ask this: ‘What are they trying to tell me that their words aren’t saying very well?’
“Because when you stop fighting over the words and you get curious about their meaning, you might actually find the argument underneath the argument.”

— Attribution Shannon Shall Cross

Life hack #12 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

“What you’re not changing, you’re choosing.”

Transcript
Interviewer: “You could give the world one lesson, what would it be?”
Speaker: “What you’re not changing, you’re choosing.”
Interviewer: “Hmm.”
Speaker: “For example, if you hate your body but keep the same habits, you’re choosing the result.”
Interviewer: “Wow. Yeah. Mhm.”
Speaker: “And relationships too. You can work on yourself, communicate, do your part, but you can’t change someone else.”
Interviewer: “Right.”
Speaker: “And if they keep doing the same thing and you keep staying, eventually, you’re choosing that too.”


Source of the statement
The central line is attributed to Laurie Buchanan, in the slightly different wording:

—“What you’re not changing, you’re choosing”—a variation of a saying attributed to Laurie Buchanan, documented in a 2016 interview.[cristeniris]

A quantum prayer 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

God, I am here within this breath;
Thank you for what remains of light.
I bring the fear beneath my ribs,
And place it in your hands tonight.
Glaucoma weighs upon my days;
My fragile eyes make darkness near.
Yet I give thanks before I know,
And trust that you can meet me here.
My retina is hurt and worn;
My troubled corneas cloud what I see.
I thank you for the hands that help,
And all the love that reaches me.
I quiet down my racing thoughts;
I open to your patient flow.
Within this quantum field of prayer,
I make you room in what I know.
My body, heart, and mind draw close;
I bring them to one resting place.
I do not hide my wish for sight;
I lift an honest, frightened face.
Thank you for healing still unseen,
For strength to meet another day.
I listen past my need for proof,
And let your wisdom lead the way.
I am a writer, made of words;
I feel them gather in the air.
If printed lines grow hard to read,
Let spoken words still hold my prayer.
I hold myself as loved and whole;
Let healing flow through flesh and soul.
My sight is precious, but my worth
Is more than what my eyes control.
I do not know what comes from here;
I thank you for this breath, this light.
Receive the trust I freely give;
I rest within your love tonight.

…

DCG

If prayer is quantum technology, then here is how we pray. Because prayer was never meant to be begging, pleading, or convincing God to intervene. That is literally just not how the mechanics works.


“Prayer is quantum technology, and it’s how consciousness communicates with the field. But religion trained us to pray from lack: ‘Please help, please fix, please save,’ and we’re always waiting.


“But Jesus modeled a different way. He prayed from alignment, and he didn’t ask hoping it would happen. He spoke as if it already was, and that’s coherence.


“In physics, observation collapses probability. In neuroscience, belief plus emotion rewires the brain. And in scripture, faith moves mountain. It’s all the same mechanics. It’s the same mechanism.


“So prayer works when your body, your heart, and your mind agree on the reality that you’re tuning into. You don’t pray for something. You pray from the state where it already exists.
“Gratitude comes first because gratitude signals certainty. Calm comes before words because regulation stabilizes the signal, and prayer is not asking God to come to you. It’s aligning yourself with the field that God already lives in.
“And once you understand that, then prayer will stop being repetitive, and it starts being extremely effective, and your life will change from the inside out.


“So how do we pray? Let’s break it down.
Praying for yourself
“To pray for yourself, an old way may look like, ‘God, please help me. I don’t know what to do. I’m struggling.’
“But the quantum way sounds like this: ‘Thank you for already stabilizing my nervous system and guiding my next step. I choose to trust the clarity that’s forming right now. I am open, receptive, and supported.’
“This works because gratitude and trust collapses uncertainty and tuning into guidance instead of amplifying lack.


Praying for someone else
“How do you pray for someone else? The old way may sound like, ‘Please God, fix them. Please heal them. Please change them.’
“But the quantum way sounds like, ‘I hold this person in wholeness. I witness their highest timeline activating. May they feel supported, safe, and guided in exactly the way that they’re ready to receive.’
“And this works because you’re not interfering or forcing outcomes. You’re stabilizing a field of possibility around them.
Praying for money or abundance


“How to pray for money or abundance? An old way could sound like, ‘God, please help me financially. I’m stressed out. I don’t know how this will work.’
“The quantum way sounds like, ‘Thank you for the flow already organizing itself around me. I am open to unexpected pathways, creative solutions, and aligned support. I trust the intelligence moving through my life.’
“This works because you’re removing urgency. Urgency collapses options, but trust expands pathways.


Praying for a partner or love
“How to pray for a partner or for love? An old way might sound like, ‘God, please send me someone. I’m lonely. I need love. I need someone.’
“The quantum way would sound like, ‘Thank you for the connection that already matches my nervous system, my values, and my emotional safety. I am becoming the version of myself that reorganizes and receives aligned love with ease.’
“This works because you shift from chasing a person to stabilizing the state that partnership requires.


Praying for direction or purpose
“How to pray for direction or purpose? The old way might sound like, ‘God, tell me what to do. I’m confused.’
“But the quantum way sounds like, ‘Thank you for making the next step obvious. I don’t need the whole path. I trust the clarity that’s arriving in real time.’
“And this works because clarity arrives in motion, not in pressure.


Praying when you don’t know what to say
“How to pray when you don’t know what to say? And this one is super important. The quantum prayer when you don’t know what to say is, ‘I don’t have the words, but I’m present, I’m listening, and I trust what’s unfolding.’
“This works because presence itself is a very powerful signal.
“Prayer is not about convincing God. It’s about aligning yourself with the reality you’re ready to live in. And that is not religion, that’s technology.
“Make sure to follow me so we can continue connecting the dots between science and spirituality and remembering the truth of our divinity and the power that we hold together.
“And also, I love you.”

— House of Lilith, USA