A postulated reflection: If our histories shape what we see, what might change when we question our first judgment? We meet one world through different eyes, And each declares the picture clear; But what we call another’s fault May wear the face of our own fear. Perhaps the past still frames the room, And tells us what deserves our sight; One seeks the comfort of straight lines, One seeks a hand against the night. We gather proof that takes our side, And leave unwelcome facts outside; Confirmation bias names the habit— A tilted scale we call our guide. Yet different views are not all true, Nor does a wound make falsehood right; The world resists what we believe— Our claims must bear its testing light. When someone speaks against our view, The pulse may leap before we know; Is this a threat before our eyes, Or yesterday refusing to go? Before the verdict leaves the tongue, Could we allow one breath of space? Not choke the feeling into silence, But keep its heat from ruling the case. What fact would make us change our minds? What have we brushed aside as wrong? Could reason test the claims we love, Not merely make their voices strong? To hear another is not to yield, Nor must we bless the harm they do; We can refuse a cruel demand And ask what brought that hurt to view. Must every difference draw our blood? Can we meet doubt without the flame? If anger keeps deciding for us, How much of us will it reshape and name?
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DCG
Transcript Took me 42 years to understand what I’m about to explain to you in under a minute. And once you understand this, you’ll stop being so confused about why people do what they do. There’s no one single right reality where you are right and everyone else is wrong. We assume that the way we see things is the way things are, right? Our values feel obvious, our priorities feel logical, our conclusions feel correct. So when someone disagrees with us, it feels wrong. And this is where the frustration starts. But here’s what most people never consider. Other people are not just choosing different actions, they are seeing a completely different reality because everybody is experiencing life through their own lens, and it’s shaped by their upbringing, by their experiences, by what they’ve been rewarded for, what they’ve been hurt by—which means something subtle is happening. Two people can look at the same situation and see two completely different things. One person walks into a messy room and feels stressed. Another person walks into the same room and doesn’t even notice it. But they do notice how people are feeling. One values order, the other values connection. Neither is wrong, but they both feel like the other is. And Anaïs Nin said it simply: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Our view of the world happens through patterns the brain has learned over time. And once your brain builds a certain view of the world, it starts reinforcing it, looking for evidence that confirms it and ignoring what doesn’t. So this leads to a very different way of thinking. What if the reason people frustrate you isn’t because they’re wrong, but because they’re seeing something that you’re not? One of the strangest truths about life is this: we are not all reacting to the same world. We’re each reacting to the version of the world our mind has learned to see. And the moment that you realize that is the moment you stop trying to correct people who are wrong and you start understanding them.[Attachment] Attribution search The strongest match was a Threads post by @flipbardinas, dated April 15, 2026 in the search results. It quotes:
—Transcribed from a social-media clip; original creator
Shannon Shallcross describes herself as a speaker, writer, founder, and two-time TEDx speaker. Her platform, The Gratitude Mind, explores gratitude and how perception shapes people’s experience of life
Why do I walk the mesa late at night, beneath the bell tower’s arch of sun-bleached stone? Why does the old campus glow so bright for one who walked away from it alone? I left my home at seventeen, so young, and paid my way with every dollar earned. Who heard the quiet hope upon my tongue each night I studied while the lamp still burned? Why is there always one more class to find, a room I cannot reach, a door that’s locked? Why does the schedule blur inside my mind while minutes slip away upon the clock? Psychology, philosophy, two roads I traveled far but never saw them end. Three classes short. Who measures all the loads a working heart must carry, lift, and tend? I married, and I worked for forty-one long years, and gave the best of what I had. So why, when all those working days are done, does one unfinished piece still make me sad? Is this the reason that the dream returns? Does painful truth play hide-and-seek at night, and wait behind the library till it learns I’m strong enough to face it in the light? And if I face it, what else might I find? That no diploma measures who I’ve grown? That every lesson life has left behind has taught me more than any class I’ve known? The past is history, so let it be. The future is a mystery, still unknown. But now, this very moment, sets me free, a gift we call the present, all our own. So if a dream keeps calling you by name, what hallway, what closed door, waits there for you? Perhaps it doesn’t come to bring you shame, but just to walk you home, whole, and new.
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DCG
“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”
— unknown 
This was the dream. I woke up on the San Diego State University campus, wearing a very plush San Diego State letterman jacket, which I have owned in the past. I was surrounded by people, many of whom were from where I worked. The people I had my career with showed up throughout the dream, even though many of them did not attend San Diego State. We were sectioned off, almost as if we had been told to serve the campus community for some unknown reason. We were grouped together in square formations, almost like attendance lineups, or even in classrooms. I walked around and saw people from my job. I didn’t know why they were there too, because many of them did not go to the same school I did.
This dream, in some form, keeps coming back: me on the campus of San Diego State University.
Transcription “Here is the twist. I was three classes shy of getting my degrees at San Diego State University. One in psychology and one in philosophy.” Annotation: the two degrees would have been a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. A Revelation I left home at 17 and paid my own way through San Diego State University. I studied toward a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy while working full-time. I always meant to finish. But marriage and work took priority, and I spent 41 years with my employer. I ended up three classes short of both degrees, and not finishing those classes is my biggest regret. My education has always mattered deeply to me. That may be why the same dreams keep coming back. I think they may be my mind returning to the one important thing I never finished the way I wanted to. This isn’t a failure. It shows how much I still value what I worked so hard for.
Why do I keep returning to the door I learned to fear before I learned my name? What am I hoping to find beneath the floor? Why does each poem go back there just the same? Jung called it shadow: what we push away. Is mine the anger I was taught to hide? If I invite it in, what will it say? And can I hear it without taking its side? I wrote of learning silence in a house. Did silence keep me safe, or leave me small? Do I still go quiet as a mouse When no one here is angry after all? I wrote of wearing calmness like a coat. Who taught me how to fasten every seam? When hurt comes near, why do I clear my throat And speak as though I’m safely in a dream? Why does my pride arrive prepared for court With every slight arranged to make its case? What does it guard when it cuts kindness short? What fear is hiding underneath its face? I wrote that thought could make a fortress last. Was learning then a shelter from the pain? When I explain each detail of the past, Why does my heart still walk into the rain? I studied how a person comes to be, The mind, the soul, the habits we repeat. Did all those years of study help me see, Or keep me from the feeling at my feet? Jung listened for the parts a life concealed. Do I keep hearing them beneath my page? Is there a grief I’ve carefully not revealed, Or fear I’ve called good sense for half an age? Why do I read a silence as a sign? Why do I search a face for coming rain? Whose old voice sounds so much like mine When I tell myself I must endure the pain? What do I make of that boy on the field, Still waiting for somebody to draw near? What did he learn when no one asked him how he’d healed? Why does his silence still live in me here? I speak of love, then turn and guard the gate. I ask for closeness, then prepare to flee. Is this the shadow Jung asked us to face: The frightened part I will not let be me? And what of all the good I set aside? The softer self I feared the world would bruise? Is there a gentleness I learned to hide Because I thought that I would have to choose? Would Dostoevsky’s man beneath the ground Know why I argue with myself at night? Do I build proofs where no proof can be found So I can say I’m right instead of frightened? Why does this question follow all I write? Has something pressed its shape into my soul? If I can name the thing and bring it light, Must I still feel it to become more whole? I think of Maslow and the life I sought. Is growing more than reaching some clear height? If all I’ve done is learn to master thought, Who holds the hurt I keep outside my sight? Am I, like Jung, pursuing what I miss When I mistake the mask for all I am? Can I hold both the wound and joy in this, And stop condemning one to save the man? I almost sign this page, then change my mind. Must I give strangers every private name? Can I leave those I love and hurt behind The curtain, yet speak plainly of my shame? Can I ask the question without scorn? Can I meet the boy and not demand his proof? What part of me was waiting to be born While I stood outside myself beneath the roof? Please help me understand what’s going on inside. Not just the story, but the ache beneath. Can I sit with what I used to hide And let a feeling pass without a speech? I think I’m on a path that Jung once knew: To meet the hidden self, not win a fight. My steps are mine; his questions help me through. Could I be growing whole by facing night?
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DCG
“The most self-aware person in the room is often hiding the deepest pain. People who were emotionally neglected as children become the biggest intellectualizers in therapy and the healing journey. They get stuck overanalyzing over and over, but terrified of feeling anything in their body. They might walk into a therapist’s office and get told, ‘Wow, you’re so self-aware. Seems like you got it all figured out.’ But instead of relief and validation, they feel hollow instead, because what’s actually happening is a defense. It’s the suppression of the grief, the anger, the shame, the anxiety that never got to cycle through to actually release. You see, a child’s first instinct when they are neglected is to cry out for help, to reach for connection. But when that call keeps getting ignored, they learn something else instead: that their cries don’t work. And so they go into the prison of their mind instead. They suppress the feeling, they disconnect, dissociate, and intellect becomes the only safe place left. And it sure fools everyone, including themselves. But what’s underneath is a nervous system that actually collapsed. It’s the belief that feeling emotions puts them in a helpless and hopeless situation. The intellectualization isn’t really making them smarter. It’s just trauma that’s still in control, and it costs them dearly: relationships that never really feel safe, a body that never gets to relax and loosen up, years—maybe even decades—understanding themselves so perfectly while nothing actually changes underneath. But eventually, like all coping mechanisms, it starts to break at the seams: random bouts of crying, reactivity that they can’t explain, numbing out, avoiding hard conversations, or having hard conversations that immediately turn into explosions. Now, if this is you and you want to get out of this, you have to go beyond the mind, and that’s a journey into the body, into the nervous system, into the parts that you never got to develop. So one quick move that you can do the next time that feelings come up inside you is to place a hand—a soft hand—on where you notice it in your body. And there’s a lot of science backing this up now: just stay with it for at least 60 seconds and ride it out. Let the feeling happen. Short window, but big impact. You might find out that you actually move through the feeling and get to the other side without having to suppress and overthink. — mindfulness 
You did not choose the room where you were shaped, The tone, the silence, or the door that closed. You learned the exits, learned how love escaped, And learned to name the shape of what you froze. The child adapts to weather, not to blame, It builds a coat from whatever it is shown. If warmth was rare, it learns to guard the flame; If love was loud, it learns to sit alone. So do not scold the self that stayed alive By softening its need into a hush. The strategies that helped a child survive Were not a flaw — they were a careful trust. But somewhere past the harm, the years arrive, And ask a quieter, more grown-up thing: Do you still need the walls you built to thrive, Or have they turned the summer into spring? Because the wound explains, it does not excuse, And knowing why is only half the road. The other half is what you choose to lose — The armor, the rehearsal, the old code. There is a difference, small and yet immense, Between the reason and the resting place. One is a map that helps the past make sense, One is a house you build inside your face. I know the pull to keep the distance clean, To disappear before the ache can land. I know the ache that lives behind the screen, The reaching palm, the never-taken hand. I have been both — the one who leaned too near, The one who let his want become a weight. And I have watched a loved one held by fear Retreat behind the drawbridge and the gate. So I stopped pulling. Not to punish, no — But so the room could hold a softer air. And something strange began to shift and show: The closer that I got by being there Without the grip, without the silent plea, The safer every honest thing became. The one who fled began to sit with me, Because I did not need her to be tame. This is the quiet revolution now: Not fixing anyone, not keeping score, But learning how to stay, and learning how To love without demanding any more. The pen is in your hand. The past is ink. The chapters that were written were not yours. But what comes next is closer than you think —
It waits behind the unlocked, easy doors.
RSP
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DCG
Regardless of how you were raised, it’s your job to grow up. There comes a point in your life when you have to stop saying, well, this is just how I am because of how I was raised. No. That might be why you became this way, but it doesn’t have to be who you stay. If nobody taught you how to communicate, then learn. If nobody showed you healthy love, then learn. If your family avoided hard conversations, have them. If anger was the only emotion you ever saw, learn another way. If you were taught to keep everyone happy while abandoning yourself, stop doing that. Because growing older happens automatically. Growing up doesn’t, though. Growing up is looking at the parts of yourself that were created in survival and asking, do I still need to live this way? To realizing that some of the things that you call your personality are actually patterns you learn to survive in your environment. And once you recognize that pattern, you have a responsibility to decide whether it ends with you.
You can spend your entire life blaming people who handed you the wounds, or you can become the person who finally heals them, because eventually, the question isn’t who hurt to? The question is, how much longer are you going to let what they did decide who you become? Your childhood wrote the first few chapters, but the pen is in your hands now. This right here is one of the most important distinctions we can make in all relationships. There’s a huge difference between understanding why you are the way you are and using it as an excuse to stay that way. Maybe nobody modeled healthy conflict for you. Maybe vulnerability wasn’t safe in your family. Maybe you learn to shut down people, please, explode, avoid, control, or protect yourself. Understanding where those patterns came from can give you a lot of compassion for yourself. But eventually, awareness has to turn into accountability, because your spouse didn’t create those survival strategies, but they may be living with the consequences of them. And I think one of the most loving things we can say in a marriage, this may not be my fault, but it is my responsibility. You can learn to communicate. You can learn to regulate yourself. You can learn to stay in hard conversations. You can learn a healthier way to love. Your childhood may have written the 1st few chapters, but you gets to decide what is written into your happily ever after love story, and maybe even more importantly, what gets passed down to the next generation.
We think that we argue with logic and light, But the war in the room is invisible — inside. You’re not fighting a fact when you’re fighting tonight, You are fighting the person who lives in their pride. A belief isn’t held like a book on a shelf, It is worn like a skin, like a name, like a scar. To challenge the idea is to challenge the self, And the self will defend itself, near or far. So the harder you push, the more deeply they dig, The more certain they feel as you prove them all wrong. The argument planted a doubt that grew big, So they held to their story, they made it more strong. We were not born with these views fully made, We were broken by something we never could say. A wound that we carried became the crusade, An old pain became armor we carry today. The emotion came first — long before the belief, Before the philosophy, before the firm stand. An experience seeking its narrative relief, A trembling heart reaching for somewhere to land. And reason arrived like a lawyer retained, To argue a case that was already won. The verdict was settled, the jury was trained, The mind was the courtroom — and so it was done. No study was needed, no figure, no chart, The judgment was carved in the marrow and bone. You cannot reach someone by way of their mind When the road that you need runs directly through heart. So if you would reach them, don’t carry a sword, Don’t marshall your data, don’t build up your case. Sit still for a moment, and pull up a chair, And ask them the question that opens a space. Not “why are you wrong?” but “where did this start? What part of your living convinced you of this?” For that is the doorway — not proof and not art, But the quiet of wondering what you might miss. The mind will change only when something in it Grows curious enough to consider the cost. Not when it’s beaten, not when it’s been hit, But when it decides that it’s willing to cross. We don’t change our minds when we lose in the fight, We change when we’re curious enough to explore. Not when we’re shamed in the merciless light, But when we feel safe enough to open the door. So speak to the wound that first seeded the thought, Speak to the human behind what they claim. The battle of argument cannot be fought
When the person defending is fighting their name.
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DCG
Screenshot
Analysis of the Core Statements This argument rests on five interlocking ideas:
Belief is identity — People do not hold beliefs the way they hold opinions about pizza. They fuse beliefs with who they are.
Arguments feel like attacks — When you challenge the belief, the person experiences it as a personal assault on the self, triggering defensive entrenchment.
Emotion precedes reason — Beliefs are not constructed from facts up. They are built from emotional experiences first, and reason is recruited afterward to justify them.
Emotional pain seeds belief — Prior wounds, fears, and lived pain create fertile ground for specific beliefs to take hold — the belief soothes or explains the pain.
5. Curiosity, not argument, changes minds — When people do shift their views, it is not because they were defeated in debate. It is because genuine curiosity about why you believe what you believe created an opening.
Scientific Support — The Research is Robust Jonathan Haidt — The Elephant and the Rider Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model is the cornerstone study here. Haidt’s decades of research, summarized in The Righteous Mind (2012), demonstrated that moral and political beliefs are driven primarily by gut-level intuition — the emotional “elephant” — while conscious reasoning functions as a press secretary for the elephant, constructing post-hoc justifications. According to his Moral Foundations Theory, people are “morally dumbfounded” — they know something feels wrong but cannot explain why, which proves the emotion came first. Dan Kahan — Identity-Protective Cognition Dan Kahan of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project coined the term “identity-protective cognition” — the unconscious tendency to process evidence in ways that shield one’s group identity rather than reach accurate conclusions. Critically, his research shows that higher intelligence and science literacy actually amplify this effect. Smarter people are better at motivated reasoning — they construct more sophisticated defenses of beliefs they were never willing to change. Claude Steele — Self-Affirmation Theory Steele’s landmark 1988 work at Stanford established that the self-system is constantly engaged in maintaining a sense of moral and adaptive adequacy. When beliefs tied to identity are threatened, the entire self feels threatened, not just the idea. The self mobilizes defensively. Sherman and Cohen’s extensions of this work confirmed that reducing this self-threat — through affirmation — is one of the only reliable ways to open a person to reconsidering a belief. Leon Festinger — Cognitive Dissonance Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory (1957) laid the groundwork: people experience genuine psychological discomfort when new information conflicts with held beliefs, and they work to eliminate that discomfort — most often by rejecting the new information rather than changing the belief. Nyhan & Reifler — The Backfire Effect Nyhan and Reifler (2010) documented the “backfire effect” — corrections to political misinformation sometimes caused people to believe the false claim more strongly. While later meta-analyses by Wood and Porter (2019) found the effect is less universal than originally claimed, the core dynamic — resistance to correction under conditions of identity threat — is thoroughly supported. NIH Neuroscience — Belief as Self-Referential Processing A 2024 NIH neuroimaging study found that challenges to political beliefs activate the brain’s Default Mode Network — specifically the regions governing self-referential processing and introspection. The brain literally treats a political argument the same way it treats a threat to the self. APA — Curiosity as a Change Agent
APA research on curiosity and practical communication analysis confirm your final point: curiosity — not argument — is the lever of genuine persuasion. A conversation that induces curiosity about why you believe what you believe creates the only real opening for change.
The Concise Argument
We do not argue about facts. We argue about who we are. Beliefs are not ideas we carry — they are identities we inhabit. When someone challenges your belief, your nervous system does not register it as a debate. It registers it as a threat to the self. You don’t think your way to a belief; you feel your way there first, often through pain, loss, or fear that needed an explanation. Reason arrives after the fact to build the case. This is why more facts, better arguments, and louder voices almost never change minds — they only harden them. The only documented pathway to genuine belief change is curiosity: a person’s own willingness to wonder why someone else sees the world differently. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not argue themselves into.
Metacognition is the brain’s ability to monitor and evaluate its own mental processes (like perceptions, memories, and decisions) and use that self‑knowledge to guide behavior.[parisbraininstitute +3] Brief summary of metacognition In neuroscience, metacognition is often defined as “thinking about your thinking” or “cognition about cognition.” It involves monitoring how well you are perceiving, remembering, or deciding, and generating signals like confidence or doubt about your own performance. These metacognitive signals support skills such as noticing errors, adjusting strategies, controlling attention, and regulating emotions. Neuroimaging work links metacognition especially to frontal and prefrontal brain circuits, which are part of the broader executive control system and our sense of self‑awareness.[ac +7] What the amygdala does in cognition The amygdala is an almond‑shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe that is part of the limbic system. It is crucial for assigning emotional significance (especially threat, fear, and reward value) to stimuli and events, and for triggering appropriate physiological and behavioral responses. The amygdala contributes to several cognitive functions by acting as a salience detector: it influences attention, perception, learning, and memory, particularly for emotionally charged or motivationally relevant information. It also supports implicit emotional learning (like fear conditioning) and modulates how strongly emotional experiences are encoded and consolidated into memory.[nih +4] Direct comparison You can think of metacognition as a monitor of cognition: the anterior prefrontal cortex , whereas the amygdala is more of a tagger and driver of emotional salience in cognition.
One way to put it: metacognition watches and evaluates your thoughts, while the amygdala helps decide what in the environment “matters” emotionally and should capture your cognitive resources.[neurosciencenews +8]
The evidence shows that the amygdala functions much faster than the anterior prefrontal cortex processes
Why is just being yourself so difficult? Being comfortable in your own skin meeting the world as it meets us will often place us in situations that test our resolve. When we persuade ourselves to be something we are not, when we try to convince ourselves to do something we should not in reaction to some event that confronts us simply because we are doubting our true identity, we risk losing our inner sense of perspective and betray our true selves. It is hard to predict the outcomes, but I think we may little by little lose ourselves to conformity. For a nonconformist, conformity is the slowest form of suicide.
Is social pressure greater to our sense of belonging that we must struggle to subdue our own individuality? In art and music, individuality is highly praised, even though many artists are inspired by others before them, they create something anew from something that has gone before, putting their own fingerprint on it somehow, someway. I believe there is a strong correlation between self confidence and individuality.
Perhaps we just have not found ourselves, know how we fit into a situation and we therefore try on different persona’s to see how they fare? We may not have a strong sense of self and adopt others styles, attitudes, or opinions for convenience so that we can be a part of something. We try on these persona’s like they are clothing, interchanging our identities as if they are fashion items, and discarding them when they go out of style. Wanting to fit in is a very strong motivator when we want to be a part of something and often leads us to behave in like manner in our social gatherings. Surprisingly we will also follow in kind with our logic and ethical thought.
Being human, and testing out new perspectives on ourselves can have healthy outcomes. It is when we force ourselves to adopt principles that we may not fully understand or endorse that alienate us from our true selves, or our moral selves that may cause us to have doubt during this time, yet we continue to behave in ways that we are not completely aligned with. The cognitive dissonance may eventually change us if this occurs as we may possibly be forced to alter our opinion, or alter our behavior to once again align for there to be intellectual and behavioral cohesion.
The problem for many is that they do not think about the consequences of their behaviors or thoughts, they have not given their position a full understanding, and are often lost to the potential pitfalls of reasoning or behaving. The lifestyle choice they have adopted may bring them elements that are not bargained for in their initial reckoning of it. This is of course what every human experiences on some level since we are not perfect beings, we fail, make mistakes in our judgements, and therefore modify our thinking or behavior after we test it out in the world. The notion of applying our common sense, and pragmatically living by learning from our mistakes is a common denominator that is experienced worldwide and has graced the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, American Pragmatism, and other thinkers though-out the ages.
When learning something new, one should worry about being unable to reach it. When one has learnt something, one should worry about forgetting it.
Confucius
It is complementary to adopt another persons influence on us when we demonstrate the impact they have on us. We model their behavior by doing what they have done. We see the world through another perspective, but a line should be drawn when we blur the distinction so much that we lose ourselves in living another persons vision. Blind impersonation is merely an imitation, to make it your own, one should adapt it to a vision that is personalized and reflects a view unique to you. Making the decisions to adopt things learned in a social environment is normal and expected. To make them work for you is up to you and your deployment of these pearls of wisdom. What I found most interesting during the younger years of my journey was the expectations of others in my encounters. The social interactions between strangers, and even friends often surprised me. As I grew older and experienced more, these conventions of conduct became more and more familiar to me, allowing me to navigate with more certainty.
Differing opinion on how we see the world is the basis for our differing on how we should proceed in the maze of human conduct. The point of singularity that changed me was when I adopted a corporate philosophy and core value system espoused to me by the company I worked for which my leadership did not wholly adopt with any sense of integrity, and therefore left me disillusioned thinking that they would follow the rules of conduct that they taught me. The larger the group, the stickier the code of conduct may become. The politics of being human has many inequitable outcomes for different people.
I can safely say that no matter what philosophy an entity adopts, following it is an entirely different question and much more important. The adoption of ideas are only as good as the behaviors that demonstrate them, namely: behavior is more powerful than words.
So I say one should be themselves in this world as much as one can be. The convergence of the pool of individuality is constantly blurred in the grand scheme of things and enters into a social construct of conformity. But also is the unique perspectives of individuals that should be held in high esteem, for there is no learning without climbing upon others shoulders to see what could not be seen before. The necessary progression of advancing is often helped by those around us.
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