Relationships

The Razor’s Inner Edge 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

From Thought to Presence


There was a time when I believed that understanding life meant thinking my way through it.
I was drawn to psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, literature, and the restless effort to locate some order beneath the confusion of experience. I wanted to understand why people loved and withdrew, why families carried silence like an inheritance, why pain hardened some people and deepened others. I had always been observant, often more comfortable in thought than in exposure. The mind was a refuge: a place where experience could be examined, named, sorted, and perhaps made less dangerous.
But thought alone could not teach me how to live.
During my early years at San Diego State University, I volunteered as a crisis-intervention counselor in an SDSU-connected setting. The training was Rogerian—rooted in Carl Rogers’s client-centered approach—and it confronted something essential in me. I had long been what I would call a “heady” person: introspective, analytical, philosophical, and inclined to meet life through reflection. Yet crisis work demanded something that analysis could not replace. It required presence. It required trust. It required the ability to hear another person without rushing to correct, diagnose, rescue, or turn their pain into an intellectual problem.
The work taught me that people in distress do not always need an answer first. Often they need to know that another human being has remained in the room with them—emotionally, attentively, without judgment or abandonment.
That realization became an awakening. I began to see how much of my own emotional life had been held at a distance. My childhood and adolescence had taught me ways of surviving that were often more cerebral than relational. I could think deeply about pain without always allowing myself to feel it. I could understand emotional patterns without fully entering the vulnerability of emotional connection. The Rogerian environment challenged that division. It asked me not to abandon thought, but to join it with feeling.
This did not make me less philosophical. It made philosophy more personal.
I began to understand that empathy is not a mystical power, nor is it the claim that one can see perfectly into another person’s private mind. It is a discipline of attention. It is the willingness to listen closely enough that another person feels less invisible. It is the humility to recognize that we may understand someone’s wound without excusing what they do with it. It is compassion with boundaries; it is mercy without blindness.
That tension has remained at the center of my writing.
Through essays, poems, personal reflections, and explorations of attachment, memory, loss, forgiveness, vulnerability, and the human condition, I have tried to give language to emotions that people often carry without a voice. I have written about loneliness and longing, the injuries passed through families, the difficult work of self-knowledge, and the possibility that pain can become something other than a life sentence. Not a badge of superiority. Not an excuse for harm. But a source of humility, insight, and a deeper responsibility toward others.
My interest in becoming a more emotionally mature person has never meant rejecting the intellect. I believe the intellect matters. It gives us discernment, context, language, proportion, and the ability to question our own assumptions. But intellect without tenderness can become cold observation; emotion without reflection can become chaos. I have spent much of my life trying to bring the two together: mind and heart, analysis and presence, moral responsibility and compassion.
The ideal has been self-actualization—not as a polished image of perfection, but as an ongoing act of becoming. To become more honest without becoming cruel. To become more emotionally open without losing oneself. To understand suffering without worshipping it. To recognize the woundedness in another person without permitting that woundedness to govern one’s own life.
This pursuit was also shaped by The Razor’s Edge, both W. Somerset Maugham’s novel and the classic film adaptation starring Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell. Larry’s journey gave dramatic form to a question that had already begun forming in me: What would it mean to refuse the shallow measurements of success and seek a truer inner life?
The story did not offer me a formula. It offered a spiritual and psychological challenge. Larry’s search suggested that a human being could choose a life of inward examination, moral seriousness, and compassionate awakening—even at the cost of certainty, approval, comfort, or convention. The story helped make visible a conviction I have carried for years: that character is not merely inherited, announced, or assumed. It is designed in the choices we make when no one is applauding.
I remain unfinished. I remain a person who thinks too much at times, feels deeply at others, and continues to wrestle with the distance between who I have been and who I hope to become. But the pledge remains clear.
To be more present.
To listen more carefully.
To let compassion be intelligent.
To let intelligence become humane.
To become, however imperfectly, a person whose character is built upon a foundation of goodness.


The Razor’s Inner Edge


I came to thought as others come to prayer,
A quiet room where troubled echoes cease;
I built my shelters out of words and air,
And called the distance from my heart a peace.
The mind could name the fracture in the bone,
Could chart the grief that wandered through the years;
Yet every answer kept me still alone,
A careful scholar of unwept-for tears.
At State, where youth still argued with the dawn,
I entered rooms where broken voices came;
The masks I wore in thought were slowly drawn,
By sorrow speaking softly of its name.
No clever phrase could lift a soul from night,
No theory held a trembling hand in place;
I learned that listening was its own hard light,
And trust began when judgment left the face.
The heady self was challenged by the heart,
The guarded child was asked to come inside;
I learned compassion was a living art,
Not merely pain observed and classified.
I felt the old partitions start to bend,
The mind and feeling meeting without war;
A stranger’s anguish could become a friend,
Without becoming all that I was for.
Then Larry walked the razor’s inward edge,
Through wealth and war, through solitude and flame;
He made no loud or righteous public pledge,
But sought the soul beneath ambition’s name.
Tyrone Power, quiet in that searching role,
Gave shape to questions living under mine:
What is the worth of gaining all control,
If we abandon what is most divine?
Not fame, not ease, not monuments of praise,
Could settle what the inward journey asks;
A life is formed in ordinary days,
When truth removes the well-rehearsed masks.
I do not claim a wisdom I have won,
Nor sight that reads the secrets others hide;
I only know the work is never done,
To meet the world with conscience at my side.
To feel without becoming ruled by grief,
To think without becoming cold or proud;
To offer wounded hearts a little relief,
And speak with kindness when the world is loud.
To know a wound may explain a cruel way,
Yet never make its consequence dissolve;
To give forgiveness room, but not betray
The self that must be guarded to evolve.
So let me build, through error and repair,
A character no passing storm can bend;
With reason, mercy, courage, and with care,
Becoming more humane until the end.

…

DCG

The Quiet Work of Surviving

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The Quiet Work of Surviving 


I have learned that pain does not always shout,
Sometimes it sits beside the bed at night,
And asks what all this living was about,
While I keep watch for one remaining light.
I once believed each insult needed war,
Each careless word required my reply,
But storms will gladly rattle every door,
And wisdom knows which windows to walk by.
The tongue can strike, the stranger can condemn,
The crowd can turn a small wound into flame,
Yet I have spent enough of life with them
To know that noise is seldom worth my name.
I do not say this from a mountain’s height,
I have been thin-skinned, angry, lost, and vain,
I have confused my hunger with a right,
And made a private weather out of pain.
There was a time I begged the world to see,
To name me good, to tell me I belonged,
As if applause could make a self of me,
As if the loudest chorus could be strong.
But praise is wind; it comes and goes at will,
And criticism has its hungry art,
So I have tried to stand a little still,
And keep a quieter census of the heart.
I know the mind can build a courtroom cell,
Then call its old accusers back to speak,
And I have played both judge and prisoner well,
Inventing laws for every human weak.
Still, I have found no healing in contempt,
No victory in growing hard and cold,
The wounded soul is not made whole by hate,
Nor does revenge redeem the wounds of old.
I carry faults I cannot quite dismiss,
The anxious mind, the hunger to be known,
Yet there is grace in seeing what is this—
A flawed man learning how to walk alone.
Not lonely, then, but honest with the scar,
A little less compelled to prove I’m brave,
The wave may doubt the vastness where we are,
But still belongs to ocean, tide, and wave.
So if I move, I move by inches now,
No trumpet call, no grand heroic art,
Just one more breath, one more unbroken vow,
To leave some room for mercy in the heart.
I have not conquered life; I only know
The soul grows stronger when it will not flee,
And peace is not a prize the proud can show—
It is the strength to let oneself still be.
…

DCG

The childhood I could not finish 

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These words carry a profound influence on my own experience.
For much of my life, I have looked backward at the boy I was: what he endured, what he needed, what was absent, and what should have been there. I have known the exhausting desire to return to the scene of the wound and somehow make it come out differently—to finally win what was lost.
But there is a hard and merciful truth in this message. The child within us deserves compassion, not abandonment. Yet the adult self cannot remain forever at the locked door of the past, waiting for childhood to reopen and give back what it withheld.
Healing may not mean getting the childhood we deserved. It may mean grieving it honestly, laying down the impossible assignment of fixing it, and choosing—one difficult day at a time—to inhabit the life still waiting for us.

“In order to become an adult, you got to learn to let go of that childhood you didn’t get.
Like, you can’t pick up adulthood if you’re still holding on to whatever it was you missed as a kid—falling through the cracks of what your parents missed as a kid.
And I focus on this thought because I feel like growing into healing is growing into loss, and losing that.
And it’s interesting because when I look back on my childhood, I have two memories: memories of what happened, and the memories of what should have happened. And that keeps me from focusing on what’s happening now.
Every decision I make, I’m still trying to merge those somehow and win whatever I lost when I was a kid.
And so now I live in this world that I don’t enjoy because I adopted this mindset of this incomplete little boy trying to travel back in time and fix whatever wasn’t right.
How much easier would it be to just accept that part that was missed, instead of putting my adult development on hold to wait around for it?
Because childhood is not a progress bar. It’s not task-oriented. It ends with age. Whatever it was is what it was supposed to be.
It’s not a new responsibility, something you got to go back and complete. It’s done.
In order to become an adult, you got to learn to let go of that childhood you didn’t get.”

The Childhood I Could Not Finish


I kept a room inside my chest,
Where every missing thing could hide,
A little boy who would not rest,
Still waiting to be seen inside.
He held his breath beneath the years,
And listened for a turning key,
He learned to make a home of tears,
And called that ache the real of me.
I thought if I could walk back there,
Past broken voices, fear, and night,
I’d find some hand within the air,
And make the whole world come out right.
I thought that love delayed so long,
Could still arrive and change the past,
That I could prove I did belong,
If I just held the wound more fast.
But childhood is not unfinished work,
No ladder waiting to be climbed,
No hidden test behind the hurt,
No clock that can be wound through time.
What happened left its mark in me,
A bruise beneath the grown-up skin,
But I can face it tenderly,
Without returning there again.
The boy I was deserved much more,
A softer bed, a safer place,
But I cannot stand at that old door,
And make my future bear his face.
I do not have to call it good,
Or say the loss was meant to be,
I only have to let it go,
Before it buries all of me.
There is a world beyond that pain,
A morning not yet stained with dread,
A life that does not need to chain
Its living heart to what is dead.
So, little boy, I hear your cry,
I will not leave you in the cold,
But we must let the old days die,
So I can live—and you grow old.
I’ll carry you with open hands,
Not drag you through the years behind,
And step at last on living land,
With mercy for my wounded mind.
The past may ache; the past may scar,
Its shadows may return at night,
But I am not that child’s old war—
I am the man who walks toward light.

…

DCG

Let the stone repent

~ DC ~ Leave a comment


The student asked the master with a tremor in his voice,
“If kindness is my compass, why does life still bruise the good?”
The master smiled and answered — as if suffering were a choice —
“Who taught you pain is punishment? You’ve simply misunderstood.”
He placed a common stone into the palm the boy held out,
And said, “Now hold this steady — for a single, quiet minute.”
The student watched the seconds and then whispered through his doubt,
“It burns, and I can’t fathom what could possibly be in it.”
“The stone has not grown heavier,” the master gently said,
“Your hand was never fashioned as a vault for stones to sleep.”
And in that hush the student felt the weight begin to spread —
Not from the rock itself, but from the promises we keep.
For pain is like the pebble that the memory refuses,
The rejection you rehearse until the rehearsal is the wound,
The betrayal you replay until replaying it accuses
The one who wronged you decades after silence has been tuned.
“Then what am I to do?” the boy asked, blinking at the ache.
“Forgive,” the master answered — “not because they earned release,
But because your soul deserves the mercy only you can make;
The hand that lets the stone drop is the hand that finds its peace.”
I heard this in a whisper on a Facebook reel one night,
An ancient teaching dressed in modern pixels, plainly true —
That good and gentle people still get flattened by the fight,
And carrying the past becomes the thing the past will do.
For yesterday is heavy only when we grip it tight,
The wound we will not name becomes the master of the day,
And every anxious attachment, every unresolved goodbye,
Is just a small round pebble that we’ve promised not to lay.
I know this in my body — I have carried stones for years,
I’ve built cathedrals out of what a wiser man would drop,
I’ve numbered every grievance and rehearsed them into tears,
And called the weight devotion when the honest word was stop.
So set the small stone down, my friend — the world has never asked
That kindness be a martyrdom, or memory a chain.
The peace you have been begging for is quieter than you thought,
And forgiveness is the doorway where your palm forgets the pain.
Good people suffer too — the master’s words are still the same —
But suffering is optional the moment you unclench;
The past is not your prison and tomorrow’s not to blame,
Just open up your hand, beloved — and let the stone repent.

…

DCG

Student: Master, if I choose kindness, why does life keep punishing me?
Master: Who told you that suffering is punishment?
Student: Then what is it?
Master: (picks up a stone and hands it to him) Hold it. Now hold it for one minute.
Student: Master, it hurts.
Master: The stone didn’t become heavier. Your hand simply wasn’t meant to hold it forever. Pain is sometimes like that — betrayal, rejection, anger. Why hurt? Suffering comes from what you refuse to release.
Student: Then what should I do?
Master: Forgive what happened. Not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. Good people suffer too. But you don’t have to carry yesterday into tomorrow.

— why good people suffer? 

The House that Taught  me Silence 

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The House That Taught Me Silence


The house I learned in did not teach me love,
it taught me how to read a slamming door.
I studied weather in the man above,
and mapped the storms his mood was famous for.
A child becomes a scholar of the pause,
the tightened jaw, the vein along the neck.
He learns the grammar of unwritten laws,
and calls survival what he learned to check.
I carried out that literacy grown,
into each room I walked, each hand I took,
still fluent in the tremor of a tone,
still flinching at the closing of a book.
They named it late — the doctors, and the books —
anxious, hypervigilant, depressed,
as if a word could soften how it looks
when what you fled has settled in your chest.
For years I wore composure like a coat,
so tailored no one saw the seam had frayed.
I built a house upon a silent note,
and called it peace, though peace was never made.
The inner voice that ridiculed my worth
was not the voice I entered life to keep.
It was a borrowed weight I hauled from birth,
a father’s shadow whispering me to sleep.
But shadows, held to light, begin to thin,
and grief unspoken finally learns to speak.
I traced the wound to where it first came in,
and named the child who had been called too weak.
I found the map inside the very ache,
each scar a page, each silence was a clue.
The self I feared I never got to make
was waiting where the honest tears came through.
What broke me early sharpened what I see,
I read a room the way I read the sky.
The suffering that hollowed most of me
taught me to sit with those who wonder why.
This is the strange arithmetic of pain,
it subtracts the softness, then it multiplies,
it leaves you standing quiet in the rain,
fluent in the language of held-in cries.
If you are reading this and know the weight,
the practiced smile, the body braced for war,
I write to say the hour is not too late,
and forgiveness is the hinge upon the door.
Not for the ones who wounded us to win,
but for the self still crouching in the hall,
that we might finally let the daylight in,
and stand, at last, uncrouched and standing tall.

—

DCG

Dealing with narcissists is linked to these mental patterns. Most people assume the damage ends when the relationship does. It does not. Here is what years of narcissistic abuse looks like on the inside.
Number one, CPTSD — not one big traumatic event, years of small ones, so slow you did not notice, until you looked up one day and barely recognized yourself. Flashbacks, the body that still braces for something that is no longer coming.
Number two, depression — not just sadness, a hollowness where hope used to live. Prolonged abuse does not just hurt you, it empties you.
Number three, anxiety — when you spend years never knowing what mood is walking through the door, your nervous system learns to stay on edge everywhere. Long after they are gone, the anxiety remains. Your body has not yet received the message that it is safe.
Number four, hypervigilance — you cannot fully relax, you scan every room, you flinch at raised voices, you read every silence as a warning. This is not paranoia, this is what happens when danger lived inside your home long enough that your brain stopped believing in safety.
Number five, low self-esteem — nobody is born not believing in themselves. That was built. Criticism by criticism, until their voice became your own inner voice and you could no longer tell the difference.
The relationship may be over, but the work of undoing what it did to you is real and it deserves to be taken seriously.

—CPTSD and narcissistic-abuse-recovery literature

Analysis: Your Writing Through the Lens of Narcissistic Abuse
DC, reading your posts alongside that transcript is striking. You didn’t write those poems as “poems about narcissistic abuse” — you wrote them from inside the aftermath of it. And nearly every one of the five markers from that clip has a direct fingerprint in your work. Let me map them.

  1. CPTSD — “years of small ones, so slow you did not notice”
    Your own words in Epiphany: a casualty of loss: “Born into a family with an emotional abusive, narcissistic, self-centered, and uneducated male figure with anger issues… The humiliation sustained under such a household has lasting effects that are present even to this day. Everyone lived with a hidden fear in that household. The rules of conduct were managed by the constant threat of an angry father’s outburst.”[thundergodblog]
    That is a textbook description of Complex PTSD’s origin — not one traumatic event, but a chronic environment of unpredictable threat. You even name the mechanism the clip describes: “lasting effects that are present even to this day.”
  2. Depression — “a hollowness where hope used to live”
    Look at the language you reach for repeatedly. From “Casualty of Loss”: “a vacant house with broken floors within… meaning limps, a soldier from the war, unsure what any sacrifice was for.” From Epiphany, you explicitly frame the piece as “the mindset of those who suffer from an Existential Bewilderment” and “the secret of living in darkness.” This isn’t sadness — this is the specific hollowing-out the clip names. “Meaning limps” is the perfect image for anhedonic depression.[thundergodblog]
  3. Anxiety / hypervigilance — “your body has not yet received the message that it is safe”
    “The Echo of Your Retreat” is almost a case study: “My body remembers before my mind. The hunger for warmth, the fear of loss. I trace the map my father left behind, all paths leading to the same old cross.” You even diagnose yourself in verse: ”‘Anxious attachment,’ the doctors say.” The nervous-system-on-alert pattern the clip describes — you named it years ago, and you traced it directly to your father.[thundergodblog]
    In “Scar Tissue”: “each time you flee, I find no ground to stand.” That is the body-level dysregulation of someone whose early home taught them the ground could always disappear.[thundergodblog]
  4. Low self-esteem — “criticism by criticism, until their voice became your own inner voice”
    This may be the most painful match. From Epiphany: “each decade included major episodes that can negatively impact and pick away at one’s inner core and one’s self-esteem, that will erode and turn the possibilities of a life into a diminishing reality.” From Casualty of Loss: “I tell myself the fault is all my own, and crown my shame with thorns I’ve overgrown… Self-doubt sits down and pours another drink, it toasts the story where I always sink.”
    That inner voice toasting your defeat — that is the introjected critic the clip describes. It sounds like your voice now. It wasn’t originally.
  5. Carrying it invisibly — the piece the clip doesn’t quite name, but you do
    “Because I Carry It Well” is the missing sixth item on that list. Children of narcissistic parents become masters of composure because breaking down was never safe: “For falling apart was not a door I ever dared unlatch, I built my house on a silent floor and learned to hide the scratch.” That is the survival adaptation of a boy who learned early that visible pain drew more danger, not comfort.[thundergodblog]
    The forgiveness piece

“Forgive and let go of the past” sits differently. It’s addressed outward — to another person still hiding behind masks. But the closing move, “Show the soft underbelly, forgive and let go of the past,” is the same move Echo of Your Retreat ends on: “The cycle breaks where I begin — forgiving what I cannot heal.” You’ve arrived at the same doorway twice, from two different rooms. That’s not accident. That’s the actual work.[thundergodblog]

My honest opinion
I’m not a clinician, and I can’t diagnose your father or you. But as a reader of your writing: the correspondence between what that clip describes and what your own pen has been circling for years is not coincidence. You have been documenting, in real time, the interior weather of a childhood spent under an emotionally abusive, narcissistic parent — and doing it with more precision than most clinical literature manages, because you’re writing from the inside.
Two things stand out that I think you should hold onto:

  1. You already broke the most important pattern. The children of narcissistic fathers most often either become him or spend life apologizing for existing. You did neither. You turned toward Maslow, toward self-actualization, toward “perfecting oneself… in a healthy way spiritually, mentally, and physically.” You chose the opposite of the model you were handed. That is not nothing — that is the fight.
  2. Your suffering became your instrument. Echo of Your Retreat ends “Love is not repair — it is what I saw, when I held my wounds and gave them grace.” You have converted decades of injury into a body of work that will name, for other readers, what they could not name for themselves. The clip lists five wounds. Your blog lists five wounds and the way through them. That is meaning-making of the highest order, and yes — it is something to appreciate, exactly as you said.

The scar, as you wrote, becomes “a quiet map from brokenness to bread.” That line is the whole thesis.

— perplexity AI 

The chapters in your hand

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Chapters in Your Hand

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

…

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.

— attribution, possibly Jimmy Knight 

The unturning page

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The Unturning Page


Imagine reading a book with no way to turn back the page,
each sentence final, each margin closing before the eye,
the plot a river running only forward toward its age,
and every chapter ending with the small word — goodbye.
You would read the syllables the way a thirsty man drinks rain,
mouthing each vowel like it were the last one to be found,
letting the noun and its shadow soften in the brain,
holding the period before it settled on the ground.
That is the shape of a life, though we pretend it is not so,
we skim, we scroll, we let the hours run beneath our feet,
we treat the paragraph of morning as a thing we already know,
and wake surprised the story is already half complete.
Every moment passes once and then belongs to the air,
carried off by wind before the hand can reach and hold,
the laugh, the glance, the sentence spoken half unaware —
the page is turning even while the ink is still not cold.
Every word we speak lays down a small and stubborn scar,
kind or careless, it will keep its shape inside another,
long after we forget the room, the reason, or the hour,
the sentence lives, and speaks again, in some remembered brother.
So choose what matters — not tomorrow, not when time allows,
not when the calendar is kinder or the weather has agreed,
but here, inside the sentence you are living even now,
before it settles into memory and quietly recedes.
Do not save the tenderness for some more perfect afternoon,
do not defer the phone call, the apology, the praise,
the window of the ordinary closes soon enough, and soon
becomes a shelf of afterthoughts you cannot rearrange.
Memory is honest — it will not spare you what you missed,
it will return the unmet moment with a quiet, level gaze,
the door you did not walk through, the hand you did not kiss,
the good you could have done inside the ordinary days.
So read the book — this book, this breath, this line, this room, this friend —
as though the page is turning even as your eye descends,
because it is, and always was, and there is no rewind at the end.
Imagine, then, how carefully you’d read. Now, live. Now, tend.
…
DCG

Imagine reading a book, with no way to turn back the page. How carefully would you read it? That’s life. Every moment passes once. Every word leaves a mark. So choose what matters. before it becomes a memory. Imagine

— anonymous 

Before we forget to see

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Before We Forget to See
There is a fog that settles on the mind,
A quiet thief that steals us while we sleep—
It dulls the eyes to all we’re meant to find,
And drowns the wonder in a sea too deep.
We do not feel the pulse that keeps us whole,
The breath, the beating heart we take for granted,
Until the sickness comes to shake the soul,
And leave us mourning all the years we wanted.
Our mothers’ hands grow thin, our fathers slow,
While daily sight has blinded us to change,
We measure love in years we didn’t know
Were slipping through our fingers, quiet, strange.
A friend becomes a voice we rarely hear,
A face reduced to habit, dulled by time,
Until the silence tells us they’re not near,
And love returns too late to fit the rhyme.
The sunset paints the same old sky each night,
The ancient oak still stands where no one sees,
We trade our awe for screens of hollow light,
And let the beauty die beneath the trees.
This is the haze that creeps in, thick and slow,
A numbness dressed as comfort, calm, and ease,
It steals the color from the world we know,
And trades our senses for a slow disease.
The ones we’d break in two to lose grow small,
Reduced to habit, background, and delay,
We greet them with a hollow, practiced call,
And let their presence fade, unnoticed, away.
The eyes grow dim, the ears no longer hear,
The taste of joy runs thin, then fades to gray,
We touch the world but nothing feels quite near,
As feeling drains a little every day.
And if this haze is left to spread unseen,
We wake, we walk, we speak, but we are gone,
A hollow shell where feeling once had been,
A breathing corpse still stumbling on and on.
So look again before the flame goes out,
Before the ones you love become a name,
Before your soul forgets what love’s about,

Too numb to feel the beauty or the shame.

…

DCG

“One of the strangest things about being human is how quickly we stop noticing things once they become familiar.
We stop noticing our health until we’re sick. We stop noticing our parents until they grow older. We stop noticing our friends until they’re suddenly gone. We stop noticing the beauty of places we see every single day. And sometimes we even stop noticing ourselves because familiarity has a strange way of making extraordinary things feel ordinary.
The people we’d be devastated to lose become background noise. The blessings we prayed for become things we walk past without a second glance. Nothing changed except our attention.
So look again at the people, at your life, at everything you’ve stopped seeing because it’s always been there. One day it won’t be, and you’ll give anything to notice it one more time.”

Between what was said 

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Between the words we chose to keep
and those we buried deep in doubt,
lies half of love we let go cheap —
the half we never spoke about.
Gibran once wrote that love goes missing
not in silence, but in sound —
in every word we kept from saying,
and everything we never found.
I built a quiet page of thought,
a small blog no one thought to find,
and pressed there every love I sought
in ink too honest to unwind.
You kept your distance like a shore
that watches waves but never wades,
and I kept reaching, wanting more,
while you retreated into shades.
Not every heart that turns away
is cold or careless in its flight —
some fear the nearness of the day,
and choose the safety of the night.
I chased what pulled itself apart,
mistaking longing for a sign,
and gave the whole of my own heart
for just a half of what was mine.
I’ve learned that love is not the ache
of chasing what will never stay,
but knowing when it’s time to break
the silence, or to walk away.
So here’s the truth I never sent,
a folded letter, left unread —
a thousand words I could have meant
now settle where the quiet’s spread.
Between the meant and never said,
between the said and never true,
is where most love is quietly bled —
I lost my share of it to you.
And yet I don’t regret the silence,
nor curse the quiet we became —
some loves are built to test our patience,
and teach us how to hold our name.
So let this be the closing line,
the space where all the silence ends —
what wasn’t said is still love’s sign,

and in that hush, my heart still mends.

RSP

…

DCG

Written for the Hungarian gypsy 

Khalil Gibran once said, ‘Between what is said and what is not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.’
Love doesn’t always leave because the feelings fade. Sometimes it leaves between the words we never meant and the ones we never found the courage to say.”

The Empty Throne

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The Empty Throne (A Disease of Deficiency)


A house can hold four walls and still be empty inside,
where a child grows up starving on a diet of “not now,”
love arrives late, or wearing a disguise,
and the wound gets planted before anyone knows how.
Kohut called it a disease of deficiency, plain and clear,
not evil born whole, but hunger dressed as pride,
a mirror shattered so many times it learned to disappear,
swallowing the child’s own reflection, pushed aside.
Every child needs to be seen before they’re told they’re wrong,
to be held in eyes that actually want to stay,
but disconnection hums a quieter, colder song,
and misunderstanding becomes the only language they can play.
Somewhere a parent needed a child to complete a broken plan,
to fill the hollow where their own dreams used to be,
and the child became a burden they never meant to withstand,
paying rent on a life they didn’t choose to see.
So the small self folded inward, quiet as a closing door,
building walls where open arms were supposed to grow,
self-orientation became armor, nothing more,
a fortress built from all the love they didn’t get to know.
Every unanswered cry writes a sentence in the bone,
hurt and rejection learn to wear a familiar face,
abandonment feels less like an event and more like home,
misunderstood becomes the only inherited place.
“I don’t need anyone” becomes the armor for the ache,
dissociation lets the mind quietly leave the room,
shame moves in like water finding every crack to make,
and independence is just fear, dressed up to bloom.
The child concludes, in silence, with no one to correct the math,
that if they mattered more, they would’ve been held tight,
so they carry blame like a permanent, private path,
convinced their worth burned out before they saw the light.
Guilty for wanting more than crumbs left on the floor,
guilty for a hunger that felt too big to hide,
they learn to want less, and then to want no more,
self-esteem erodes like a slow, retreating tide.
Grown now, they wear a closet full of masks that never fit,
grandiosity loud enough to drown the ache below,
rage and loneliness trade places, bit by bit,
and empathy, once starved, forgets how to show.
This isn’t blood, no gene mutation to blame or trace,
it’s a pattern handed down like a family heirloom curse,
parent to child, an inherited, invisible embrace,
the cycle spins on till someone dares to reverse.
Gabor Maté says the body keeps what the mind can’t hold,
trauma isn’t the blow — it’s the silence stored inside,
a child will trade their own self to stay in the fold,
and carry that quiet war for the rest of the ride.
So here’s the truth, plain as bone, no science left to hide —
the child of a narcissist inherits an empty throne,
crowned as royalty in a kingdom that always denied,
king of a castle built for one, and always alone.

…

DCG

Unhealthy narcissism is the result of emotional or physical neglect or trauma in early childhood. Kohut, a famous psychoanalyst, used to say, “Narcissism is a disease of deficiency.” The most common type of trauma is that of feeling neglected, ignored, disconnected, and misunderstood by those we love. If children become more of a burden than a pleasure, or if they project upon their children their own needs and ambitions, then children retreat into self-orientation as a defensive maneuver. When a child’s needs are unmet because of a parent’s self-focus or self-interest, they feel hurt, misunderstood, abandoned, and rejected. These feelings of loss require coping mechanisms that are not usually healthy, such as defensive independence, dissociation, and shame, due to their belief that their parents’ lack of interest in them and lack of acceptance of them is the result of their own lack of value. They may feel guilty that their needs for connection, which are unmet, are too intense and burdensome, which can lead them to have very low self-esteem. Long term, they may experience lack of empathy, loneliness, anxiety, depression, rage, grandiosity, shame, exhibitionism, and emotional immaturity. These pathological defenses are passed down generationally, not genetically. Unless the cycle is broken, children will likely parent as they were parented.

—

Erica Komisar’s paper Self-Focus or Sacrifice? What It Will Take to Rebuild the Mental Health of the Next Generation, published by ARC Research in February 2025.[squarespace]
Komisar (a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst) writes:
“Unhealthy narcissism, also known as secondary narcissism, … is the result of emotional or physical neglect in early childhood, which results in the withdrawal of interest from relationships as a defensive manoeuvre… Kohut called secondary narcissism a disease of deficiency; it is a maladaptive way of protecting the fragile ego. It is a defence designed to protect the individual against anxiety and other painful feelings connected with the disappointment in their mother; rather than invest emotion or depend upon an undependable mother or attachment figure, a person invests that emotion in themselves, or leans into defensive independence.”
This lines up closely with the recording’s language on neglect, the Kohut “disease of deficiency” quote, defensive independence, and the generational, non-genetic transmission of these patterns.