Undeceived, with Love

For over twenty years, I have sat with people at the precise moment their lives stop making sense — when the story they built breaks, and what remains is not yet a story.

I am also a writer. Not because I chose it, but because some things cannot be contained in the clinical hour alone. They need form where the self is both therapist and subject. Where the question is not what do you need but what remains unanswered and why that is the most intimate.

These essays begin there. I write about love that does not survive what it teaches. About the stranger who appears only when the known self has exhausted itself. About what happens when the distance between the one who listens and the one who speaks vanishes and neither can tell.

~ Yoon Im Kane

Undeceived, with Love

Deceive~decipere~to ensnare. To be deceived is to be trapped. And what I cannot unsee is that the trap was never the untruth someone told me. Never the lover. Never the institution. Never the one that got away.

The trap is the mind's own architecture. The mind that looks at itself and cannot see that the looking is the problem.

I love you, wall. I hate you, wall. My wound, my healing, wall. Each one is a room the self builds and furnishes and calls my inner life. And the totality of those rooms is the prison. Built from the inside, thought by thought, until the architect forgets she is the architect. She moves through her own construction believing something else trapped her.

Even belonging. Even the house we build from our own voice and call our home. Because the self that arrives and says I finally belong here is still building. Still naming the construction so it never has to face what lies beneath the foundation.

To be undeceived is to see this without looking away. Without the mind rushing to convert what it sees into a story about seeing.

And that seeing is violent. Not like war. Violent like a thread pulled from the center of a garment. The whole thing comes apart. Quietly. Completely. What remains is not a better costume. It is the thread. The thing before the pattern. Before the name.

Then a voice, from somewhere I did not expect:

"I am so relieved… I thought I had destroyed you."

What remained…

simply was.

What Falls Upward

The injury arrives: a betrayal, a divorce, a friend who vanishes at the moment of need—and the tallying begins. We call it remembering. It is tallying the cost.

One person who arrived heartbroken in my office kept the books for years. After the love ended, they carried a ledger: who did what, what it cost, and what the pain entitled them to. Some entries were verbatim; all of them kept inside the story of their heartbreak.

They believed the accounts would help them forgive and move on with their lives. Over time, and with horror, they saw that the accounts were keeping them. They had built armor out of what was done to them and what they were owed; a self made of unpaid debts
Grievance, from the Latin "gravare" to burden, shares its root with gravity. A grievance is not a claim. It is weight that becomes who we are.

This is why wounded people struggle with mercy. Not unkindness. Not a failure of compassion. When a self is built from the story of its injury, all attention flows to the debt that must be collected. The debt is a mortgage: mort-gage, the death pledge, and the self keeps paying the cost to stay intact among the ruins.

The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil called this "moral gravity." Everything in nature falls. The suffering passes suffering along. The powerful use their power. The injured collect or inflict their injuries. What is natural is not cruel; it is a form of gravity, obeying its own laws. To receive the blow and not return it is against nature. Grace, she said, is the only thing that falls upward. Supernatural.

Weil went further. Mercy is not something we do. It is the space we live inside. The receptive body inside a merciful world. Her image of creation: God withdrawing, consenting not to occupy everything so that something else could exist. Set the theology aside: all of us receive what we did not deserve. Every one of us lives on terms we did not earn.

So releasing a debt is not generosity. It is demolition and a wager. A debt claimed is not a possession waiting to be repossessed; it is a piece of who we are, and to let it go is to wager that whatever remains is enough…enough to go on, holding less, yet more full. The strategic mind cannot imagine wholeness on the far side of that loss. This is why we do not let go. And it is why the road to mercy cracks open at heartbreak: real loss dismantles the strategic self without asking its permission. In merciless submission.

What remains, if we do not rush to build another story over the ruin, owes nothing and is owed nothing. In merciful recognition, it sees the one who hurt and the one who was hurt entirely: the act and the life around the act. There is nothing and no one left to balance what is unjust.

There is only the adult aloneness of the path among everything that lives on.