Have you ever wanted to break something on purpose? Not an impulse in a moment of rage or fear—I mean methodically, precisely, thoroughly so that reassembling it would prove impossible. I’m trying to remember a time I’ve wanted such a thing. I keep returning to only one.
There is one thing I dream about breaking, breaking so thoroughly even its memory will be erased, until it becomes unspeakable and inconceivable. I’ve been guilty of perpetuating it at times, before I understood what it was and what it cost. I’ve been a victim of it and feel its sting daily.
I’ve studied it, in millennia of writing and records.
I’ve obsessively mapped its presence and traced its roots.
I’ve methodically searched for pressure points, existing strain, micro-fractures.
I want it to shatter and disappear.
That one thing is the Lie.
The Lie is a choice. It is the choice to protect one’s image above all else. The Lie is the image, the symbol, the number that replaces the living, real thing. It is a lie we have internalized to the point that it has become largely invisible, a force that frames and shapes everything we no longer notice. Like air—we only consider its existence once it’s absent, and panic.
Unlike oxygen, which we need to survive, the Lie’s absence will not result in our physical death, but it will result in our psychological one, a normal, healthy process that has been mystified, pathologized, and woo-wooed into meaninglessness.
Where did you come from?
No, not the country—where did the being that is you come from? The trillions of cells that somehow grew, without your direction, and somehow coordinate together an almost impossible amount of functiona—did you emerge from there?
Those same cells started as a single egg in your mother, an egg that began forming when your mother was in utero, in your grandmother, at approximately eleven weeks gestation. Three generations nested inside one another.
Your grandmother had to stay alive long enough to at least deliver your mother. Your mother had to survive until she was old enough to ovulate. Your particular sperm had to be the one that reached her egg. And during those weeks when your cellular origins were forming inside your mother inside your grandmother, your grandmother’s body was the environment—her nutrition, her stress, her chemical exposures were shaping the material that would eventually become you.
You are not separate. Life did not start with you. It will not end with you.
And we’ve known it. We’ve always known it. That’s why they have to rewrite the narratives, reinforce and escalate the conditions that once shaped our grandmothers and now shape us. We were being shaped before we arrived. Not just the world we’d enter. Us. Before we could even know what we were losing
Someone noticed different people have vastly different responses to relationships with other people. They noticed patterns of attachment styles; they studied and learned about how these form, how humans bond, and the impact. They were able to identify the conditions humans most needed to bond successfully and thrive. Beautiful work really.
And then someone else sat in that room and asked different questions.
They studied connection—in decades of research and clinical observation.
They obsessively mapped its presence and traced its roots.
They methodically searched for pressure points, existing strain, micro-fractures.
They wanted it to shatter and disappear.
To them, bonding was the threat. The ungovernable quality of connected humans—the way attachment makes people unwilling to sacrifice each other for abstractions—that was the disorder that needed breaking.
Same verbs. Same precision.
I am searching for how to shatter something. So were they.
