Someone Shows You Exactly Who They Are

You are listening to them talk and something lands that didn’t land before. The words are the same as always but this time you hear what’s underneath them. You are seeing the actual person instead of the idea of them and the actual person is different.

They do something selfish and you finally notice the pattern instead of excusing the incident. They say something cruel and you realize they say cruel things regularly, you just didn’t want to see it. The clarity arrives and it is not gentle. It is sharp and it hurts because now you know.

The person has not changed. They have been this way the whole time. You built a version of them based on what you wanted them to be and that version has been protecting you from seeing the actual person. Now the protection is gone and you can see them exactly as they are.

It’s strange because you still care about them but the caring feels different. You care for who they actually are instead of who you pretended they were. The actual version is smaller, less generous, or more self-interested. Caring about that version requires different things than caring about the version you invented.

You can’t tell them what you see because they don’t know you have stopped pretending. They think everything is the same between you. They are still the person in your head except they are not. They are the actual person and the actual person is someone you need to decide whether to keep in your life.

The clarity doesn’t go away. You can’t unknow what you know now. You can pretend for their sake or yours but the pretending is work now because you have seen through it. The relationship has to become something different because the foundation of it was false and now you know the foundation was false.

Other people probably saw this already. They know who this person is and they might be surprised it took you this long to see it, or they just accept who they are and moved on to caring about them anyway. Either way you are catching up to a reality that was always there.

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