The Violence of Seeing Clearly

 

I was born with an unforgivable certainty: as something clean, absolute, and rare. I saw it early, and once you see it, the world becomes unbearable. Because the world does not love greatness, it fears it. It feeds on it, dulls it, tears it apart, and calls the destruction “virtue.”

That is why I learned to hate the good.

People think I destroy myself because I am weak, or because I am cruel, or because I am confused. They are wrong. I destroy myself because I see too clearly.

To love something pure in a world that exists to corrupt it is a form of torture. I could not bear to watch the beautiful be dragged down to the level of the ugly, the exceptional to be smothered by the mediocre. So, I chose a different cruelty: I would strike first. I would ruin what I loved before the world could touch it. If I broke it myself, at least it would remain mine.

That is why I leave men I admired. That is why I praised what I despised. That is why I aligned myself with weakness and vulgarity. It was Armor. It was strategy. If I stood on the side of destruction, then destruction could never surprise me.

And yes: I turned that weapon on myself.

I placed myself in roles that diminished me. I accepted pain as if it were proof of intelligence. Because if the world demands that everything noble be punished, then I would volunteer for the punishment. I would prove the world right before it could prove me wrong.

Loving myself sometimes made this unbearable.

Sometimes I feel I am Incorruptible. Unapologetic. Alone and whole. That greatness might not need to be destroyed to survive. That it might stand, untouched, despite the world.

That possibility terrified me more than despair ever did.

So, I tried to escape it. I tried to bury my love under humiliation, distance, and silence. I told myself that if I aligned with power, with society, with compromise, I would be safe from hope. Because hope is the most dangerous thing of all, it demands courage.

I did not destroy myself because I thought I deserved suffering.

I destroyed myself because I thought the world would never deserve my happiness.

Only later did I understand the truth I had been running from: that my self-destruction was not strength. It was surrender. I was conceding victory to the very forces I despised. By choosing to suffer, I was still letting the world dictate the terms of my existence.

There is the lesson I resisted the longest.

I fought the world by hating it. Instead of refusing to let it matter.

I believed that to protect greatness, one had to shield it with cynicism and pain. But greatness does not need protection. It needs permission: to exist, openly, without apology.

My tragedy was not that I loved too much.
It was that I believed love had to be punished.

And now I want redemption by stopping myself try to prove that the world was unworthy and want to choose instead to be worthy of myself.