Untwisted


Dear Eugene,

"No one can do to us what we are not already doing to ourselves."  Do you believe this?

I am not sure.

First I am not sure if I invented this line; I Googled it and couldn't find anything.  Then I am not sure if I actually believe it.  It is too general a claim for it to not be presumptuous.

The statement came up in a conversation with a friend and since then I tried to test its truthfulness.  What answers for only me answers no one at all; so I tried to read it between the lines of other people's stories.

Well, I am still not sure.

I've made an assumption, that there is an irreducible humanity behind every human face, however distorted the face might once, sometimes, or even frequently be, for whatever reason, inflicted from within or imposed from without.  It is another way to say one can kill the body but not the spirit.  It also supposes the past matters in our future eternal.  It ultimately speaks about hope, that everyone is an open book and at best only a co-author of even one's own life.  We don't know why but we can sense a big, hunky-dory twist ending is lurking around the final bend, one that would untwist all distortions and show us who we really are.  Apocalypse.

Then we'll be given our true name.  We will no longer be known by, say, the name of the disease that doctor diagnosed us with and people sympathized us for all life long, and with these, the many discounts and discredits on our humanity we have to endlessly acknowledge and live accordingly.  I am not a list of symptoms and conditions that people of similar background and life stage would usually be identified with.  No one can impose "professional" opinion on my life and eradicate me of my living unprofessionally.  My pride doesn't make me, my shame doesn't break me, yet all of me matters because the One who speaks me into existence says so.

The Name-giver naming us, holding our gaze in love everlasting, that is about the only thing that can be done to us.  That's about the only thing I know for sure.

Yours, Alex

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