It is hard to tell what is the source of my blue days. I had a great last couple of days, but did not sleep very well. My space is fairly clean, though not perfect. I have surgery coming up in a week, bills coming up for next month, and a busy few days ahead. I guess it does make sense that I did not want to get out of bed today. I need to learn how to overcome these days though, they are getting more and more common.

I have been tracking my food for the last couple of weeks to try to find out why I am struggling to lose weight and to better understand my habits. I see now that I may not have the healthiest habits and maybe making some changes in my diet would help too. However, that seems like a lot of work and could mean a more expensive grocery bill. If anyone has ideas on cheap, easy, tasty meals I could try to incorporate, please let me know.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

101 and 102 were simply filled with family time and lots of laughs.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Well, this is crazy.

I worked out in the morning and then became a productivity machine around my house. I cleaned and organized like I haven’t done in a while. I think I needed to keep busy…

My family got together and the boys slept over so I really didn’t have time to overthink much of anything.

100 days without working and I continue to feel grateful, optimistic and patient. Yes, some days are easier than others, but I would not have been able to spend so much time with my sick dog, showing up for family, doing incredible pottery projects, or getting my health back on track without this time off. Frustration and anxiety are at an all time high, while I continue to focus on things I can control. Finances are tight and I still don’t know how much longer it will be, but I continue to be true to myself. I sure hope something comes through soon so I can unpause my life and continue to plan for the future, but I will carry on as I have been.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Inbetweeners 23- Lurian

So to the players, Lurian was initially nothing more than a mission objective, another box to check off while they were in The Torment. They knew he had a lover, Elythos, who desperately wanted him rescued and that he'd been trapped in the Torment for a long time. They also knew that the forces of the High Heavens were unable or unwilling to free him. Beyond that they didn't really ask any questions. During the actual quest, they learned that he was intrepid, and despite decades of captivity and torture, was ready to take on the Warden and destroy the Torment. However, there was, of course, much more to the story.

Lurian's capture and subsequent imprisonment was in fact engineered by the authorities in the High Heavens. Of course, they couldn't be seen to be involved directly themselves, so they outsourced it to third parties. Made sure a superiorly powerful force of fiends would ambush Lurian at just the right time while he was on a crusade in the Lower Planes, and when reinforcements were simply not available. I never filled in the specifics of how this played out, but the angels wanted Lurian off the board and saw to it that happened. The reasons why are... complex. While Celestia is ostensibly the plane of ultimate goodness, the truth is it strayed from that mission long ago. There were still many in the heavens aligned with this, Bahamut and many of the angels included, but most of the authority in Celestia and similiar planes were closely allied with Mechanus and prioritized order and control over goodness. Lurian was no saint either, though he'd have you believe he was.

I envisioned Lurian to be a little bit of an egomaniac who believed his own self-aggrandizing mythology. He believed that the angels had not done enough to help mortals, and that more heroic acts were necessary. While he would say he did this for ultimate goodness, the truth was he did it to boost his own brand. He was in love with the idea of being idolized by the masses. Every demon or devil slain was an opportunity to boost his reputation. And he did just that. Acting as an iconoclast, he violated the laws of the heavens to directly interfere in mortal affairs, make war on the lower planes, and boost his cred and prestige in the process. He also began developing his own cult of personality with in the Celestia. Other angels, like his lover Elythos, fell for his charm and began to follow him. Sensing the potential for an uprising, the powers that be recognized this problem should be dealt with before it metastasized into rebellion. Having him tried for crimes was certainly a possibility, Lurian had broken several of the laws of heaven... there were many. However, such a trial would give him a platform, and with his charisma he could win over many converts. Killing their own kind in cold blood was also out of the question, that would make him a martyr. So they opted for the Torment option. Lurian had not become established enough yet where his allies would dare go into the Torment to rescue him, lest they end up imprisoned there themselves. So, he was mourned but gradually forgotten by all except Elythos.

Elythos is interesting because he in many ways is the opposite of Lurian. He has a very small ego, lacks confidence and avoids conflict. He looked to Lurian to provide for him and protect him, and this fed into Lurian's ego and self-perception as a guardian/shepard, so they became co-dependent fairly quickly. Without Lurian, Elythos felt lost, unmoored. His protector was gone. He believed in Lurian, fully and completely and trusted in what was right. He became so desperate that he promised his soul to Zariel in return for helping get Lurian back. Deep down inside though, Elythos knew that if he could get Lurian out Lurian would find a way to save his soul, fix the deal. Lurian was really good with those things.

So anyway, fast forward to right after the Torment. Lurian has met these peculiar adventurers who managed to do the impossible and break him out. After fighting side by side with them and seeing them perform an actual miracle, allowing them to defeat the Four and the Sibriex Warden, he is more than grateful... he is curious. Where did they get these powers? How is it that the hobgoblin was able to create an exact copy of himself? What were these spells and items the likes of which he had never seen before in his countless conquests across the centuries? Most importantly, how were they able to create portals into and out of the Torment? They referred to their patron, the one who they captured the Jailer's body for. To most, the Jailer is a horror beyond comprehension, one to be utterly destroyed. These adventurers treated it more like... a specimen to turn in for a finders fee. So to say that Lurian wanted to meet the Interloper was an understatement.

First though, he was to be reunited with Elythos. Their reunion was short-lived as burning chains appeared around Elythos and Xivora took her true form, seizing Elythos and taking him to Zariel to fulfil the contract. (Side note, the players collectively shrugged at the big reveal that Xivora was in fact an Erinyes... I guess with all the horrors they had been subjected to they were pretty numb at this point. Devils just didn't rate anymore.) Lurian new Elythos was foolish, but the fact that he had gotten himself in this deep with Zariel was beyond the pale. Lurian knew this was about getting to him, as much as Elythos had his virtues, he wasn't of much use on the battlefield. Lurian on the other hand... Zariel knew him by reputation. He immediately considered the options. Serve Zariel, fight in the Blood War and save Elythos. Alternatively, find allies and kill or damage Zariel enough to force her to get Elythos. Maybe get leverage on her somehow. But no, Lurian instead observed the players, saw their interactions with Zariel, with the Shadow of Torm, with the Interloper, and with the Beeple Queen and he hatched a new plan.

It all started when the players were psychically connecting with the Queen. They were trying to decide what to do about Zariel. She was an evil devil lord, commander of the top layer of hell, Avernus and one of the most fiercesome warlords in the lower planes. As good guys, they should probably try to eliminate her. But the players had realized things are not always as they seem, and those purporting to be on the side of good frequently weren't and vice versa. Ultimately, Domilia decides in communing with the Queen that Zariel and the Shadow of Torm were cut from the same cloth. Morally both were equally grey, so she would try to redeem Zariel, bring her back to the light which she had fallen from. Lurian, spying in on their psychic connection, essentially forces his way in, offering his “help” but in doing so taking control of the conversation between the players and the queen. This was Lurian's style, find an opportunity where he is needed and leverage it to make him the centerpiece. He then told the players he would help them redeem Zariel but remained cryptic about how. He went off and sought a private audience with the Interloper. For a second time, instead of dissecting what was brought to him, the Interloper and Lurian communed. When he left, his angelic wings had taken on a fractal, four dimensional power. He went directly to the source of what gave the players their power and borrowed some for himself. The Interloper was delighted to play, to see what would happen with Lurian in his employ. From there, Lurian disappeared into the lower planes.

So let's take a moment to keep score. Mere hours after being released from captivity and endless Torment, Lurian did the following:

1) Convinced his saviors to go on a suicide mission with him to defeat an ancient evil eons old, older than the Blood War itself, and in doing so bring down the Torment, the most notorious prison in the multiverse. They were successful.

2)Make a psychic connection with the Beeple Queen without the players consent or awareness, making an alliance with her and promise to future guard her hive. He already has plans to have Elythos live there once he frees Elythos, it is a safe place and the tranquility and boundless positivity are much more Elythos' speed.

3)Make a deal with the Interloper, and in doing so leverage powers that only the players and Zariel had done before.

4)Come up with a way to get leverage over Zariel, such that he will be able to negotiate with her as equals.

5)Find a path to coopt the Shadow of Torm, to make it his own. And more than that, to reunite it with the Temple of Torm and many other religions.

4 + 5 I'll get into in the next post, and exactly how he pulls it off. My point being, Lurian is an escalationist, an accelerant. That is why his compatriots imprisoned him. Now that the players have set him free, he will catalyze change on a cosmic scale. There are multiple times throughout the campaign after this point that the players kind of remark to themselves... What have we done?

There is an atheistic view that flourishes in the world that simmers down to the idea of something like this: “because there is pain there is no God,” or “God wouldn’t let such terrible things happen, therefore there must not be one…” I think this festers in the idea that negative thoughts, experiences, and feelings are only bad, or not worth having and to be avoided at all costs. Or in other words there is no benefit or anything worthwhile if it is something that most (or at least I) consider negative. But maybe the negative physical and emotional feelings we have are also created by God and very much worth experiencing. Part of the grand adventure of life that God has gifted all of us.

We have a young cow under a year old that has a sprained leg, it may even be broken. It’s swollen at the knee and she is struggling. But she walked almost a mile on three of her legs, hobbling onward. We motivated her with some sweet grains to get her to a barn. It was inspiring, and she didn’t really seem to complain one bit. She did wear down from time to time and we’d leave her for a long rest and only did two sessions a day. In our view she was struggling and this had some negative associations to it all. I felt for her. In her view she was using her strength to get to some yummy grain, and maybe it wasn’t very negative at all.

My youngest daughter has been ill lately. She was hungry, tired, weak, and nauseous. She started eating again today and is progressing quickly to full recovery. During her sickness her mother and I would check on her pretty often and felt nervous. Her body was rejecting food and most liquid, she would vomit anything up quickly after trying. In my short sighted view it is a somewhat dreadful situation. But after a couple days she’s recovering quickly. She didn’t seem very worried through it all, just tired and hungry. It seems to me people overreact to other people’s sickness, trials, and pain. The person having the experience is often less concerned than the people around them. Of course there are exceptions to this, but I’ve seen it a bit through life.

Anytime people, animals, or even plants have pain often people react in a sort of repulsive way. As if nothing good can come of it and we have to end that pain. And in a way I believe that is mildly correct. But only if that pain is caused by people, something that we can stop.

An example would be war, or imprisoning people that are non-violent offenders. The war in Ukraine in my view is end-able. Just stop funding it, Ukraine cannot continue very long without outside help. A group of people that were originally part of Russia but then instantly became part of Ukraine when Soviet Russia fell recently voted to rejoin Russia. Well, why not just let them rejoin Russia and end that war in Ukraine? NATO and the USA were breaking agreements before the war broke out, Russia is not the only guilty player in all of this – in fact Russia seems the most justified and level headed through all of this so far. The war in Iran was not started by Iran, they had Israel and the USA blowing them up, well maybe they should stop? These are man made pains and violent actions that aren’t natural – they could end by choices made.

Perhaps those are too controversial of examples. Here’s another one: Maybe the people in prisons all over because they use substances that their country calls illegal should be let go so they can go back home and end the suffering caused by prison life. The USA has a farm-bill that has gone under attack which will re-criminalize THC delta-8 and more that is derived from hemp. This will turn many people into criminals overnight. Why not just, stop doing silly things like this? Let people have their gummy-bears and not be criminals. Another non-violent offense the world over is political activism. People in prison for speaking against their governmental systems – they should be let out of prison and left alone by their government. All of this is human created pain and violence against non-violent offenders. These things should come to an end.

People like to create pain, conflict, and strife – and do such a thing while pretending they are doing the will of God or at least the will of their government (god). What if the will of God is nothing like this and has nothing to do with that kind of suffering? What if the will of God is more like a smooth river rolling through the landscape that humanity put all their efforts to choke out? When left to flow freely sometimes it is rough on a rock and smooths it out or even kills something. But those are not man-made conflicts, they are natural conflicts which do cause pain but not fictional strain. What I see is that God has given us the ways of Heaven through scriptures, and people continually reject that way and follow the ways of man. Rejecting the Laws of God and trying to fix those ways by creating their own man made laws and kingdoms. Far less misery would be had if people would follow God’s Law over man’s. If you don’t know what those Laws are I suggest reading the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-7. The Ten Commandments are also a good starting ground.

My knees have been hurting this year. It’s been interesting and I’ve even put in some effort to have it stop. But it doesn’t lessen my belief in God. I’m fine enough with pain, it teaches me things even if I’d rather it go away. Pain is a good teacher and it isn’t drastically different than joy. Our range of feelings and emotions is pretty limited, just like our visual reception. We see and experience only a tiny blip of this reality – we all have heavy blinders on with our receptive capabilities through this physical body. The joys in life are lessened by the lack of pain. With pain I more fully realize and understand happiness and joy. If my daughter never had sickness would I really fully understand and appreciate her health? If my knee never hurt would I appreciate being able to do labors as much? I’ve been taking borax to increase my borate intake, it’s a cheap source that I had on hand. I read about how societies low in borate have higher rates of arthritis and joint pain and many people have cured themselves with borax. So I tried it out, I’m taking ¼ tsp one or two times a day and it’s helping. I’ve decreased my joint pain dramatically and my knees are doing much better. Not 100% recovery but over 50% so far. Would I even learn about this if I didn’t have pain? Seems reasonable to try and diminish some pain if we can. But pain and misery existing seems a silly reason to completely reject the idea that there may be a Creator who loves us. Maybe pain is a gift and one of the reasons we are here, one of the many experiences we can have while in this temporary flesh.

Good things come from negativity. Negativity can blossom into beautiful things. Why not embrace the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything that weaves between and outside of it all? Not to the point of causing pain intentionally, but accept it and learn from it when it comes our way.

Personally I have overall come to deeper understandings through times of pain than I have through times of joy. I believe my God is much wiser than me. If we were only to receive pleasure and joy we would be shallow and weak. If you are rejecting God because there is misery and pain, it might be time to have a second look. Relationship with the Divine is a slow process that takes patience and effort. Play with faith, act as if there is a God and you can communicate with God. As I’ve done this I’ve come to slowly know my Creator, and it’s awesome – I now have no doubt. I don’t think I’m special, I think everyone can do this. But I do not think it happens often to those who choose to disbelieve and think it an impossibility.

Picture an ordinary Tuesday on an ordinary platform. A train is late, commuters thumb their phones, a busker tunes a guitar against a tiled wall. Somewhere in that crowd a man in sunglasses glances your way for slightly longer than feels polite, and then looks away. You think nothing of it, because there is nothing to think. You have not been photographed in any sense you would recognise. No flash, no shutter, no phone raised to frame your face. And yet, in the half-second of that glance, a camera tucked into the hinge of his glasses has captured your face, a model running on the companion app on his phone has reduced the geometry of your features to a string of numbers, and that string has been compared against a store of other such strings held on the device. If you were a match, your name would have surfaced in his field of view. If you were not, the system would simply have filed the measurement away and moved on to the next face in the crowd. You would never know either way. That is the entire point.

This is not a thought experiment. In June 2026, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly embedded a face-recognition system called NameTag into the companion app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, an app that has by now been installed on more than fifty million phones. According to the reporting, the system was dormant but complete: capable of identifying any person captured by the glasses' camera, converting a face into a unique biometric signature, and matching it against profiles stored locally, all without any notification to the person being identified. Andy Stone, Meta's vice-president of communications, told WIRED that the feature was “purely exploratory” and that the company had reached “no final decision” about it — this of a system whose components had been shipped across a series of routine app updates beginning in January. On 5 June, a day after publication, after an outcry led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the company stripped the code from the app, and the EFF declared a partial victory. The relief was real. It was also beside the point. Because removal answers a narrow question — is the feature live right now? — while leaving the larger one exactly where it was: when a company can build ambient surveillance of strangers into a mass-market consumer object and distribute it to millions of people before anyone outside the building knows it exists, what does an ordinary person walking down the street actually have to protect them?

The Shape of the Thing That Was Built

Begin with the mechanism, because the mechanism is the argument in miniature. On the reporting, NameTag ran three AI models in sequence. The first swept each frame for faces. The second cropped and aligned whatever it found. The third converted that cropped face into a faceprint — a vector of 2,048 numbers describing the geometry of one particular human head — and compared it against a store of faceprints held on the device. The string of numbers is not a figure of speech. It is the literal artefact: a person reduced to two thousand and forty-eight measurements in the time it takes a stranger to look up and look away. And the system did not confine itself to the faces it already knew. A face it could not match was cropped, indexed and stored locally regardless, kept for future processing, which means the machine was not merely answering the question of whether it recognised someone. It was accumulating strangers against the day it might.

It helps to be precise about what NameTag is and is not, because the precision is where the alarm lives. This is not a data breach, the familiar modern catastrophe in which a company that meant to keep your information safe fails to, and your records spill out through a hole someone forgot to close. It is not a hack, in which an outside party defeats a system designed to keep them out. A breach and a hack are failures of intention; somebody wanted to protect you and could not. NameTag is the opposite. It is a capability that works precisely as designed, and the design is to identify people who have not asked to be identified, who do not know they are being identified, and who have no means of objecting because they are unaware there is anything to object to. The harm is not the malfunction. The harm is the function.

Nor is it surveillance in the sense we have spent two decades learning to dread. The mental model most of us carry is of a watcher with a motive: a government tracking dissidents, a corporation harvesting behaviour to sell us things, a platform building a profile to keep us scrolling. Those are concentrated powers, and concentrated power can at least in principle be named, regulated, sued, voted against. What the glasses describe is something stranger and more diffuse. The watcher is not a state or a firm. The watcher is whoever happens to be standing near you wearing a particular pair of sunglasses — a stranger on a train, a man at the next table, someone who passed you on the escalator and whom you will never see again. The infrastructure of identification has been miniaturised, commodified, and handed out at retail. Surveillance has been democratised in the bleakest possible meaning of the word: not made accountable to the many, but made available to anyone.

That diffusion is the genuinely new thing. We have had powerful face-recognition systems for years, and we have had reasons to fear them. But those systems lived in places — in police control rooms, in airport queues, in the data centres of a company called Clearview AI that scraped the open web for faces and sold the results to law enforcement. They were terrible, but they were located. You could at least say where the danger was. NameTag proposes to dissolve that location entirely, to take the faceprint and seed it into the ambient environment, into the everyday optics of people who are simply going about their day with a camera on their face and a model in their pocket. The question stops being “is the government watching me” and becomes “is anyone, and how would I ever know.” There is no control room to point at. There is only the crowd.

How the Glasses Got On Your Face

None of this fell from the sky. The smart glasses at the centre of the story are the product of a partnership between Meta and EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley among a great many other brands and dominates the global market for spectacles. The collaboration began with the underwhelming Ray-Ban Stories in 2021 and matured, in October 2023, into the Ray-Ban Meta line, which paired a discreet camera, open-ear speakers, and an on-board AI assistant into a frame almost indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses. The Oakley Meta range followed, aimed at athletes and the outdoors. And then the things began to sell. EssilorLuxottica reported that around two million units had moved between launch and early 2025, and that sales more than tripled across 2025 alone, with something on the order of seven million glasses sold in that year and roughly nine million in total since the line began. Revenue from the AI glasses then nearly doubled again year on year across the first half of 2026. A new model, the Ray-Ban Display, arrived at $799 with a screen set into one lens, operated by hand gestures and a neural wristband that reads the electrical signals in the wearer's forearm; its international launch, promised for early 2026, was pushed back because demand in the United States was, in Meta's word, “unprecedented”. The two companies now speak of production capacity running to twenty million units or more by the end of 2026, and of exceeding thirty million if the demand holds.

The hardware numbers matter, but the number that should command attention is a different one. The companion app — the software that pairs with the glasses, manages their settings, and, crucially, runs the AI that interprets what the camera sees — has been installed more than fifty million times. That gap between glasses sold and apps installed tells its own story about the way these systems propagate: the camera is the visible artefact, the thing you might notice on someone's face, but the intelligence lives in software that can be updated silently and at scale, pushed to tens of millions of devices in the ordinary churn of a Tuesday-morning patch. A feature does not need to be announced to arrive. It does not need a launch event, a keynote, a press release. It can simply appear, fully formed and waiting, inside an update labelled “bug fixes and performance improvements.” That is, on the reporting, more or less how NameTag arrived: not in one dramatic release but in pieces, distributed across several updates from January onward, each component innocuous on its own, the whole only legible once someone troubled to assemble it.

The design language of the glasses compounds the problem. The entire commercial proposition is that they look normal. Ray-Ban and Oakley are not obscure gadget brands; they are the default eyewear of beaches and high streets, and the smart versions are deliberately hard to tell apart from the dumb ones. There is a small capture light meant to indicate when recording is under way, a concession wrung from earlier privacy criticism, but it is easy to miss in daylight, easy to obscure, and in any case indicates recording rather than identification. A bystander who happened to notice the light would learn that a video was being taken, not that their face was being measured and matched. The very features that make the glasses a successful consumer product — their ordinariness, their ubiquity, their disappearance into the visual furniture of everyday life — are precisely the features that make them an effective instrument of covert identification. You cannot opt out of a surveillance device you cannot distinguish from a pair of sunglasses.

The Two Consents, and Why Only One Exists

There is a serious argument for the convenience of all this, and it deserves to be put at its strongest rather than waved away. A person who is bad with names meets a colleague at a conference and is spared the small humiliation of forgetting. A man with early dementia walks into a family gathering and the glasses gently remind him who his grandchildren are. A blind user, who cannot read a face at all, is told that the person approaching is a friend. These are not trivial goods. The promise of ambient computing has always been that the machine recedes into the background and quietly smooths the friction of ordinary life, and recognition is, on its face, exactly that kind of smoothing. Meta and its defenders can point, with some justice, to genuine accessibility cases and to the simple human pleasure of not being the person who blanks on a name. If the technology only ever did those things, for people who wanted it, the objection would be hard to sustain.

But the argument contains a fatal slippage, and the slippage is the word “consent.” There are two consents at stake here, and only one of them can ever be given. The wearer consents. He buys the glasses, installs the app, agrees to the terms, and decides to switch the feature on. Whatever happens to him — the data he generates, the analytics he feeds, the profile he builds of himself — he has, in some meaningful if imperfect sense, signed up for. The accessibility cases all live on this side of the line. The blind user, the man with dementia, the bad-with-names colleague: each of them is consenting to a tool that operates on their own experience. That is consent the wearer can give, and it is real.

The bystander cannot give it. This is the structural fact the convenience argument cannot survive, and it is worth stating plainly because so much of the public conversation slides past it. When the man in sunglasses identifies you on the platform, you are not a user of the system. You are its raw material. You did not buy the glasses, did not install the app, did not read the terms, did not toggle anything on or off. You were merely present, in public, with a face, and that was sufficient. There is no screen on which you might have tapped “I agree,” because the entire transaction is built to require nothing of you and to tell you nothing. Every framework we have for managing the privacy harms of the last twenty years — terms of service, cookie banners, privacy settings, the whole apparatus of notice-and-consent — assumes a relationship between a person and a service that person has chosen to use. The bystander has no such relationship. The bystander has been conscripted into a system to which they are not a party, and from which there is, by design, no exit. You cannot withdraw a consent you were never asked to give.

A Company That Has Paid This Bill Before

If there is a reason to doubt that good intentions will hold the line, it is that Meta has stood exactly here before, and the standing was expensive. In 2008, Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act, known universally as BIPA, the strictest law of its kind in the United States. Its core demands are simple and onerous: a company that collects a person's biometric identifiers — a faceprint, a fingerprint, a voiceprint — must obtain that person's informed written consent first, must publish a retention and destruction schedule, and must not profit from the data. What gives BIPA its teeth is a feature most American privacy laws conspicuously lack: a private right of action with statutory damages. An ordinary Illinoisan does not have to wait for a regulator to act, or prove they suffered measurable financial loss. They can sue on their own behalf, and the statute, rather than the plaintiff's bank statement, sets the sum: a thousand dollars for a negligent violation, five thousand for a reckless or intentional one. That structural choice — a wrong made actionable by the person wronged, at a price the legislature fixes in advance — is the reason BIPA matters far beyond Illinois.

It matters somewhat less than it did, and the reason is instructive. For years the open question under the Act was whether that sum attached to every scan or only to the first, and in 2023 the Illinois Supreme Court answered it in Cothron v. White Castle System: a claim accrued each time a biometric identifier was collected. The multiplier was the whole of the deterrent. A company that fingerprinted the same worker twice a day for five years faced a figure with a great many zeros in it, which is precisely why the figure concentrated minds. Within eighteen months the legislature had taken it away. Senate Bill 2979, signed by Governor J. B. Pritzker and effective from 2 August 2024, provides that repeated collection of the same identifier from the same person by the same method amounts to a single violation, recoverable once — the first amendment to BIPA in sixteen years, and an amendment in one direction only. In April 2026 the Seventh Circuit held, in Clay v. Union Pacific Railroad, that the change was remedial rather than substantive and therefore applied backwards, to every case already pending when it passed. The private right of action survives, and it remains the most effective biometric-privacy mechanism in American law. But the part of it that made a large company stop and calculate has been filed down, and filed down retrospectively, by the same legislature that sharpened it. That is worth holding on to, because it describes a gravitational pull the rest of this story obeys: remedies that genuinely deter do not stay sharp on their own.

Facebook learned what it costs. The company's old Tag Suggestions feature, switched on by default from 2011, scanned every uploaded photo and built faceprints of the people in them without the written consent BIPA required. The resulting class action, In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, settled for $650 million, approved by Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California in early 2021 — at the time the largest all-cash privacy settlement in history, covering roughly 1.6 million Illinois users. Then Texas, which has its own biometric statute, the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, or CUBI, dating to 2009, brought the first enforcement action ever filed under it. In July 2024, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Meta would pay $1.4 billion to resolve allegations that it had captured the facial geometry of Texans, again through Tag Suggestions, without consent — the largest settlement ever obtained by a single state from a single company. Two billion dollars, in round terms, for the same underlying behaviour: collecting faceprints from people who never agreed to it.

And yet the deepest lesson of those settlements may be the wrong one to take comfort in. The EFF, in its commentary on the Texas case, made an observation that should haunt anyone inclined to treat the figures as deterrence: the violation went on for years, and would have been stopped far sooner had ordinary Texans been able to sue the way Illinoisans can. The settlements, enormous as they are, arrived after the harm was complete, as a cost levied at the end rather than a barrier raised at the start. For a company of Meta's scale, a billion-dollar payout some years after the fact is not a wall. It is a line item — a calculable, plannable expense to be weighed against the value of the data and the advantage of moving first. When penalties function as the price of a strategy rather than a prohibition on it, they cease to deter and start to license. The history does not reassure. It tells us that Meta has done this before, knew exactly what it was doing when it did, and paid the bill as a cost of doing business. NameTag is not a departure from that pattern. It is its continuation, in a more intimate medium.

Nor has the pattern closed. On 4 September 2026, lawyers at Wexler Boley & Elgersma filed a proposed class action in the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of Francisco Alvarez, an Illinois resident, and his minor child, of Jeremy Wahl of California and his minor daughter, and of a class they estimate in the millions. The complaint alleges that Meta harvested facial images from Facebook and Instagram without notice and used them to train and test NameTag, to generate the faceprints it would match against, and to build image-generation models including Emu and Muse Image. The counts are brought under BIPA's requirement to publish a retention and destruction schedule and its requirement of informed written consent before collection, alongside claims under California privacy law. Meta says the suit is “without merit and misrepresents our work”, that it has been transparent about using information to develop AI products, that it is not building a universal database of faces, and that NameTag was never released to consumers. The allegation that should arrest anyone reading it, though, is not about users at all. The images are said to have come from users and non-users alike — from people who never opened an account, never clicked through any terms, never entered into any relationship with the company, and whose faces happened to appear in somebody else's photograph. That is the second consent, the one that cannot be given, going missing a second time and much earlier: the bystander conscripted not at the moment of identification but years before it, to supply the raw material for the system that will one day decline to ask them. And the claim arrives in Illinois, under the one statute that lets an ordinary person bring it, in the jurisdiction whose remedy for bringing it has just been cut to a single recovery.

What the Harvard Students Already Showed

It would be a mistake to imagine that any of this required Meta's blessing, and the clearest proof came not from a corporation but from two undergraduates. In the autumn of 2024, the Harvard students Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen built a system they called I-XRAY using nothing more than a commercially available pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses and software they wrote themselves. The glasses streamed video; their program scanned that stream for faces, ran them through a public face-search engine, and then chained the results to other public databases to pull up names, addresses, occupations, relatives, and in some cases fragments of social security numbers — all in something close to real time. In their demonstration they identified strangers on public transit and produced, within seconds, a dossier the stranger had no idea was being assembled.

The students were explicit that the point was not the glasses in particular. As Nguyen put it, the same thing could have been done with a phone camera; the project was a demonstration of what was already possible, built to raise alarm rather than to provide a tool. And that is exactly why it matters to the NameTag story. It establishes that the capability has been sitting in the open, reachable by two motivated undergraduates with off-the-shelf hardware, for years. The hard part was never the optics or the on-device cleverness. The hard part — the part that requires the scale, the distribution, the fifty million installed apps, and the willingness to absorb the legal consequences — is putting that capability into the hands of millions of ordinary people as a default, frictionless, supported feature of a product they already own. That is the line a company crosses that a pair of students cannot. I-XRAY proved the technology was loose. NameTag proposed to make it ambient.

The same lineage runs through Clearview AI, the firm that scraped something on the order of tens of billions of images from the open internet — Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere a face could be found — to build a search engine for faces that it sold to police departments and others. Clearview has been fined repeatedly under European data-protection law, including a €30.5 million penalty from the Dutch regulator, and in the United States it settled with the American Civil Liberties Union under BIPA in 2022, agreeing to a nationwide injunction limiting which private entities could use its database. Clearview showed that the back end — the vast index of faces against which any new face can be matched — already exists and can be built from public material. The glasses supply the missing front end: the eyes, distributed across millions of faces in the street. Put the two halves together, on-device or in the cloud, and you have a complete machine for identifying strangers, assembled from parts that are each, individually, already real and already deployed.

The Patchwork and the Hole at Its Centre

Confronted with all this, an American walking down the street might reasonably ask what law protects them. The honest answer is: it depends entirely on which street, and mostly the answer is none. The United States has no federal baseline privacy law, no national statute that says, simply, that your biometric identity belongs to you and may not be taken without your agreement. What exists instead is a patchwork, and the patches are thin. Illinois has BIPA, with its private right of action, and that is why the largest reckonings have happened there. Texas has CUBI, enforceable only by its attorney general, which is why its billion-dollar settlement required the state to act on its citizens' behalf. Washington has a biometric statute; a handful of comprehensive state privacy laws passed since 2023 gesture at biometric data as a sensitive category. But the overwhelming majority of Americans live in states where no specific biometric law applies to them at all, where a stranger identifying them in public breaks no statute they could name.

There is motion, of a kind. At least ten state legislatures took up bills mentioning smart glasses during 2026, though most were aimed at keeping the devices out of schools. Two reached further: Louisiana's House Bill 410, which would oblige anyone recording an in-person conversation to say so or face a suit for damages, and California's Senate Bill 1130, which would make it a crime to record a person with a wearable device in a place of business where privacy is reasonably expected, and would bar the sale of wearables lacking a clear recording indicator. At federal level, Representative Zoe Lofgren has reintroduced the Online Privacy Act, a comprehensive bill running to individual rights, corporate duties, security, breach notification, enforcement and a standalone Digital Privacy Agency to administer the lot. Senators have written letters, to Meta in March and to the executive branch in May. None of this is yet a law that protects the man on the platform. A bill introduced is not a bill passed, three previous versions of the Online Privacy Act were introduced and none of them advanced, and a statute that keeps glasses out of classrooms does nothing whatever for the stranger standing behind you in a queue. The patchwork is being stitched at its edges while the hole in the middle stays precisely the size it was.

Which is why the most revealing response of the year came not from a legislature but from institutions that had stopped waiting for one. In July 2026 the New York State Unified Court System barred eyewear and headwear containing a camera, microphone or recording technology from more than twelve hundred court facilities. In August, His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service extended an equivalent prohibition across every criminal, civil and family court in England and Wales, instructing security staff to confiscate the devices on entry and return them on exit. The service explained itself briefly: “There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited.” Notice what the courts did not do. Smartphones remain admitted, on the condition that they are not used to record — a rule about conduct, enforceable because the conduct can be seen. No such rule could be written for the glasses, because the glasses record while merely being worn, and the whole of their design is devoted to making that state indistinguishable from the other one. A conduct-based rule requires an observable act, and here there is none. So the only instrument left was physical exclusion: confiscation at the threshold, the last resort of an institution with no law to invoke. That is what a legal vacuum looks like in practice, and it is worth noticing who gets to use it. A court can take the glasses off a man at its door. A woman on a railway platform cannot.

The contrast with Europe is instructive, and not entirely reassuring in the direction one might expect. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, biometric data processed for the purpose of uniquely identifying a person is “special category” data under Article 9, subject to a default prohibition that can be lifted only by narrow conditions, chief among them explicit consent — the very consent the bystander cannot give. The penalties run to the higher of €20 million or four per cent of global annual turnover, which for a company of Meta's size is a figure with real heft. The EU AI Act goes further still, and its architecture is the one that most directly answers the NameTag problem: it treats remote biometric identification as a category of special danger, banning the real-time variety in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement save for tightly drawn exceptions, and placing heavy constraints on the rest. Those prohibitions have been in force since February 2025. Europe, in other words, has at least begun to legislate against the specific shape of the harm: the identification of people, at a distance, in public, without their knowledge.

Yet even Europe's framework was built with the wrong threat model in mind. The AI Act's most stringent rules contemplate the state as the principal actor — the police force running real-time recognition over a crowd, the public authority building a watch-list. That is a reasonable historical fear, but it is not quite the NameTag fear. NameTag is not the state. It is a private individual, a consumer, a man in sunglasses, operating a device he bought at retail, processing the faces of strangers for his own private ends. The law's careful exceptions for law enforcement, its calibration around public authorities, do not map cleanly onto a world in which the surveillant is your fellow passenger. The frameworks we have, even the good ones, are aimed slightly to one side of where the danger has actually moved. They were built to constrain the watcher in the control room. The watcher has left the control room and is now standing next to you on the platform.

The state, meanwhile, has not obligingly stayed behind in the control room while the danger moved on. In its budget request for the 2027 fiscal year, the Department of Homeland Security proposed developing smart glasses for its immigration officers — eyewear that would allow an officer to photograph a person in the street, covertly, and run the image through biometric identification without breaking stride. In May 2026, Senators Markey, Merkley and Padilla led colleagues in demanding that the department abandon the proposal. What this shows is not that the point about threat models was wrong but that it was understated. The two models are not succeeding one another, the private watcher quietly replacing the public one. They are converging on the same hardware. The state is reaching for the identical miniaturised consumer form factor, which means the rules built for the control room — rules that presume a system, a premises, a procurement, an identifiable deployment capable of being authorised and audited — do not cleanly bind the state either, once its officers are simply people in the street wearing sunglasses. The device collapses the distinction on which the law was built. Whatever else a pair of glasses on a face may be, it is not a control room, and a framework that regulates control rooms will keep missing, whoever happens to be wearing them.

What Proportionate Would Actually Mean

So what would a response proportionate to the scale of the thing being built actually require? Begin by naming what it cannot be, because the NameTag episode has already shown us the shape of the inadequate answer. It cannot be the after-the-fact settlement, the billion dollars paid years later once the data is collected and the precedent is set. We have run that experiment twice, at $650 million and $1.4 billion, and the only lesson Meta appears to have drawn is how to price it. A penalty that arrives after the capability has been built, shipped, and switched on is not a constraint on the behaviour; it is a tax on it, and a company with sufficient revenue treats a tax as a permission slip. Proportionality has to mean intervention before deployment, not compensation after.

That points toward a cluster of measures, each of which trades cleanly against a specific failure the episode exposed. The first is ex-ante product gating: a requirement that a consumer device capable of biometric identification of non-consenting third parties cannot be brought to market, or have such a capability shipped to it, without prior regulatory clearance — the way a new aircraft or a new drug must be cleared before it flies or is sold, rather than recalled after it crashes. The dormant-code manoeuvre, in which the components arrive piecemeal in routine updates and lie waiting to be activated, is precisely the move that ex-ante gating exists to forbid. The second, and bluntest, is a flat prohibition on covert biometric identification of strangers in consumer devices — a line that says some capabilities are not products at all, that the identification of non-consenting bystanders is simply not a feature a sunglasses company may ship, regardless of clearance, regardless of consent flows the wearer might click through. Many democracies already accept that certain instruments cannot be sold to the public no matter the demand for them. The case that ambient face-recognition of strangers belongs in that category is not exotic.

The third measure addresses the consent asymmetry directly: statutory bystander rights, a recognition in law that the person identified — not merely the person doing the identifying — has standing and an interest, and that processing their faceprint without their agreement is a wrong done to them specifically. And the fourth is the mechanism that makes the rest enforceable rather than aspirational: a private right of action with statutory damages, on the BIPA model. This is the single most important lesson the whole history teaches. The reason Illinois has produced the largest reckonings is not that Illinoisans are more private by temperament; it is that they can sue, individually, without proving financial loss, for a sum the legislature has fixed in advance. That structure converts a diffuse, hard-to-quantify harm — the silent taking of your face — into a concrete liability a company must price in before it acts rather than after it is caught. Illinois has since trimmed that mechanism, capping recovery at one violation per person however many times the face was scanned, and the Seventh Circuit has applied the cap backwards to suits already filed. It would be easy to read the narrowing as a reason to abandon the model. It is better read as instruction in how the model must be built. The structural achievement is the standing, not the multiplier: an ordinary person, with no lawyer on retainer and no financial loss to document, who can nonetheless make a company answer for what was done to their face. Nothing else in American privacy law gives them that. But the Illinois experience shows what happens once the numbers grow large enough to be felt: the remedy that bites comes under sustained and well-funded pressure to stop biting, and it was amended within eighteen months of acquiring real force, in a form that reached backwards into cases already under way. A federal right of action worth having would have to be drafted in the expectation of that pressure rather than in innocence of it, with damages scaled to the scope of a collection rather than to one moment of it, and a floor beneath which the sum cannot later be filed away. A federal baseline privacy law carrying that mechanism would do more to deter the next NameTag than any number of nine-figure settlements arriving years too late. The EFF, in declaring its partial victory, said as much: removal is not a change of heart, and good will is not a regulatory regime.

Why Removal Is Not an Answer

It is worth steelmanning the reassurance one more time, because it is sincere and it is not nothing. Meta stripped the code. The feature is not live. A company watched the public react, listened, and pulled back; the system worked, in the sense that exposure produced retreat. Those who take comfort in this are not foolish. The press did its job, civil society did its job, and a powerful firm changed course in days rather than years. If you believe in the corrective power of sunlight, the NameTag episode is a small vindication of it.

And yet the structure of the relief is exactly what should disturb us. Notice the sequence. The capability was conceived, built, and distributed to fifty million devices before anyone outside Meta knew it existed. The public's only opportunity to object arrived after the system was already sitting, complete, in tens of millions of pockets — and arrived not because Meta disclosed anything but because a journalist found it. The removal we are asked to celebrate was an act of grace, granted by the company that built the thing, on a timetable the company controlled, in response to an exposure the company did not choose. Nothing in that sequence is a right held by the bystander. At every step, the person whose face was at stake was a spectator to a negotiation between Meta and its critics, with no seat at the table and no lever to pull. The code can be re-added as quietly as it was removed; Meta has pointedly declined to say it will not return. A protection that exists only at the discretion of the entity it is meant to protect you from is not a protection. It is a reprieve.

And there is no longer much need to speculate about whether it will return. Two months after the code came out of the app, the intention surfaced in the patent record. United States patent application 2026/0238876 A1, “Smart Cameras Enabled by Assistant Systems”, was filed on 4 February 2026 and published on 13 August, the latest continuation in a chain of filings reaching back to 2019. It describes an assistant that combines the glasses' cameras with facial recognition, expression analysis, gaze tracking and object recognition: software that identifies the people in the wearer's line of sight, generates video clips automatically according to who is present, reads faces and gestures through what the document calls semantic scene understanding, and — this is the part to sit with — ranks the people around the wearer by how interesting they are, drawing on stored data about the wearer's social relationships to perform the sorting. The crowd on the platform, scored and ordered. Meta was prosecuting that application through the same months in which it was describing NameTag to WIRED as purely exploratory, a matter on which no final decision had been reached. Both things can be true in the narrow sense that an application is not a product and a patent is not a shipping date. But companies do not spend years and lawyers pursuing claims over a direction they have abandoned. Stripping the code retired a feature. It did not retire the capability, and the capability is now a matter of public record, in the company's own filing.

This is the deepest reason removal does not answer the structural question. The question was never “is NameTag running today.” The question is whether an ordinary person has any standing, any right, any enforceable claim over what is done with their face by a stranger in the street — and the answer that the episode actually delivers is no. What stopped NameTag was not a law the bystander could invoke but a public-relations calculation the bystander could only hope would break their way. Change the calculation — a quieter rollout, a more distracted news cycle, a feature framed as accessibility rather than identification, a competitor shipping first — and the same capability lands and stays. The thing that saved the strangers on the platform this time was luck wearing the costume of accountability.

The Face You Cannot Take Off

There is a reason faces occupy a special place in the law and in our intuitions, and it is worth ending there. You can change a password that leaks. You can cancel a card, freeze an account, move house, choose a new phone number. The whole machinery of modern data protection rests, quietly, on the assumption that identifiers are in some sense revocable — that if the link between you and a piece of information is compromised, the link can be broken and remade. Your face breaks that assumption. It is not a credential you can rotate. It is the one identifier you carry, exposed, into every public space, every single day, with no means of withdrawing it short of a mask. When your faceprint enters a system without your consent, there is no reset. The harm does not expire when the breach is patched. It persists for as long as you have a face, which is to say for the rest of your life.

That permanence is what raises ambient biometric identification of strangers to its own category of harm — distinct from the breach, distinct from the hack, distinct even from the older surveillance we learned to fear. It is not the loss of something you can replace. It is the quiet appropriation of something you cannot. And it is inflicted not by an adversary you could name and confront but by the ordinary ambient condition of being in public near someone wearing a camera and carrying a model. The man in sunglasses on the platform may have meant you no harm at all. He may simply have been bad with names. The system does not care about his intentions, and neither, finally, should the law. What matters is that the capability existed, that it was built deliberately and shipped to millions, and that the only thing standing between you and it, on that ordinary Tuesday, was the hope that someone, somewhere, would find the code in time. We can do better than hope. But only if we decide that a face is not a feature, and that the stranger's right to know your name ends precisely where your right not to be known begins.

References and Sources

1. Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14 (Illinois, 2008).
2. Senate Bill 2979 (Illinois, 2024), amending 740 ILCS 14/20 to limit an aggrieved person to a single recovery for repeated collection of the same biometric identifier by the same method. Signed by Governor J. B. Pritzker; effective 2 August 2024.
3. Cothron v. White Castle System, Inc., Supreme Court of Illinois (February 2023), holding that a BIPA claim accrues on each collection or transmission of a biometric identifier.
4. Clay v. Union Pacific Railroad Company, No. 25-2185, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1 April 2026), holding the 2024 BIPA damages amendment retroactive to pending cases.
5. Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, Texas Business and Commerce Code, Chapter 503 (Texas, 2009).
6. In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, No. 15-cv-03747, United States District Court for the Northern District of California (final approval, James Donato J., February 2021).
7. Office of the Attorney General of Texas (2024) “Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures $1.4 Billion Settlement with Meta Over Its Unauthorized Capture of Personal Biometric Data.” Press release, 30 July 2024.
8. Electronic Frontier Foundation (2024) “Texas Wins $1.4 Billion Biometric Settlement Against Meta. It Would Have Happened Sooner With Consumer Enforcement.” Deeplinks blog, July 2024.
9. Alvarez et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-10773, United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (class action complaint filed 4 September 2026; Wexler Boley & Elgersma LLP).
10. WIRED (2026) “Meta's Hidden NameTag: Inside the Face-Recognition System Quietly Shipped to Smart Glasses.” Investigation, June 2026.
11. Electronic Frontier Foundation (2026) “VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry.” Deeplinks blog, June 2026.
12. United States Patent Application Publication 2026/0238876 A1, “Smart Cameras Enabled by Assistant Systems.” Meta Platforms, Inc. Filed 4 February 2026; published 13 August 2026.
13. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), Article 9, “Processing of special categories of personal data.”
14. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 5, “Prohibited AI practices” (real-time and post remote biometric identification provisions; in force from 2 February 2025).
15. American Civil Liberties Union (2022) “In Big Win, Settlement Ensures Clearview AI Complies With Groundbreaking Illinois Biometric Privacy Law.” Press release, May 2022.
16. Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens / Dutch Data Protection Authority (2024) Decision fining Clearview AI €30.5 million for unlawful biometric database.
17. Markey, E. J., Wyden, R., and Merkley, J. (2026) Letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on facial recognition in smart glasses. Office of U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey, 17 March 2026.
18. Markey, E. J., Merkley, J., Padilla, A. et al. (2026) Letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security opposing the development of biometric smart glasses for immigration officers. Office of U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey, May 2026.
19. Online Privacy Act of 2026, H.R. 8014, 119th Congress (introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, 19 March 2026).
20. Senate Bill 1130 (California, 2026), Wearable Device Privacy Protection Act; and House Bill 410 (Louisiana, 2026), on notice requirements for in-person recording.
21. New York State Unified Court System (2026) Memorandum prohibiting smart glasses and other recording eyewear in Unified Court System facilities, effective 20 July 2026.
22. HM Courts & Tribunals Service (2026) Prohibition on Meta smart glasses in criminal, civil and family courts in England and Wales, August 2026.
23. Ardayfio, C. and Nguyen, A. (2024) “I-XRAY” demonstration of real-time facial identification using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Harvard University student project, documented in contemporaneous reporting, October 2024.
24. EssilorLuxottica / CNBC (2026) “Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica says it more than tripled Meta AI glasses sales in 2025.” Reporting on Meta–EssilorLuxottica smart-glasses sales figures, February 2026.
25. EssilorLuxottica (2026) First-half 2026 results and accompanying commentary on AI glasses revenue growth, Ray-Ban Display availability and production capacity, July 2026.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Sentence You Keep Editing Before You Say It

There are conversations where you can feel yourself editing every sentence before it leaves your mouth. You know what you want to say, but you keep softening it, shortening it, or changing the words because you are not sure how the other person will react. Maybe you are sitting in your car after work with the engine off, staring at a message you have typed and erased three times. Maybe you are standing at the kitchen counter while someone you love asks what is wrong, and you say, “Nothing,” because the real answer feels too complicated. That quiet pressure is part of why the YouTube conversation about what it means to be truly heard matters so much. Being heard is not simply having someone nearby while words come out. It is having enough room to stop performing and finally say the sentence you have been protecting.

I have been thinking about how often people carry entire conversations inside themselves because they do not believe there is a safe place to put them. We can be surrounded by people and still feel that way. We can have family, coworkers, neighbors, church friends, and hundreds of names in our phone and still hesitate when the thing we need to say is real. That is why this deeper reflection on friendship, listening, and making room for one another belongs in the larger conversation about Christian encouragement. Sometimes the person who helps us most is not the person with the strongest advice. It is the person who makes enough room for us to become honest before God and honest with ourselves.

That room can be surprisingly rare. We are used to fast conversations. Someone asks how we are, and we know the acceptable answer before they finish the question. We say we are good, busy, tired, hanging in there, or doing fine. Most of the time that is enough because not every hallway, office, checkout line, or church lobby needs to become a deep conversation. But the habit can follow us home. We get so used to giving the short answer that eventually we are not sure whether anyone wants the long one. Worse, we may not be sure we know how to give it anymore.

A man can spend the entire day solving problems at work and then sit in his driveway for ten minutes because he does not want to carry the pressure through the front door. A woman can answer everyone else’s questions, keep appointments straight, manage the children’s schedules, remember what groceries are missing, and still have no idea how to explain why she feels worn down. A teenager can laugh with friends all afternoon and then lie awake wondering whether anybody actually knows what he is afraid of. None of these people necessarily needs a dramatic rescue. They may need a person who can stay present long enough for the polished answer to run out.

That is where friendship becomes more than companionship. It becomes a place where truth can breathe.

Jesus did this with people in ways that still challenge me. He did not treat every person as a problem to process quickly. He stopped. He asked questions. He let people answer. In the Gospels, some of the most powerful encounters begin with Jesus giving attention to a person others were ready to move past. Bartimaeus was shouting beside the road while people told him to be quiet. Jesus stopped. A woman reached through a crowd after years of suffering, and Jesus did not simply keep walking after she was healed. He turned toward her. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples were walking with disappointment and confusion, and the risen Jesus asked them what they were discussing. He already knew more than they did, yet He let them speak.

That matters because Jesus never needed information from people in the way we do. He was not asking because He was uninformed. The questions created room. They gave a person dignity inside the encounter. The blind man could name what he wanted. The grieving and confused disciples could say, “We had hoped.” The person in front of Jesus was not reduced to a category.

We cannot listen with His perfect knowledge or love, but we can learn from His willingness to stop.

That may sound simple until you try it in ordinary life. Someone says, “Work has been rough,” and before they finish, we start telling them about our own week. Someone says, “I am worried about my daughter,” and we immediately offer a solution. Someone says, “I do not know what I believe right now,” and fear makes us rush to correct them before we understand what they mean. We may genuinely care. We may even have useful wisdom. But good advice given too early can still communicate, “Please become easier for me to understand.”

Sometimes people need to finish the story before they can hear anything else.

Imagine two friends meeting at a small diner before work. One of them has been unusually quiet for weeks. He keeps saying he is tired. Finally, while stirring coffee he has barely touched, he says, “I think I made a mistake taking this job.” His friend could answer immediately. The salary is good. The benefits are strong. The market is uncertain. Do not make an emotional decision. All of those thoughts may eventually deserve attention.

Instead he asks, “What makes you think that?”

The man talks for twenty minutes. He explains that the problem is not the workload alone. He feels like he has become somebody he does not recognize. He is short with his family. He spends Sunday thinking about Monday. He wakes at three in the morning calculating how long he can keep going. The job is not simply difficult. It is occupying his inner life.

Now the conversation is different. Advice given before those twenty minutes would have been advice about a salary. The real conversation is about what the work is doing to a human being.

This is one reason being heard can feel so powerful. We often do not completely understand our own experience until we hear ourselves say it in front of someone who is paying attention. Thoughts that felt tangled inside begin taking shape in words. The friend may not reveal a solution. Their presence may simply help us hear what we have been trying not to hear.

There is humility in listening this way because it means I am willing to believe that your experience may not fit my first interpretation. I may think I know why you are upset. I may be wrong. I may believe you need encouragement when what you need is permission to admit you are disappointed. I may think you need to try harder when you actually need rest. I may assume you want to leave when you really want one part of the situation to change. If I care about you, I should be curious enough to let your answer replace my assumption.

That curiosity is not interrogation. A friend should not have to answer twenty questions before they are allowed to be quiet. There is a difference between asking to understand and asking because silence makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes the kindest question is one question followed by enough quiet for an honest answer.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Then wait.

We are not very good at waiting anymore. A few seconds of silence can feel like a problem. We reach for the phone, fill the gap, make a joke, or ask another question. Yet the sentence someone most needs to say may be on the other side of ten quiet seconds.

A woman learns this while sitting with her brother at the kitchen table after their father has been admitted to the hospital. She knows he is worried, but every time she asks, he says he is fine. She stops pressing. They drink coffee. Several minutes pass while he looks at the table. Finally he says, “I am afraid this is the last time Dad is going to come home.”

There it is.

Not a medical question. Not a request for optimism. Fear.

His sister could immediately say, “Do not think like that.” She might be trying to protect him. She might be trying to protect herself. Instead she says, “I am afraid of that too.”

For a moment, neither has to be the strong one.

That is making room.

Christian encouragement sometimes becomes too eager to move people toward the hopeful sentence. Hope matters. I believe deeply in hope because I believe in Jesus. But Christian hope is not threatened by an honest description of fear, disappointment, exhaustion, or grief. Jesus did not require people to clean up their emotions before approaching Him. The Psalms certainly do not hide distress. Faith is not pretending the dark room is bright. Faith is learning that Jesus can enter the dark room without becoming darkness Himself.

A friend who understands this does not rush to put spiritual language over every wound. They may pray. They may quote Scripture. They may remind you of what is true. But timing matters. A verse can become deeply comforting when offered with love, and the same verse can feel like a door being closed when used to end a conversation too quickly.

Suppose a woman says, “I have prayed about this for two years, and I am tired.” If the first response is, “You just need to trust God,” she may hear something that was never intended: Your exhaustion is a spiritual defect. Perhaps she does need to keep trusting God. All of us do. But maybe the faithful response begins by acknowledging the cost of two years of waiting.

“I can understand why you are tired.”

That sentence does not oppose faith. It makes room for faith to become honest.

Jesus never taught that trust requires emotional dishonesty. In Gethsemane, He spoke openly about sorrow. He asked His disciples to remain near. He prayed with complete submission to the Father and complete honesty about what lay ahead. There was no contradiction between truthfulness and faithfulness.

We need friendships where that same distinction is understood. You should be able to say, “I trust God, and I am still scared.” You should be able to say, “I believe Jesus is with me, and this still hurts.” You should be able to say, “I know what Scripture teaches, and I am struggling to live it today.” These are not necessarily statements of unbelief. Sometimes they are the beginning of a more truthful faith.

A friend can help by refusing to panic when our words are unfinished.

This becomes particularly important for people who are usually the encouragers. If everybody knows you as the positive person, the dependable person, or the person of faith, you may feel strange admitting that you are tired. You have spent so much time helping others stand that sitting down feels like failure.

A man who leads a team at work experiences this after months of pressure. Everyone comes to him for answers. He is calm in meetings. He solves problems quickly. At home, he keeps the same posture because his family is already dealing with enough. One Saturday he meets a longtime friend to help replace a broken fence panel. Halfway through, he puts the drill down and says, “I do not think I can keep pretending I know what I am doing.”

His friend does not laugh. He does not say, “Of course you do.”

He asks, “At work?”

The man shakes his head.

“Anywhere.”

That answer changes the afternoon. The fence still needs repair, but for twenty minutes the tools stay on the ground. The man explains that every part of life feels as if somebody is waiting for him to make the next decision. He is tired of being the person everyone looks at.

His friend eventually says, “Then you do not have to be that person with me today.”

Nothing has been solved. The man will still return to work Monday. The fence will still need finishing. Yet one role has loosened for an afternoon.

That matters.

Some of us have been performing competence so long that we have forgotten what friendship feels like without it. We think we are loved because we are useful. We make people laugh, solve problems, answer calls, organize plans, give advice, pay the bill, remember everything, or keep everyone encouraged. Those gifts can be beautiful. They become heavy when we start believing the friendship would collapse without them.

A listening friend gives us evidence against that fear.

They are still there when we do not have a solution.

They are still there when the story is messy.

They are still there when we say, “I do not know.”

Over time, that kind of presence can teach us that being known is different from being evaluated.

Most of life trains us to expect evaluation. Work evaluates performance. School evaluates answers. Social media quietly evaluates attention. Even ordinary groups can create invisible expectations about whether we are interesting, successful, funny, attractive, useful, or easy to be around.

Friendship can become one of the few places where we are not constantly auditioning.

That does not mean friendship has no standards. Healthy friends expect honesty, respect, reciprocity, and basic care. They should. But there is a difference between being accountable inside a relationship and feeling as though you must earn your right to remain there every time you enter the room.

You can feel the difference in your body.

Around some people, you rehearse.

Around others, you exhale.

That exhale is not always because the person agrees with you. In fact, some of the safest friends may disagree with you often. Safety is not identical to approval. Safety means you trust that disagreement will not be used to humiliate, discard, or punish you. You can hear, “I do not think you handled that well,” from someone who has already shown that your dignity is not up for debate.

That is why listening and truth belong together.

If I only listen in order to approve everything, I am not really honoring you. I am treating comfort as more important than growth. But if I only listen for the moment I can correct you, I am not honoring you either. I am waiting for my turn to become the authority.

Jesus held grace and truth without tearing them apart. Friendship shaped by Him should keep learning the same balance.

There will be conversations where the loving response is, “I understand.”

There will be conversations where it is, “I love you, but I think you are wrong.”

Sometimes both belong in the same conversation.

A friend may say, “I understand why you are angry. I also do not think sending that message tonight is wise.”

That is not rejection. It is care with enough strength to resist being controlled by the emotion of the moment.

Another friend may say, “I understand why you want to quit. Before you decide, can we talk about what happens next?”

Again, the person is being heard without every impulse being endorsed.

The deeper gift is not agreement. It is room for the whole truth.

That room also changes the person doing the listening. If you listen closely to enough people, simplistic judgments become harder to maintain. You begin seeing how much history can sit behind one decision. You learn that the person who seems distant may be exhausted. The person who talks too much may be lonely. The person who appears angry may be afraid. The person who keeps helping may not know how to receive. The person who says, “I do not care,” may care so much that disappointment has become unbearable.

We should be cautious about turning these possibilities into diagnoses. We do not know people completely. The point is not to invent hidden explanations. The point is to remember there may be more than the first thing we see.

Listening keeps us humble.

One evening, a father is irritated because his adult son keeps canceling plans. The father tells a friend, “He is selfish now. Ever since he got that new job, everything is about him.”

The friend could agree. Instead he asks, “Have you asked him what the job has been like?”

The father has not.

A few days later, he does. His son admits he is overwhelmed, working late, and embarrassed that he cannot manage everything. The cancellations still matter. The son needs to communicate better. But the story is different from selfishness.

One question saved the father from building a larger accusation out of incomplete information.

This is what friends can do for one another. Not provide excuses for every bad behavior, but slow us down before certainty becomes cruelty.

The same patience can be directed inward. Sometimes we need a friend because our own interpretation of ourselves has become cruel. We say, “I am failing at everything,” and a friend asks what everything means. Usually it means three things went badly in the same week. We say, “Nobody cares,” and a friend reminds us who called yesterday. We say, “I have wasted my life,” and someone who has known us for twenty years refuses to let one disappointed season swallow the entire story.

This is not empty positivity. It is perspective.

A woman in her early fifties tells a friend that she feels behind. Her children are grown, her marriage has been through difficult years, and work feels less meaningful than it once did. She scrolls through photographs of people traveling, starting businesses, celebrating milestones, and wonders whether she missed some invisible turn.

Her friend does not tell her she has everything to be grateful for. Gratitude is valuable, but it can become dismissive when used too quickly.

Instead she asks, “Behind what?”

The woman begins to answer, then stops.

Behind whom?

Toward what destination?

Whose schedule?

For the first time she realizes the word behind has been controlling her without a clear definition.

The conversation does not hand her a new life. It gives her a better question.

Good listening often does that. It does not always give answers. Sometimes it removes a false question so the real one can finally appear.

Maybe that is why certain conversations stay with us for years. We do not remember every word. We remember that somebody helped us tell the truth.

They did not rescue us.

They did not become Jesus.

They did not solve what only time, action, grace, or God could solve.

They simply made enough room for the hidden sentence.

And once it was spoken, we were no longer carrying it entirely alone.

Chapter 2: The Weight Behind “I’m Fine”

The message arrives while you are standing in the grocery store deciding whether you can justify buying the more expensive coffee. It is from a friend who knows you well enough to notice when your replies become shorter. “You have seemed off all week. Do you want to talk?” Your first instinct is not relief. It is resistance. You look at the screen and think about how much is already happening in your friend’s life. Their work has been difficult. Their mother has appointments. Their own family needs them. You type, “I am okay. Just tired.” Then you stand there with the phone in your hand, knowing the message is technically true and emotionally incomplete.

Many of us are better at carrying other people than allowing other people to carry us. We know how to show up with food, encouragement, advice, a ride, a prayer, or a late-night phone call. Receiving the same care can feel strangely uncomfortable. We worry about becoming too much. We do not want to sound needy or add our problem to somebody else’s already crowded life. So we begin shrinking the truth before we share it. We tell the short version, remove the part that sounds too sad, or make a joke before the other person can worry. We say we are tired when what we really mean is that we are scared, lonely, discouraged, angry, or not sure how much longer we can keep pretending we are fine.

This can become a habit so deep that we start believing silence is maturity. We tell ourselves we are protecting people, and sometimes we are. There are moments when timing matters and another person genuinely does not have the capacity for a heavy conversation. But sometimes what we call consideration is fear. We are afraid that if someone sees the full weight of what we are carrying, they may pull away. We would rather be quietly overwhelmed than risk discovering that our need is inconvenient. That fear can make a person lonely even inside a loving relationship.

A woman may spend years being the one everyone calls because she is calm. Her sister calls about marriage problems. Her coworker calls after a bad meeting. Her adult child calls when money is tight. She listens because she cares, but she also becomes known as the person who can handle things. One night, after everyone else has gone to bed, she sits at the kitchen table with a stack of unopened mail and feels tears come without warning. Nothing in the room is dramatic. There is a utility bill, a doctor’s appointment card, a school fundraiser flyer, and a half-empty glass of water. She picks up her phone, scrolls through several names, and puts it back down. She knows people, but that is not the same as believing she is allowed to need them.

Jesus repeatedly welcomed need without treating it as an inconvenience. People interrupted meals, travel, teaching, and crowded moments. They brought children. They called from roadsides. They pushed through crowds. They lowered a man through a roof because the room was too full to enter normally. The Gospels do not present human need as tidy or scheduled. Need often arrives at the wrong time. That does not mean every request must be answered immediately by every person. Jesus was not teaching us to become permanently available to everyone. He withdrew, rested, prayed, and moved on from places even when people wanted Him to stay. But His boundaries never suggested that people were shameful for having needs. That distinction matters.

A healthy friend can say, “I cannot talk tonight, but I can call tomorrow,” without making you regret asking. They can admit, “I do not know how to help with that,” without making your problem sound foolish. They may even say, “I think this is bigger than what I can carry with you alone,” and encourage you toward additional support without communicating that you are being pushed away. This is what makes honest friendship sustainable. Care is real, but nobody has to pretend they are limitless.

The person in the grocery store finally types another message. “Actually, I am not doing that great. Do you have time tomorrow?” The reply comes a few minutes later. “Yes. Lunch?” That exchange is small, but something important has happened. One person has told the truth without demanding immediate rescue. The other has made room without pretending they have infinite capacity. Both people remain human. This is the kind of friendship many of us want but struggle to build because it requires two difficult skills at once: asking and answering honestly.

Asking honestly means we stop disguising requests as vague hints. Instead of saying, “I guess everyone is busy,” we can ask, “Could you talk for a few minutes this week?” Rather than becoming resentful because nobody noticed our exhaustion, we can admit, “I need some help.” If a difficult date is coming, we might tell a friend, “Tomorrow is going to be hard for me. Would you check in?” That can feel less romantic than being spontaneously understood. We all enjoy being noticed without asking. There is something beautiful about a friend who remembers. But relationships become stronger when care does not depend entirely on mind reading.

A man spends several weeks irritated with his closest friend because the friend has not asked about an upcoming medical test. The test has been on the man’s mind constantly. He assumes anyone who cared would remember. Finally, during a phone call, he says, “I am nervous about Thursday.” His friend pauses and asks what is happening Thursday. The man feels hurt immediately, then realizes he never actually told him the date. He had mentioned the test generally weeks earlier, but the details lived much more vividly in his own mind than in anyone else’s. “Sorry,” the friend says. “I did not realize it was this week. Do you want me to call that morning?” The answer is yes, and Thursday morning the call comes. The care is real even though the reminder had to be given.

We can lose good relationships by demanding evidence of love in forms the other person does not know they are supposed to provide. We create secret exams and then become wounded when people fail them. The birthday message had to arrive before nine. They should have noticed the tone in our text. They should have asked a second time after we said we were fine. They should know we hate being alone on certain evenings. They should know we want company even though we declined the invitation. Sometimes people do know, notice, and surprise us beautifully. Sometimes they do not. Being heard becomes easier when we give people a real sentence to hear.

This does not mean every person deserves full access to our vulnerability. Wisdom matters. Some people have shown that they do not handle private things carefully. Some immediately make the conversation about themselves, use personal information later during conflict, minimize what matters, or gossip. Trust should be given according to character, not according to how badly we need someone in the moment. Jesus taught His followers to be wise as well as innocent. Christian openness is not carelessness. You can be loving without telling everyone everything. The goal is not complete exposure. It is honest connection with people who have earned enough trust to receive what is real.

That trust is usually built slowly. A person tells you something small, and you handle it well. Later they share something slightly more vulnerable, and you do not mock it. They say no to an invitation, and you do not punish them. They disagree, and you do not threaten the relationship. They have a bad day, and you do not use it to define their character. Over time, the relationship teaches them whether honesty is safe. We all teach people how safe honesty is around us, and much of that lesson comes through our reactions.

When a friend says, “I am struggling financially,” do we let them decide how much detail to share, or do we immediately become invasive? If someone admits, “My marriage is hard right now,” do we listen carefully, or begin criticizing their spouse in ways that may make a temporary conflict harder? A friend might confess, “I am angry with God,” and our first impulse may be to panic and lecture instead of staying present while they work through the sentence. If someone says, “I made a mistake,” we can become fascinated by the details or help them think honestly about responsibility and repair. The first response matters because people remember what happened the last time they told us something real.

A young man tells an older friend that he feels lost in his career. He expects advice. Instead the older man says, “I remember feeling that way at your age.” Then he makes a mistake that many caring people make. He spends the next twenty minutes telling his own story. The story is not useless. Some of it may even be helpful. But the younger man leaves knowing much more about the older man’s career than the older man knows about his. Relating is one way we communicate empathy, and “that happened to me too” can make someone feel less alone. The problem comes when our story takes over the room.

A better rhythm might be, “I went through something similar, so I understand some of that uncertainty. What part is hardest for you right now?” Now the personal connection serves the listener instead of replacing them. This takes practice because many of us were never taught how to listen. We were taught how to answer. School rewards answers. Work rewards solutions. Leadership often requires decisions. Online conversation rewards fast reactions. Then we bring the same habits into friendship and wonder why someone says, “I do not need you to fix it.”

Fixing can feel safer than listening because fixing gives us a role. If I can solve your problem, I know what to do with my hands. If I cannot solve it, I have to sit beside your uncertainty, and that can feel helpless. A father learns this when his adult daughter calls after a painful breakup. He immediately begins pointing out every reason the relationship was wrong. He reminds her of concerns he had from the beginning and tells her she will find someone better. Everything he says may be sincere, but she becomes quieter. Finally she says, “Dad, I know it was not right. I am still sad.”

He stops. That one sentence teaches him what she needed. She did not need the relationship defended or the breakup reversed. She needed her sadness to be allowed to exist without being argued away. “I know,” he says. “I am sorry.” Now she starts talking again. Listening often requires us to resist the urge to improve the emotion immediately. Sadness does not always need a motivational speech. Fear does not always need someone to insist there is nothing to fear. Anger does not always need correction in the first minute. Sometimes an emotion needs to be named before it can be examined.

This is especially true in prayer. We may bring the same editing habit into our relationship with God that we use with people. We try to pray correctly instead of honestly. We think we should sound faithful, grateful, patient, and calm. Those are good qualities, but God already knows what is underneath the polished sentence. Anger, fear, disappointment, and confusion are not hidden from Him. Honest prayer does not surprise God. It brings us into truthful relationship with Him.

The Psalms show people asking how long suffering will continue, describing fear, crying out for help, remembering God’s faithfulness, and returning again to trust. Scripture does not hide the movement. Faith is allowed to have a process. A friend can sometimes help us reach that honesty by refusing to force the final spiritual sentence too soon. They may sit with us long enough that we can finally pray what is actually true: “I am scared. Help me. I do not know what to do. Give me wisdom. Please stay near.” These prayers are not impressive. They are real.

There are also times when being heard means allowing someone to say what they need from us instead of deciding for them. A friend might ask, “Can I tell you something without getting advice?” That request should not offend us. Another may tell us directly that they do want our opinion. Someone may ask us to pray, while another person may say they cannot pray about the issue out loud yet. Respecting those differences can prevent a great deal of frustration. One simple question can help: “Do you want me to listen, help you think through it, or help you do something about it?” Real conversations may move between all three, but the question communicates something important. I do not assume my preferred way of caring is automatically what you need.

A woman learns this with her friend who is caring for an aging parent. Every time the caregiver complains about paperwork, appointments, and repeated phone calls, the woman starts researching solutions. She sends links, names, and suggestions. Eventually the caregiver says, “Please stop sending me things.” Her friend is embarrassed because she thought she was helping. “I know,” the caregiver says. “I already spend all day solving problems. Sometimes I need to complain for ten minutes and then talk about something else.” That is useful information.

The next time they meet, the caregiver talks about an exhausting appointment. Her friend listens. After a few minutes, she asks whether help thinking through it would be useful. The answer is no. So she changes the subject and asks about the neighbor’s ridiculous yard statue. The caregiver laughs. The friendship has become lighter because the listener learned not to make every difficulty into a project. There is love in that restraint.

There is also love in acting when action is truly needed. Listening should never become an excuse to remain passive when someone is in danger or clearly asking for help. If a person tells you they are being harmed, unsafe, or considering hurting themselves, care may require immediate action and additional support. If a friend is trapped in a situation beyond what ordinary companionship can address, encouraging professional, pastoral, medical, legal, or emergency help can be part of taking them seriously. Being heard does not mean a friend must carry everything alone. In fact, one of the most loving things a friend can say is, “I am staying with you, and we need more help than I can provide by myself.” That is not abandonment. It is humility.

The same humility should shape the person asking for support. Your friend may love you deeply and still not know what to say. They may not have experience with what you are facing. They may respond awkwardly because good people can be clumsy. We should distinguish between imperfect care and careless care. A friend who says the wrong thing, realizes it, apologizes, and tries again may still be a very safe friend. A person who repeatedly dismisses, mocks, exposes, or weaponizes what you share is different. One mistake should not automatically erase years of faithfulness, but a pattern should not be ignored simply because the person has known you a long time. Discernment protects honest friendship from both cynicism and denial.

The lunch between the two friends from the grocery-store message finally happens the next day. They meet at a sandwich shop near work. The friend who asked to talk does not begin with a dramatic confession. He talks about sleep first, then work, then the argument he had with his wife, and finally the feeling that he has been disappointing everyone. His friend listens and eventually says, “You keep talking like everybody has given you a performance review.” The man looks up. His friend points out that he has described his boss, wife, children, and even this friendship as though everyone has formally decided he is failing. Then he asks, “Has everybody actually told you that?”

The man thinks. His boss has not. His wife is frustrated about one issue, not their entire marriage. His children have barely said anything. His friend is sitting across from him eating chips. “No,” he says. The friend nods. “Then maybe you are carrying some disappointment nobody handed you.” That does not solve everything. There are still conversations the man needs to have. There are responsibilities he may need to handle differently. But a false weight has been identified.

This is what safe friendship can do. It gives truth somewhere to land, not a perfect truth delivered from one flawless person to another, but a human truth discovered over lunch, in parked cars, on back porches, while washing dishes, or in the quiet after somebody finally asks a second question. Sometimes you are the person who makes room, and sometimes you are the person who needs it. The friendship becomes deeper when neither role becomes permanent. The dependable person gets to need something. The quiet person gets to speak. The advice giver gets to admit uncertainty. The person who usually receives help gets to offer it. Friendship breathes when care can move in both directions.

Back in the grocery store, the coffee is still in your cart. The message has been sent. Lunch is scheduled. Nothing about tomorrow has changed yet. The problem is still there, and the pressure is still real. But you are no longer telling the whole world, including yourself, that you are fine. Sometimes the first relief is not that the burden becomes smaller. It is that you stop hiding the fact that you are carrying it.

Chapter 3: When Your Honest Answer Is No

The family group message arrives while you are standing in line at the pharmacy. Someone asks who can host the gathering next weekend. Before you finish reading, another message appears with your name in it. “You always make it work.” A third person adds a laughing face and says your house is the easiest place anyway. You look at the screen and feel the familiar pull to answer yes before you have even asked yourself what the weekend already holds. The refrigerator needs groceries. Work has been heavier than usual. You promised your spouse that Saturday would finally be quiet. None of those facts feels dramatic enough to justify disappointing anyone. So you type, “Sure,” stare at the word for several seconds, and then erase it.

For some people, the hardest sentence to say in friendship is not “I need help.” It is “I cannot do that.” We can speak honestly about sadness and still struggle to speak honestly about capacity. We want to be generous. We want to be dependable. We may have spent years becoming the person others can count on. Then one day we realize that our yes has stopped meaning yes. It means I feel guilty saying no. It means I am afraid you will think differently of me. It means I would rather resent this quietly than risk disappointing you openly.

That is not the kind of honesty that makes friendship stronger.

A relationship where only one answer feels safe is not as free as it appears. If I can tell you my fears but cannot tell you I am unavailable, something important is still hidden. If I can listen to your problems but cannot say I do not have the energy tonight, then the friendship may know my compassion better than it knows my limits. Being heard includes having our limits heard too.

Jesus lived with compassion that was never careless. People wanted Him constantly. Crowds followed. Needs were everywhere. Yet the Gospels also show Him withdrawing to pray and moving on when others wanted Him to remain in one place. In Mark 1, after a night when many people came to the house where He was staying, Jesus rose very early, went to a solitary place, and prayed. Simon and the others searched for Him and said everyone was looking for Him. Jesus did not respond by returning to every expectation waiting at the door. He said they would go elsewhere so He could preach there also.

We should be careful about turning Jesus into a modern lesson about personal boundaries. His mission was unique, and His choices were not simply a strategy for protecting a comfortable schedule. Still, the scene reminds us of something basic: the presence of need did not mean every demand became the assignment. Jesus knew what He was called to do. He was compassionate without allowing every voice around Him to define His next step.

Many of us need that distinction because we confuse being needed with being called.

A coworker asks you to cover another shift. A family member wants you to solve a problem they could partly solve themselves. A friend asks for a favor during the one evening you planned to rest. A church need appears. A neighbor needs help. Each request may be legitimate. None of the people asking has to be selfish for you to be unable to say yes.

Yet the dependable person often hears every request as a moral question. If I could technically do it, should I? If I do not, am I becoming selfish? What if nobody else steps up? What if they are disappointed? The mind can turn a simple request into a courtroom.

A man learns this after agreeing to help three different people on the same Saturday. He tells himself each favor is small. By noon he is driving across town with tools in the back of his truck, irritated at everyone who asked. That irritation embarrasses him because the requests were not unreasonable. The truth is harder: he said yes to things he did not actually have room to do.

That evening his wife asks why he is angry.

“I am not angry.”

She looks at him.

He sighs. “I am tired of everybody needing something.”

She answers, “Did you tell any of them no?”

He has not.

This is one of the uncomfortable places where honesty becomes responsibility. Other people cannot respect a limit we never communicate. We may want them to notice our exhaustion without making us say it. Sometimes a loving person will. But if we repeatedly present ourselves as available, we cannot be shocked when people believe us.

Saying no does not require hostility. A healthy no can be simple. “I cannot do Saturday.” “I do not have the capacity for that this week.” “I can help for an hour, but I cannot take the whole thing.” “I am not the right person for this.” These sentences are not sermons. They do not require a defense brief.

The need to overexplain often reveals that we do not fully believe we are allowed to have a limit. We pile up evidence so the other person will issue permission. I cannot come because work was terrible, I slept badly, my car needs service, I have not seen my family, and I might be getting a cold. All of those facts may be true. But sometimes the truest sentence is still, “I cannot come.”

A friend who makes room for us can hear that sentence without turning it into a character judgment.

That does not mean they can never be disappointed. Disappointment is not cruelty. Your friend may genuinely wish you could attend. They may say, “I am sorry you cannot make it.” That is different from making you pay emotionally for the answer. “I guess I know who matters to you now” is not the same thing. Neither is “Fine, I will just do it myself” when spoken to create guilt.

We should watch our own responses too. If someone tells us no, do we make them regret being honest? Do we demand an explanation? Do we become colder? Do we keep asking until the no becomes a reluctant yes?

Friendship becomes trustworthy when no is allowed to remain no.

A woman discovers this with a friend who often asks her to attend large social events. The woman likes her friend but finds crowded evenings exhausting after a full week of work. For months she goes anyway because every refusal produces questions. “Are you upset?” “Are you sure?” “You never come anymore.” Eventually she begins avoiding the invitations entirely because answering has become harder than declining.

One afternoon she finally tells her friend the truth. “I need you to believe me when I say I am too tired. I am not rejecting you.”

Her friend is quiet.

Then she says, “I think I keep making your no about me.”

That sentence changes their relationship. The invitations continue. The pressure does not. Sometimes the woman goes. Sometimes she does not. Their friendship becomes easier because an invitation is finally allowed to be an invitation rather than a test.

This is what honest connection requires. We have to stop treating another person’s boundary as an automatic statement about our worth.

Your friend may need an evening alone. Your sibling may not want to discuss something yet. Your spouse may need time before answering. Someone may decline a trip because of money. Someone may leave early because they are tired. Someone may not be ready to forgive at the pace you prefer. These choices can affect us, but they are not always about us.

A secure relationship can ask for clarification when needed without demanding that every limit disappear.

“Are we okay?”

“Yes. I am just exhausted.”

“Okay. Rest.”

That exchange is a gift.

There is another side to this. Boundaries can become a fashionable word used to avoid responsibility. We can label every inconvenience a violation and every difficult conversation an attack. We can use “I need space” to punish someone without telling them what happened. We can call withdrawal peace when it is really avoidance.

Jesus-centered honesty should not become self-centeredness with spiritual language around it.

If you promised to help and simply changed your mind because something more interesting appeared, that is not the same as discovering a real limit. If someone depends on you because you accepted responsibility, your feelings do not erase the commitment. If you hurt someone, “I am protecting my peace” is not a substitute for accountability.

A boundary should help us live truthfully, not help us escape every cost of loving people.

This is why motives matter. The question is not only, “Do I want to do this?” Love often asks us to do things we would not choose for convenience. The question is also, “What is actually mine to carry?” There are nights when you are tired and still need to show up for your child. There are conversations you would rather avoid but owe to your spouse. There are promises that should be kept even when keeping them costs comfort.

The goal is not a life with fewer obligations. It is a life where our yes and no become honest.

That honesty makes generosity stronger. A yes freely given carries a different spirit from a yes extracted through guilt. When you choose to help because you truly can, the act is lighter. You do not spend the whole time secretly blaming the other person for asking.

A man begins practicing this with his brother, who often calls for help with home repairs. The man is skilled with tools and usually enjoys helping, but the requests have become frequent. Instead of becoming resentful, he starts answering more specifically.

“I can come Sunday after lunch for two hours.”

Sometimes his brother asks for more.

“That is all I can do this weekend.”

The first few times feel uncomfortable. Then something surprising happens. His brother adjusts. Jobs get divided differently. Sometimes he asks somebody else. Sometimes he figures it out himself. The relationship does not collapse.

The man realizes he had been carrying resentment over a rule nobody else knew existed: if my brother asks, I must say yes.

Many of our burdens are built from rules like that.

A good friend always answers immediately.

A good daughter never says no.

A good Christian never gets tired of helping.

A strong person does not need a break.

A loving person should always want company.

Where did we get these rules?

Some came from family patterns. Some came from fear. Some came from misunderstanding what Christian service means. Jesus taught sacrificial love, but sacrifice offered to God is not the same as a life controlled by every request. Love needs wisdom because without wisdom we can give away things that were not ours alone to give.

If you are married, your time affects your spouse. If you are a parent, your energy affects your children. If you have work responsibilities, staying up half the night to solve every friend’s crisis may affect people who depend on you the next day. Your body has limits whether your guilt approves of them or not.

Sometimes saying no to one person is part of saying yes to something you are already responsible for.

This can be difficult to explain to someone who only sees the request they made. They do not see the whole calendar, the mental load, the family conversation, the financial strain, or the fact that you have not had an unscheduled evening in three weeks.

You do not owe everyone the entire explanation.

The people closest to you may deserve more context, especially if your availability has changed. But even then, explanation should create understanding, not become a plea for permission to be human.

One evening, a woman tells a close friend she cannot talk on the phone. The friend knows she usually listens whenever needed.

“Everything okay?” the friend asks.

“Yes. I just do not have much left tonight.”

“Got it. Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

The next afternoon they speak for almost an hour. The friendship is not weakened because one evening contained a limit. It may actually be stronger because neither person had to pretend.

That is what we want: relationships where truth does not automatically threaten belonging.

There will still be tension sometimes. You may set a healthy boundary and someone may dislike it. This is where the deeper work begins because boundaries do not control other people’s reactions. You can say something kindly and still disappoint someone. You can make a wise decision and still be misunderstood.

If your peace depends on everyone agreeing with your limit, you may still be trapped.

A boundary is not successful because nobody feels anything about it. It is successful when it is clear, appropriate, and respectful, and when you are willing to let another adult have their feelings without surrendering the truth simply to make the discomfort stop.

That can feel brutal for a people-pleaser.

A friend says, “I am disappointed.”

Everything in you wants to change the answer.

Maybe you say, “I know. I wish I could do it too.”

Then stop.

Let disappointment exist.

You are not required to transform every disappointed person into a satisfied person before the conversation ends.

This does not give us permission to become cold. Compassion can remain. “I know this puts you in a harder spot, and I am sorry I cannot help this time.” That sentence recognizes the impact without pretending capacity exists where it does not.

Jesus could feel compassion for crowds without allowing the crowd to become the author of His mission.

We need that center.

Without it, we can spend our lives reacting. Whoever asks first gets the time. Whoever becomes most upset gets the yes. Whoever knows how to create guilt becomes the priority. Eventually our calendar may look full of kindness while our inner life becomes full of resentment.

That is not a sustainable picture of love.

A friend can help us recognize this pattern. They may notice that every time you meet, you complain about responsibilities you keep volunteering for.

One morning over coffee, you say, “I do not know why everybody expects me to do everything.”

Your friend asks, “How many of these things did you volunteer to do?”

You begin answering and then laugh because the pattern becomes obvious.

That friend has heard more than your complaint. They have heard the cycle.

A safe relationship does not only give us comfort. It can help us see where we participate in our own exhaustion.

There is hope in that because participation means some choices can change.

Not all burdens are chosen. Illness is not chosen. Grief is not chosen. Caring for a loved one may involve responsibilities we would never wish away even when they are exhausting. Economic pressure can remove options. There are seasons when no amount of boundary language creates abundant time or energy.

We should not reduce every exhausted life to poor choices.

But where choices do exist, honesty can return some agency.

Maybe you cannot change the job this month, but you can stop volunteering for one extra committee.

Maybe you cannot remove the caregiving responsibility, but you can accept help with groceries.

Maybe you cannot reduce your children’s needs, but you can stop believing every school request must receive your yes.

Maybe you cannot change the financial pressure immediately, but you can decline an expensive social plan without inventing an excuse.

Small honest choices can create breathing room.

They can also reveal which relationships are capable of respecting the real you.

A person who only likes you when you are endlessly available may not actually like the whole person. They may like access.

That does not mean every frustrated response proves a relationship is unhealthy. People have bad moments. A friend may react poorly, then think about it and apologize. Give people room to grow too.

“I was disappointed and I made you feel guilty. I am sorry.”

That apology can repair a great deal.

We all have to learn that love does not mean unlimited access.

You cannot answer every call.

You cannot attend every event.

You cannot carry every secret at every hour.

You cannot be emotionally ready for every conversation just because someone else is ready to have it.

You cannot solve every problem.

You cannot give what you do not have.

What you can do is become more truthful about what you do have.

That truth may be, “I have twenty minutes.”

It may be, “I can listen, but I do not have advice.”

It may be, “I cannot help financially.”

It may be, “I want to be there, but I cannot travel right now.”

It may be, “I need tonight to myself.”

When those sentences are spoken with love, they do not diminish friendship. They give friendship reality.

Back at the pharmacy, your number is called. You pick up the prescription and walk toward the door with the family message still unanswered. Outside, you stand beside your car and read it again. “You always make it work.”

You know why they said it.

You usually do.

You also know what this weekend needs to be.

So you type, “I cannot host this one. I need a quiet weekend at home. I hope somebody else can take it.”

Your thumb hovers over send.

The old fear is there. Someone may be disappointed. Somebody may ask why. The gathering may become less convenient. You may feel guilty for an hour even though you did nothing wrong.

Then you press send.

A few minutes later, your sister replies, “No problem. I can do it.”

That is all.

No family crisis.

No accusation.

No collapse.

You sit in the car and laugh quietly because you had prepared yourself for a battle that never happened.

Sometimes we are waiting for other people to make room for us when the first room we need is the one created by our own honest sentence.

Chapter 4: The Prayer You Do Not Have to Fix Before You Pray It

The house is finally quiet when you sit on the edge of the bed with a notebook in your lap. You had planned to pray before sleeping. You even wrote the date at the top of the page. Then nothing comes. The words you think you should say feel too polished for the night you have had, and the words you actually want to say feel too raw. You stare at the blank paper while the hallway light spills under the door. Somewhere in the house a refrigerator motor starts. You can hear a clock in another room. You know God is not waiting for eloquence, yet you still feel the old pressure to sound faithful before you speak.

This is one of the strangest habits we carry into prayer. We may finally learn to tell a trusted friend the truth and still approach Jesus as though He needs the edited version. We remove the anger, soften the disappointment, hide the fear, and turn our actual condition into language we think a good Christian should use. We say we are grateful when we are also confused. We say we trust when part of us is frightened. We say we surrender while another part is still gripping the outcome with both hands.

There is nothing wrong with gratitude, trust, or surrender. They belong deeply to Christian faith. The problem begins when we use true spiritual words to hide from another truth that is also present. A person can trust Jesus and still be tired. A person can believe Scripture and still have a question. A person can be grateful for what remains and grieve what was lost. A person can love God and still say, “I do not understand why this happened.”

Jesus does not need us to protect Him from our honesty.

That matters because the deepest version of being heard does not begin with another human being. It begins with the God who already knows us before we explain anything. The friend who listens can be a gift from Him. The conversation that helps us understand our own heart can be part of His care. But even the best friend eventually goes home. There are thoughts we cannot fully explain, fears we do not know how to translate, and moments when nobody else is awake. Christian friendship is precious partly because it can remind us where our final refuge is.

The notebook remains open.

You write one sentence.

“I am angry that this is still happening.”

Then you stop.

Nothing terrible happens.

There is no thunder. No correction appears on the page. You are still in the same room. The problem is still unresolved. But something has changed because you have stopped pretending before God.

The Psalms teach us that prayer can carry language far more honest than the careful phrases many of us use. People cry out, question, remember, lament, hope, complain, praise, and return again to trust. The movement is not tidy because human life is not tidy. Scripture does not hide this from us. It shows that faith can speak from inside pressure instead of waiting until pressure is gone.

Jesus Himself prayed honestly in Gethsemane. He did not pretend the coming suffering felt small. He spoke of His distress and prayed about the cup before Him while submitting Himself completely to the Father. The honesty did not weaken obedience. It revealed the depth of it.

That should free us.

You do not have to wait until your feelings agree with your theology before you pray. You can bring both into the same room. “I know You are good, and I do not understand this.” “I believe You are with me, and I feel alone tonight.” “I want to forgive, and I am still angry.” “I trust You, and I am scared about what happens next.”

Those prayers are not failures of faith. They may be the place where faith stops becoming performance.

A woman discovers this one morning in the laundry room. She has been praying for a family situation for months. Nothing seems to change. She is folding towels before work when she realizes she is angry with God. The realization frightens her more than the anger itself. She has spent weeks using careful prayers because she believes admitting frustration would be disrespectful.

She puts the towel down and says quietly, “I do not understand why You are allowing this.”

Then she starts crying.

The laundry room is not holy because of the washer, the detergent, or the basket on the floor. It becomes holy because truth has entered the prayer.

She does not receive an explanation that morning. She does not hear a voice telling her why the situation continues. What changes is the relationship inside the waiting. She no longer has to spend energy hiding something God already sees.

This is what a trusted friend can sometimes help us learn. When someone receives our difficult sentence without panic, we begin to understand that honesty does not automatically destroy relationship. That lesson can reach into prayer. We become less afraid of telling Jesus what is actually happening inside us.

The reverse is true too. Learning to become honest before God can make us healthier friends. If I have somewhere to take my deepest fear, I do not need every friend to carry it perfectly. If I can pray about my anger, I may be less likely to unload it on the first person who disappoints me. If I know Christ is my center, I can receive human care gratefully without demanding that another person become everything I need.

That distinction is essential.

Sometimes we say we want to be heard when what we really want is for another person to remove uncertainty. We tell the same story repeatedly hoping that one friend will eventually find the sentence that makes us feel safe. We ask for reassurance again and again because the answer lasts only a few hours. We want someone to promise that the job will work out, the relationship will recover, the test will be fine, the money will come, the child will be okay, or the future will make sense.

A friend may comfort us. They may remind us of what is true. But they cannot promise what God has not promised.

That is where friendship has to know its place.

A friend can say, “I am with you.”

They may not be able to say, “This will happen exactly the way you want.”

A friend can pray beside you.

They cannot control the answer.

A friend can remind you of Jesus.

They cannot replace Him.

This humility protects friendship from becoming unbearable. No human being should have to become the final answer to another person’s fear.

A man learns this after months of calling the same friend about a business decision. He has already gathered the facts. He has spoken with people who understand the industry. He has prayed. Yet he keeps asking his friend, “What would you do?”

At first the friend answers. Later he notices that every answer produces another question.

One evening he says, “I think you are asking me to make you certain.”

The man becomes defensive.

“I am just asking what you think.”

“I have told you what I think. You keep coming back because you want me to make the risk disappear.”

The words are uncomfortable because they are true.

The friend is not withdrawing support. He is returning responsibility. “I will pray with you. I will talk it through again if there is new information. But I cannot make this choice safe for you.”

That conversation becomes a turning point. The man realizes he has been using friendship as a place to postpone decision. He wanted a person he trusted to absorb the possibility of regret.

Sometimes being heard should lead us back to responsibility.

Jesus listens, but He also calls people to act. “Follow me.” “Go.” “Rise.” “Do not be afraid.” “Your faith has made you well.” His compassion does not leave people permanently sitting at the edge of their own lives.

A healthy friend may eventually say, “You have talked about this for months. What are you going to do?”

That is not impatience if the timing is right. It can be respect.

The goal of being heard is not to become endlessly dependent on being heard. It is to become more truthful, more grounded, and more able to live.

There is a moment when conversation must become movement.

The woman who is unhappy at work eventually submits the application.

The person who keeps apologizing for the same pattern eventually changes the behavior.

The friend who wants reconciliation eventually makes the call.

The person who needs rest eventually cancels something.

The one who is afraid to ask for help eventually asks.

Words prepare the ground. Then life asks us to step into what we have said.

This may be why the best conversations often end with something ordinary. You talk for an hour about what has been weighing on you, then you stand up, wash the cups, drive home, pick up the children, answer an email, or go to work. The world did not stop because you told the truth. You return to it carrying the truth differently.

One evening, a man calls his brother from a gas station parking lot because he is frustrated about a conflict at home. He talks for forty minutes. His brother mostly listens. At the end, the man asks, “So what do I do?”

His brother says, “Go home and have the conversation you have been having with me.”

The man laughs because that is the last thing he wants to hear.

He had been explaining his hurt to everybody except the person involved.

So he drives home.

The conversation is not perfect. He says some things badly. He has to start one sentence again. The other person disagrees with part of what he says. But he finally brings the honest words into the relationship where they belong.

That is another purpose of safe friendship. It can become a rehearsal room for courage, but it should not become a hiding place from courage.

Your friend may help you find the words.

Eventually you have to use them.

This is true spiritually too. We can talk endlessly about trusting Jesus and still avoid the next faithful step. We can read about forgiveness without contacting the person we wronged. We can discuss generosity without giving. We can pray for courage while continually choosing whatever keeps us comfortable. Conversation is meaningful, but Christian faith does not remain entirely conversational.

Jesus says, “Follow me.”

Following requires movement.

Not frantic movement. Not performance. Not earning His love. Movement born from trust.

Sometimes the next step is remarkably small.

Put the phone down and sleep.

Send the email tomorrow instead of rewriting it for another week.

Tell your spouse what has been bothering you without accusing them.

Schedule the appointment.

Open the Bible again after months away.

Walk into church and sit in the back if that is all you can manage.

Say no.

Say yes.

Say, “I was wrong.”

Say, “I need help.”

The smallness of these actions can make us dismiss them. We imagine transformation should feel larger. Usually life changes through repeated choices that barely look important while we are making them.

A woman is lonely after moving to a new city. She tells an old friend on the phone every Sunday that she has not met anybody. The friend listens for several weeks. Then she asks whether the woman has accepted any of the invitations coworkers have offered.

“No.”

“Why?”

“I do not feel like going when I do not know anyone.”

Her friend laughs gently. “That may be why you do not know anyone.”

The woman knows she is right.

The following Thursday, she accepts an invitation to dinner with three coworkers. The evening is not magical. She does not meet a future best friend. She is nervous for the first twenty minutes and tired afterward. But one of the coworkers asks if she wants to get coffee the next week.

That is how a new life sometimes begins.

Not with certainty.

With one honest step.

We need friends who can honor our feelings without helping our fear build a permanent house.

This balance is difficult because people move at different speeds. What looks like avoidance from the outside may be a person gathering enough strength to act. What looks like patience may become stagnation. There is no universal number of conversations after which someone should be “over it.”

Good friends learn through attention.

They ask, “Do you need me to keep listening, or do you think you are ready to decide something?”

That question returns choice to the person.

It also respects the listener’s limits. Friendship can become draining when one conversation repeats for months with no willingness to consider movement. A caring friend is allowed to say, “I love you, but I do not think repeating the same conversation is helping anymore.”

That sentence may hurt.

It may also be the truest thing in the room.

There are situations where repeated conversation is part of real processing, especially in grief, trauma, or major loss. We should not impose impatience on people carrying wounds that need time. But even there, friendship should not be the only support if the person is stuck in ways that require professional care.

Humility means knowing when love needs company.

A friend can sit beside you.

A counselor may help you understand patterns.

A pastor may help you think spiritually.

A physician may address what belongs to health.

A lawyer may help with what belongs to law.

A financial professional may help with money.

A support group may connect you with people who know a road your closest friend does not.

Jesus-centered friendship does not fear appropriate help. It is not a competition for who gets to be most important.

The goal is the good of the person.

This is especially important for those of us who like being the helper. Being needed can become part of our identity. When someone begins getting stronger, making decisions, or finding additional support, we may feel less necessary.

That feeling deserves honesty too.

If I need you to remain dependent on me so I can feel valuable, my help has become tangled with my own need.

Love wants freedom for the other person.

A friend who once called every evening may begin calling once a week because life is improving.

That is good.

A person who needed you to attend every difficult appointment may begin going alone.

That is good.

Someone who asked you to help make every decision may start trusting their own judgment.

That is good.

You are not being replaced by health.

You are watching a person stand.

There is joy in that if we can release the need to be central.

Jesus did not call disciples so they would remain passive spectators around Him. He formed them, sent them, corrected them, and entrusted them with responsibility. His presence made them more able to live their calling, not more dependent on human reassurance.

Our friendships should move in the same direction.

We should become more able to tell the truth.

More able to ask.

More able to listen.

More able to say no.

More able to act.

More able to stand before God without hiding behind somebody else’s certainty.

This brings us back to the notebook on the bed.

The sentence is still there.

“I am angry that this is still happening.”

You read it again.

Then you write another.

“I am also afraid nothing is going to change.”

Another.

“I do not know what You are doing.”

You stop.

The room is still quiet.

Then the prayer shifts, not because the anger disappears, but because honesty has made room for something underneath it.

“Help me know what is mine to do tomorrow.”

That prayer does not demand the whole future.

It asks for enough light for the next step.

Maybe that is what you have needed all along.

Not a friend who can explain everything.

Not a perfect answer.

Not certainty.

Enough room to tell the truth, enough grace to remain there for a while, and enough faith to take the next step when morning comes.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index:

https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

#nsfw #shorts

Janay didn't consider herself all that attractive. Short, some scars on her skin, fat in the wrong places, and a tired look of wisdom and broken dreams—all etched into a single package. She didn't look in the mirror for long on most days. It was just her, anyway. No pets, no family, no social life to speak of. But this wasn't what Janay was about. There was more. That was just the surface level she showed others. Her real depth was hidden behind a secret. On the outside looking in, one would think that's a lonely existence. For Janay, this is the only true peace she has ever known. It's not that she didn't try. It's just she wasn't wired to play the game everyone knew. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Dark thoughts had no place in her home. It was time to pivot.

She walked, fully nude, back to her bedroom. A chaotic mess that was her personal shrine and personal sanctuary. On one side there was a large bookshelf. It wasn't for books; instead, it held her personal collection of sex toys, displayed openly. Her real trophies, her real sexual partners, her real friends.

She had almost every dildo imaginable. A good majority of them were different sizes and types. Some were realistic, some were girthy with exotic textures. Some were fantasy-style creature cocks, others were impossible sizes that she collected like trophies with no intention of inserting. She just liked the shape and look of them.

Janay was really addicted to cock. Not in the normal way. Not in the way that made men hard, though. She had long disconnected her enjoyment of cock from men. Another person always made life messy. It brought her so much pain and misfortune. But she didn't want to be bitter. So she detached from men and just focused on cock.

She still has her first dildo, which she bought in college. Worn but still functional, it sits in the center of her collection. Symbolic of how a tree branches out from a seed, every dildo, in some way, was connected to her first toy. Her first lover, her first and only comfort in a chaotic world. She took another deep breath, letting her mind and body unwind from the life that didn't suit her outside of her four walls.

She would smile and coo at them, running her hand across them, imagining them as if they were attached to a man who only exists in her mind as an abstract concept. A brief flashback of her failed relationships and her divorce flooded her mind. She blinked, shook her head, and talked to herself, “Not today, you've had enough.”

Right now her focus was choosing her next silicone partner for her afternoon of pleasure. Her one anchoring activity, her one consistent hobby that made her whole: Gooning.

Along the way in Janay's life journey, people stopped working. The community stopped functioning. Family turned toxic. Friendships faded. She's even lost pets due to tragic circumstances. Every time she tried to be 'Janay +1,' it evolved into something more than just zero.

But her toys? Gooning? That never left. As long as she had silicone and a wet pussy, she was fine.

Janay picked a large creature cock for her goon session tonight. She didn't want to be reminded of anything human at this point. She just wanted pleasure. Janay made her way over to her pride and joy of her home: her desktop PC. Built for one and only purpose.

This machine has been her forever, a custom-built beauty of age and purpose that has seen it all. She has evolved her baby to its final form. It has four screens. Two of them stacked in front of her in landscape orientation, and two in portrait mode on the sides. One would think it's a little excessive until you know what their purpose is really for.

Janay watches hardcore porn almost constantly.

Porn has been her comfort in a chaotic world throughout her adult life. Then around 35, it clicked for her. There was no need to hide or be ashamed of this. Like everyone else, she learned about gooning during the pandemic and the identity stuck with her after the divorce.

She sat down in front of her screens with her big floppy toy, pulled up her playlists and porn sites, and began her ritual. She spread her legs and gently rubbed her folds, waiting for wetness to come. Once the wetness came, the weight of life began to dissolve. Those problems no longer mattered. Once she got her pussy wet enough and her dildo made it inside, it was all better.

She knew it was a coping mechanism. But her excessive porn consumption was a compulsion at this point. It was a call. It was her pull. Porn was her anchor. Gooning gave her purpose. It was something special to come home to. It was a consistent thought always in the back of her mind.

She brought porn with her in the workplace. Goon audios she listened to like music, scrolling at her desk on her phone when no one was looking, listening to porn while driving in traffic. Tweeting about it, letting all of her safe for work accounts collect dust. A symbol of a life that paused. A life no one cared to check on.

Porn always made her whole. Porn took over her life for the better.

As she sat in her plush office chair, she would scroll and look at every screen focusing on something for a few moments, smiling. Each screen had something obscene perverted, and absolutely beautiful.

She would spend a few moments reclined in her chair, thrusting her toy in a rhythmic motion, let her body cream and squeeze, welcoming its girth and texture into her inner walls. Once she was close to orgasm, she would stop the motion, sit comfortably with her toy inside, then browse the internet or new clips or anything porn related to add to her collection. The edge was pleasure, not the orgasm.

Overall it was a humble simple existence. No one needed to know that this is all she did for hours every single day.

No one needed to know she listened to porn audio like podcasts.

No one needed to know this ritual had completely taken over her life.

This was the only thing in her life that was consistent and never hurt her.

So there she sat in her chair. Comfortable. Calm. At peace. Pleasuring herself for hours finding the center she deserved.

She's peaked in life and all she had to do was get extremely addicted to porn. Now all she wanted to do was make her porn addiction worse. Janay was happy.

In Summary: * Listening now to relaxing music after spending a full afternoon into the early evening of “a bonding day” with the wife, as she calls it. We handled various chores together, and spent a fair amount of time driving from one place to another. The night prayers and meditations are ahead of me, then an early bed time.

Hope your Monday has gone as pleasantly as mine has.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 225.53 lbs. * bp= 147/85 (70)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:00 – 1 banana, 2 HEB bakery cookies * 07:40 – 1 seafood salad sandwich * 18:40 – snacking on more of those cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:15 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 04:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 06:20 – order household supplies * 06:40 – start my weekly laundry * 11:30 – finish prep for this afternoon's drs. appointment * 12:30 – leave home early for the drs. * 15:15 – look at apartments with the wife * 16:15 – drive to Universal City with the wife, dropping off some food to an old friend of hers * 18:30 – finally back home, ready to sit and relax for awhile.

Chess: * 07:05 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

There is a precise logic to the way he protects himself. He doesn’t avoid falling in love out of indifference; he avoids it because love demands a loss of control. To truly feel for someone requires surrendering the steering wheel, letting another person influence your emotions, your focus, and your inner world. For someone who relies on self-preservation and emotional mastery, that level of exposure feels less like intimacy and more like danger. That is why a low-stakes relationship works for him. It is predictable, comfortable, and safe. She doesn't distract him or throw off his equilibrium. She provides companionship without demanding the kind of deep emotional vulnerability that would threaten his grip on things.

When he said, “We don't need to overthink this. It was fun hanging out but that's it. Nothing is going to change,”

It was a swift effort to minimize what happened, draw a hard line, and put the lid back on the jar. Whatever briefly slipped through after that... that was a glimpse of a vulnerable side, someone who, for a fraction of a second, allowed himself to just feel. But as soon as the shift registered, the panic of losing control set in. For a person built on self-defense, vulnerability becomes the antagonist. Stepping back into a comfortable, controlled routine is the only way he knows how to regain his footing, because falling in love means accepting that you cannot control everything, and that uncertainty is a place he simply refuses to stay.

Here's a low-impact routine built specifically for shooting sports—it builds the core stability, steady breathing, and balance that carry over to a stable shooting platform.

Why This Combo Works for Shooters

Pilates builds the deep core and postural strength needed to hold a stance steady over a long string of fire. Yoga's breath work directly trains the controlled exhale-and-hold pattern used right before the trigger break. Neither adds bulk or fatigues the shoulders/arms the way weight training might before a match.

Warm-Up (5 min)

• Cat-Cow – 8 slow reps, syncing breath with movement to loosen the spine
• Standing side bends – 30 sec per side
• Arm circles + shoulder rolls – 30 sec each direction

Core & Stability (Pilates) — 15 min

• Dead Bug – 3 sets of 8 per side (anti-rotation core control, mirrors resisting torque while aiming)
• Bird Dog – 3 sets of 8 per side, hold 3 sec at top
• Plank (forearm) – 3 x 20-30 sec, focus on not letting hips sag
• Side Plank – 2 x 15-20 sec per side (builds the lateral stability used in offhand/standing positions)
• Pilates Roll-Up (or half version for beginners) – 8 reps, slow and controlled

Balance & Steadiness (Yoga) — 10 min

• Tree Pose – 30 sec per leg (directly trains single-point balance, useful for kneeling/standing positions)
• Warrior III – 20-30 sec per side (builds hip and core stability under a forward-leaning stance)
• Eagle Pose – 20 sec per side (proprioception and focus)
• Chair Pose hold – 30 sec (leg endurance without impact)

Breath Control (Yoga-based) — 5-8 min

• Box breathing: inhale 4 sec, hold 4 sec, exhale 4 sec, hold 4 sec — 5 rounds. This is nearly identical to the respiratory pause shooters use before the shot.
• 3-part diaphragmatic breathing lying down, 5-6 slow breaths, hand on belly to feel expansion

Cool-Down (5 min)

• Child's Pose – 1 min
• Seated forward fold – 1 min
• Legs-up-the-wall – 2-3 min (great for recovery after a long match day standing/kneeling)

Total time: ~40-45 minutes, 2-3x per week works well alongside range sessions.

Walking: minimum ~20 minites, Do this everyday.

A few coaching notes: keep reps low and form-focused for younger athletes, use verbal cues (“belly breathing,” “stack your shoulders”) rather than complex anatomical language, and consider running the balance poses barefoot for better proprioceptive feedback. Want me to adjust this for a specific age range or build it into a printable/shareable format for the team?

I was ready to uninstall some apps on my phone today.

I have too many! 🫩

Luckily I was scrolling my YouTube community posts & I came across another “perfect post” by David A. It is an AI cartoon about gangstalking that he shared.

I am not a big fan of AI but it can definitely serve you well when you can’t find the right words to write yourself! In all honesty, I have no idea who created this but whoever it was did a brilliant job writing the prompts. If I find out who created this, I will definitely give them proper credit. But until then, I’m thanking David A. – again – because some of his posts in the past have helped me through some very challenging times.

http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxo3M7CWBuMXnHQk3DW6B_asaL_qQ2EJ8T?si=VP2XFms7r4xrg9oA

Any targeted individual that has been a victim of a smear campaign will definitely recognize all of these tactics used. It is a cruel & relentless & brutal way to crush another human being’s spirit. Let alone the isolation it causes them & the damage to their good name.

Will you ever be able to unhear the smear you hear? 🙉

Will you ever be able to make a conscious effort to stick up for them if you happen to know them when you do hear it because it really does involve mindfulness & choice of actions?

Will you ever contact that person directly & hear their side of the story in order to be able to use your critical thinking skills?

Will you ever mention something kind they might have done for you in the past to neutralize all the toxic hatred you are hearing about them?

Will you jump on the bandwagon instead because it looks cool for your social media profile? 👍

Will you walk away quietly & tell yourself you’d rather be around decent people who tell the truth instead?

Will you become a part of the sheeple culture & just go with what the current culture dictates which is having a huge amount of followers, a ton of views & a million likes? 🐑

Will you make an effort to try & meet or contact that person just to get to know them yourself because don't people like to make new friends?

Will you try & be a mediator instead & quietly walk up to them & introduce yourself? Maybe say – “Hey, I'm hearing these bizarre rumors about you. I’m different. I’d rather treat you to a cup of coffee & get to know you as a human being, not as a news bite.” ☕️

Will you give them a chance in your life if you don't know them at all because sometimes the greatest fulfillment can come from opening yourself up to new experiences?

Will you be too insecure yourself & just go along with all the gibberish you hear just because it’s easier? It doesn’t involve much effort to believe the lies so you might as well just go along & believe them. 🤷‍♀️

Will you see someone’s soul underneath all the skin & bones & flesh they carry on their body because everyone has one, whether they like it or not? Meaning they have depth & they have spirit – they don’t just have an external artificial shell that means absolutely nothing after death comes to take it away. ✨️

Will you remember that quote about all men being created equally & actually make a conscious choice to treat them as such? Or does that require too much thinking so you'd rather not think instead?

Will you start listening more instead of talking all the time so you actually give yourself time enough to pause & reflect? Because listening takes alot more patience & effort than just blabbering on & on & repeating what someone told you about someone else.

Will you actually do something courageous & ask them yourself why they became targeted? That you really want to know because you want to learn new ideas & new thoughts or does knowledge scare you?

Will you ever welcome them into your community with genuine love & open arms or will you put lots of walls up because remember, you’ve “heard” so much about them, haven’t you? 🏢

I don’t know the answers to these questions, BTW. I’m definitely not perfect.

One thing I do know is that we all have the power inside of us to change our own narrative. It’s called CHOICE.

And sometimes that involves taking a risk to also help another person’s narrative.

Again, will you make an effort to unhear the smear you hear? 🙉

And again, thank you David A. 💝

I don't really have much more to say except that I truly believe that intentional kindness is definitely not a weakness.

Just like intentional maliciousness is definitely not a strength.

🌺💛🌺

P.S. This post is dedicated to September's Suicide Prevention Month & all the victims of suicide – targeted individuals or not – who have taken their own lives because they felt they had no choice. In actuality, they really did. They just couldn't see it because someone else’s hatred came creeping in.

Another short story for you!

I like noir fiction a lot, and it’s a tough sell. This one’s only been rejected once, but I don’t really see a lot of hope for it in the short fiction markets for crime and mystery.

Content warnings: violence, drugs, mention of sexual assault.

I’d like to be able to say I started dealing because my family needed money and there were no other options. Something noble.

The truth, though, is that I wanted to get invited to parties. I mean, it is certainly true that we, my mom and I, had way less money than the families of any of my classmates at Cincinnati Prep, but it’s not like I was hungry or we were about to be homeless or anything.

But if you’re a broke kid who takes the Metro bus to Cincinnati Prep and lives in Western Hills, you don’t get invited to parties in Hyde Park, Amberley, or Indian Hill.

Unless you’ve got weed to sell. Instant popularity!

I then branched out into adderall, because my high-achieving peers requested it.

I stayed away from the hard stuff, though. Because I get my product from Alex down the street, and they have guns and security cameras and all that shit because they sell coke and fentanyl. I’m sixteen. I don’t want that kind of hassle.

Actually, even the hassle of selling weed and adderall had become too much. I did a fair amount of dealing in the school parking lot, and the administration had started to get uncomfortable because parents were complaining that their kids were buying weed at school.

They called me in for a chat. I don’t know if other people got called in or if this was a special privilege for people from the wrong side of the tracks. (Not a metaphor. Literal train tracks run through the center of the city just west of downtown. Cincinnati is a little on-the-nose).

Our Dean of Students was a white guy named James Browne who used to boast about how he dropped out of Cornell to follow the Dead (which I guess is some stoner band and not, like, ghosts he was tracking or something) in the 80’s before straightening up and getting a degree from the University of Cincinnati. He sat me down in his office.

“Look, nobody knows better than me how much kids like to smoke weed. I was a kid once.”

I didn’t respond.

“But, you know, there are some parents here who are pretty uptight about the old ganj. And as much as I’d like to tell ‘em to smoke a bowl and relax, I can’t, because they pay my salary. So look, you do whatever you want off of school property. But I can’t have you dealing on campus.”

You don’t have to talk to cops, but silence isn’t really an option with Deans of Students. “I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Seriously, though. Search my bag. Search my locker. I don’t sell drugs, I don’t do drugs, and I don’t have any drugs on campus.” That was two lies and a truth. I didn’t do drugs. And the drugs on campus were in the “gear tunnel” of Abby Johnstone’s Rivian pickup truck because nobody is ever going to suspect the top-of-the-class student, basketball star, and student council president of holding drugs.  Or doing drugs. But you really can’t do all those things at a high level without chemical assistance. At least Abby couldn’t. I sold her Adderrall at cost as a thank you for the use of her high-tech stash locker.

Dean of Students James Browne said, “well. I’m sorry to be a narc, but I’m gonna have to take you up on that.” Nothing but books, pencils, notebooks and some pretzels in my bag and my locker. “You tried the honey mustard ones?” James Browne asked as he held up a bag of plain pretzels.

“Just here for the salt and the carbs,” I said.

“Respect, man, respect,” James Browne said.

The cameras went up in the parking lot the next day. There’s a couple million dollars’ worth of automotive hardware in that parking lot, so I was kinda surprised it took the administration that long to put it under surveillance.

Like I said, I didn’t need the money, not really, and I definitely didn’t need the hassle, so I put out the word that I was having a going out of business sale at Lily Brightling’s party on Saturday night. Dealing had gotten me the level of social acceptance and coolness I wanted, though, it has to be said, it hadn’t brought me any real friends, because I never knew who was being nice to me because they liked me and who was being nice to me because they liked drugs. Now I could just get some shitty food service job or something and focus on my grades, and I suppose find out who my real friends were. Unlike most of my peers, I actually had to do well because I didn’t have a dad who owned a company and could hire me if I majored in frat parties at a third-tier college.  As far as I knew. Mom had always been tightlipped on the subject of my father.

I did a brisk business at Lily’s party. I usually sold to my rich classmates at 150% markup from my cost, so dropping that down to 100% seemed like a bargain to them but was still a pretty nice payday for me.

And then everything went sideways.

Nick Last Name Redacted because if you’re from Cincinnati, you know it, came up to me and said, “Can you get me a key?”

This was the second time I’d spoken to Nick, who was a year ahead of me, since I started at Cincinnati Prep. The first time was when he tried to make me eat his jockstrap in the locker room after gym class when I was in 9th grade and literally a foot shorter and probably 50 pounds lighter than him. Classy guy.

So I decided to give him some shit. “Like a house key? A car key? What kind of key are you after?”

“A kilogram. Of cocaine.”

“Sorry, man, I don’t move that kind of weight.” First thing I did when I started dealing was to study and memorize Ohio’s drug laws. A kilo gets you the Major Drug Offender designation and a mandatory eleven-year prison sentence. I wouldn’t risk that for myself, let alone for this asshole. “I can ask my person.”

“Your person? Why not just say guy?”

“Because they’re not a guy.”

“Chick, then.”

“Look, Nick, it’s been a real joy talking to you, but I’m not getting you a kilo of cocaine, and I don’t want to be the person who introduces my person to a guy who is gonna disrespect them. Because trust me when I say that would be bad for everyone involved. Okay? So give it a rest.”

“Thought you might say that,” Nick said. “So check this out.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a video of me pulling what was pretty clearly several bags of weed and a bag of pills out of the gear tunnel of Abby Johnstone’s Rivian. Fucking douche. “Can’t really see Abby getting into Stanford after this. Can you?”

“Abby’s not involved,” I said.

“Can’t unlock that tunnel without the key fob,” Nick said, smiling.

“I stole it,” I said.

“Bro. Do you even know how cars work these days? Of course not, because you’re too fucking broke to have one. If you lose your fob they reprogram the car so the old fob doesn’t work. You’re obviously in this together. And, anyway, all I have to do is show this to Browne and you’re done at Cincinnati Prep. Back to the West Side where you belong. And that stuck-up bitch is gonna have to find a safety school.”

My brain was racing. Nick was an idiot, but not so much of an idiot that he didn’t have backups of the video. So I couldn’t ever make sure the video was destroyed and couldn’t come back to haunt me.  I really did not want to get into the coke dealing business. I especially didn’t want to get into the coke dealing business because I’d been outsmarted by this asshole.

But it didn’t seem like I had a choice. I wasn’t going to get him a kilo, though.

“I’ll get you an eight ball. Then if you like the product, I’ll send you to my person. I can’t afford the kind of lawyer that could get me out of “caught with a kilo of coke” trouble.”

“Fine,” he said. “Ault Park. Tomorrow at 10. On the roof of the pavilion.”

I cannot stress enough what a dumb place this is to execute a drug buy. In a park after dark, so you’re legally trespassing just by being there, and on the roof of a structure so that literally anyone driving by, say, in a patrol car, can see you. Oh yeah, and if you’re on the roof of the structure, one cop on either staircase and you’re trapped. The pavilion is literally surrounded by woods that can’t be seen from the road and would be much better places for illicit meetups. But I wasn’t the one driving this train.

So I found myself on top of the pavilion at Ault Park at 10PM the next night. The park was closed, but there weren’t any gates or anything. My bike was locked to a lamppost outside of the park. The stairstep fountain in front of the pavilion was still lit up and the water was still moving, and from the top of the pavilion I could at least see when lights were coming up the street. Which they did kind of frequently. I ducked down every time I saw them coming, but eventually this got tedious, so I just sat down on the concrete floor and waited. Ten minutes later, I saw Nick.

I stood up. “You got it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Three hundred bucks and it’s all yours.”

He made a show of reaching into his pocket, then pulled his hand out, empty. “No money till I see the product,” he said.

“That’s not how this works,” I said. “And anyway, I don’t have anything on me. It’s in the park, and after you pay me, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s not like I’m gonna rip you off—you know how to find me pretty easily.”

“I don’t give a shit how it usually works,” Nick said. “I’ve got the video, I make the rules.”

I really didn’t like this. Selling to potheads and honor students was always a joy. Selling to bullies who want to be coked-up bullies turned out to be much more complicated. But he did have a point about the video.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s behind the plaque of Joseph Ault.”

“What the…where exactly the fuck is that?”

I pointed. “Downstairs. There’s a plaque on a big rock. What you want is behind the rock. Now, about my 300 dollars.”

Nick walked to the front of the pavilion and called down to someone, “behind the rock with the plaque on it!” I joined him at the front of the structure and saw Shane Becker head over to the rock. He came back a minute later with the baggie in his hand. “Got it!” he said.

“Okay, now about my 300 bucks,” I said.

“I’m getting the friends and family discount,” Nick said and punched me in the stomach. Hard. While I was doubled over, he punched me in the face, and I went down. He gave me a couple of kicks in the ribs while I was down, I guess just for fun, and then walked away. I heard the roar of his Porsche’s engine as he and Shane went off with three hundred bucks’ worth of coke. Well, it cost me one fifty, but still. The fucker drove a Porsche. He could afford to pay me.

Eventually I got up off the ground and started walking out of the park back to my bike. I guessed, given what I knew about Nick, I should have been glad that he didn’t want to humiliate me in some weird sexual way. Maybe that was just for the locker room.

I stopped paying attention to my surroundings, maybe because I was trying to think my way out of this. If he tried to get a kilo out of Alex, he wouldn’t dare try this shit, but, on the other hand, he didn’t want an intro to Alex. He wanted me to take all the risk. In fact, he would definitely make me mule the kilo to him and then not pay me.

I was still trying to think about how to get out of this when I saw flashing blue lights. A cop car pulled up next to me. I stopped walking, and I soon had a flashlight shining in my eyes. “Park’s closed,” the cop said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

“What the hell happened to you?” he said. My face was bruised and a little swollen.

Normally I wouldn’t talk to cops, but I didn’t think this guy was trying to bust my balls on a trespassing charge. “She told me her boyfriend was out of town. He came back early,” I said.

The cop laughed. “You wanna file a report?” he said.

“No sir I do not. I want to go home and get an ice pack and ponder my life choices,” I said.

“Hey, speaking of life choices, you got any drugs on you?”

Ugggh. I didn’t, but I was in the park illegally, which might have been probable cause for a search. And if I asserted my right to refuse a search, I would definitely get a trespassing ticket, which I’m sure would not be a big deal, but I was already out a hundred and twenty-five bucks for the night.

“I do not,” I said. “I’m happy to empty my pockets, though.”

I was hoping this would at least allow me to avoid having the cop’s hands on me. I pulled my wallet out of my right pocket and opened it up to reveal no wad of cash, no baggies of drugs. I turned the pocket inside out. I pulled my keys out of my left pocket along with a wrapped condom. “Guess I won’t be needing this tonight,” I said.

“Can you pass that wallet over here?” the cop said.

“I can, but don’t take my library card. I’ve got holds to pick up.” I smiled. I couldn’t tell if the joke landed because I still couldn’t see the dude’s face. He looked at my state identification card.

“You’re a long way from home,” he says.

“Tell me about it. Came all the way over here for some pussy and got the shit beaten out of me instead. It hasn’t been a good night.” This wasn’t the kind of thing I would say in real life. But I figured this would go better for me if I spoke the cop’s language.

The cop shined the light in my face again. Then he handed me my wallet.

“Alright. Stay out of the park after closing time.”

“Sir, I can promise you I will,” I said.

I got home exhausted from the long bike ride and the beatdown, but I barely got any sleep because I was absorbing the reality that I was going to have to change schools. Because my choices for playing along with Nick included buying a kilo from Alex and then having Nick steal it from me or buying a kilo from Alex and getting arrested with it and going to jail for eleven years. The cost of a kilo would pretty much wipe out my savings, and I couldn’t see Nick giving up his leverage over me pretty much ever. In fact, he’d probably send the video to James Browne just out of spite as soon as he graduated. So the best thing I could do is to just cut my losses. It wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t really fit in at Cincinnati Prep, but I was comfortable there. People knew me. I knew how the social stuff worked. And I could get really good grades without anyone wanting to kick my ass. They just wanted to kick my ass so they could steal drugs from me, apparently.

But with the possible exception of Abby, nobody would miss me, and I’m not completely sure that she would miss me more than the Adderall. I would miss her, though. She had been nice to me when I was a new kid from the wrong kind of neighborhood in a school where everyone else had known each other since they were five.

Speaking of Abby, I was going to have to talk to her and reveal my idiocy and the fact that there was probably going to be blowback from this that hit her. Which I felt bad about. She didn’t have to do me a favor, and now she was going to have to suffer for it.

The next day at school I found Abby before lunch. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” I said.

“I know, I know, going out of business. I’ll survive,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s…it’s kind of worse news than that.” I told her about the video and about Nick blackmailing me to procure coke and how he wanted a kilo and I wasn’t gonna do that which meant I was going to get kicked out of school and we’d have to find a way to pretend I used her truck without her consent so it didn’t mess up her Stanford application.

“I dunno if I can like clone your key or something. I can probably say I stole it out of your bag while you were at basketball prac—”

“Wait,” she said. “Stop talking. A video? That’s what he has?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure it’s real?”

“I mean, it’s me doing a thing I have done, but I can’t really say if it’s legit. I mean, I assume Nick is too dumb to put a fake video together.”

“Yeah, but Shane isn’t. That piece of shit has made deepfake porn of half the girls in the senior class.”

I didn’t know what to say about this, except that selling recreational drugs suddenly seemed like a way less shameful activity than I thought it was.

“Jesus. That’s…”

“Yeah. It sure is. Look. I can get Liz Wallace to make like six deepfake videos of you setting the school on fire, shooting JFK, whatever. We’ll send ‘em all to Browne, and Nick’s ironclad blackmail video loses all its power.”

I shook my head, smiling. “Damn. I knew you were smart, but not this kind of smart.”

“Oh, I’m not done. We’ve gotta figure out a way to get him back for beating you up and stealing from you.”

“Well, I’ll think about that one,” I said, but I had no plans to.

I liked Abby. But people who grew up with money just couldn’t have any idea how unfair the world is. When someone as connected as Nick Last Name Redacted decides they want to screw you, you just get screwed. That’s how it works. Everybody on my street knew this. And probably nobody on Abby’s did.

When I was walking to the bus stop after school, Abby pulled up in her electric truck and said, “get in. I’ll drive you home.”

“Aw, Abby, I can’t let you do that. It’s so far, and—”

“Nothing in Cincinnati is more than 20 minutes from anything else,” she said. “Besides, we need to talk.”

I hopped in the truck. First time I’d seen the inside. “So I had an idea,” she said.

“About what?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was stupid. I guess I was. “About making Nick pay for what he did.”

I sighed. “Guys like Nick don’t pay for what they do.”

“Well, just because he hasn’t doesn’t mean he can’t. And I know how to do it.” She told me her plan. It was ridiculous.

But twenty-two minutes later (yeah, I timed it, and frankly I was relieved to find that Abby was wrong about something) she pulled up in front of my house, which I’m embarrassed about. I know I should be all working class proud, like my mom actually has a house despite being a hotel housekeeper, but it was a small house and looked shitty on the outside (and, frankly, the inside), and I guess I had spent enough time at Cincinnati Prep to feel ashamed about not living in a mansion in Indian Hill.

We walked down to the end of the cul-de-sac where there was a house hidden behind overgrown bushes and under overgrown trees. Alex’s place. You probably wouldn’t know there was a house here unless you knew there was a house here.

I rang the bell and smiled at the camera.

“Who the fuck is that?” a voice said.

“She’s with me. She’s cool,” I said. I knew this was not a thing I should have been doing. Showing up unannounced with Abby in tow.

“She’d better be,” the voice said. The door clicked, and we entered.

Inside the door, we took an immediate left into the living room. Alex was there playing video games on a six-foot TV. Jorge was on the weight bench in the corner pressing a lot of metal. I didn’t stop to count the plates, but it had to be more than his body weight. And Jorge was a big guy. Dennis was spotting, which was kind of a joke because I severely doubted he could keep that much weight off Jorge’s neck. Dennis was the speed and ferocity and Jorge was the strength, and they were why you did not fuck with Alex or their supply. Well, them and the guns they carried, but as far as I knew, they’d never used them.

The room smelled like sweat and weed. “Okay, talk,” Alex said, not looking away from the TV. “First, explain this person’s presence.”

“This is Abby who kindly provided me with a secure stash for my product,” I said.

“A pleasure,” Abby said, turning on her ‘charm the parents and admissions counselors’ smile which did absolutely nothing in this environment.

“So what do you want?” Alex said. “You told me you were retired. But lemme guess. You got a taste of that coke money and you want some more.”

“Um. Not exactly. If you were to look at my face, and I’m not suggesting you should, but I’m just saying if, you’d see that I’m bruised and swollen because the fuck I sold the 8 ball to beat the shit out of me and stole the coke.”

Alex paused the game and looked over at me with what could have been genuine tenderness. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry, kid.”

This was the most human emotion I’d ever seen from Alex, and I figured this meant we could call this visit a win and just leave even though we hadn’t actually asked for anything.

“So look,” Abby said in a bright, perky voice. “The guy who did this is a real piece of shit—bully, rapist—you know the type.”

Alex raised their eyebrows. “I do indeed,” they said.

“So I was thinking maybe you should—” I cringed. One does not tell Alex what they should do, but it was too late, Abby was plowing straight ahead, and I had to give it to her—she was not intimidated by this unfamiliar situation or the terrifying people in the room with us. “punish this attack on your supply chain, because it certainly doesn’t look good if people find out they can steal from you.”

Alex stared at Abby for a long, long time. Then they smiled, and I nearly wet my pants with relief. “I don’t want to make any assumptions about your gender identity, but I can tell from here that you have a pair of brass balls. Either that or you’re just a rich kid who’s never been told no before. In either case, I respect it. But I have to point out to you that I was not robbed. I was paid in advance, so I’m not out any money or product.  And you two go to school with high profile people. And, as you can imagine, my livelihood depends on keeping a low profile. What’s this kid’s name?”

Abby told them, and they laughed out loud. “Oh hell no!” they said. “That family owns this town. I am not touching this. Sorry, kids, but you are out of luck.”

If Abby was flustered, she didn’t show it. “Do any of your employees work on a freelance basis?” She asked. I saw Jorge and Dennis perk up.

Alex didn’t even look at them. “They do not. Everybody in this neighborhood knows who they work for. They get caught on camera beating the shit out of the coked-up Prince of Cincinnati, it will eventually come back to me. And I will be out of business. So, no. We can’t help. I really am sorry. You,” he addressed this to Abby, “going to Harvard, or what?”

“Well, I’m still a junior, but Stanford.”

“And then law school, right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, if you decide to go into criminal defense law, I will happily put you on retainer. I don’t think a single prosecutor in Hamilton County would be a match for you.”

Abby glowed, and this praise made her lose a step for the first time. “I..uh, I appreciate that. I wonder if you would approve of your staff giving us a referral to a specialist who might be interested in the kind of work I’m proposing.”

Alex raised their eyebrows again. “That’s up to them. Guys?”

“Yeah,” Dennis said. “We know a couple guys. But we’re gonna need a finder’s fee.”

“If you hadn’t asked, I would have offered one,” Abby said.

I had essentially been standing there like a big dumb asshole for the entire conversation, though in fact I was a little dumb asshole. I was so stunned to find Abby Johnstone fitting in better at Alex’s house than I did that I lost my usual cool. The plan had been to come in here and ask Alex to handle it, and when Alex said no, I figured we were done, but Abby clearly wasn’t going to be done.

An hour later and two blocks away, Abby had come to terms with two guys whose names we did not know. “Look, uh,” I said, “I can pay half of the—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Abby said. “I have the money, you don’t, so let me do this.”

“Okay,” I said. “But w—” I was going to ask why. But then I remembered Abby called Nick a rapist. Which was not surprising information in the least, but she hadn’t said it like it was speculation. Maybe it was her. Maybe it was one of her friends. Maybe both. In any case, it wasn’t my business to pry into. She’d tell me if she wanted to. “We need to get you a burner phone,” I said.

It was only a few days later that Nick cornered me in the hall after school. “I’m ready for my key,” he said.

“I’m glad you enjoyed the product. But I’m afraid this time I’m going to need some money up front,” I said. “I’m happy to cut you a deal, but free just isn’t sustainable for me.”

He held up his phone. “I’ve got the email to Browne in my drafts folder,” he said. “Video attached.”

I held up my hands. “Okay, okay, but can we at least meet in the woods this time? I got stopped by the cops last time.”

“Fine,” he said. “10:30 Friday night.”

“Great,” I said. “There’s a trailhead about half a football field to the left of the pavilion. I’ll be there with the product.”

I told Abby when the meetup was, and she, Abby Johnstone, the girl with the 4.3 GPA because of the honors sections bump, pulled out her burner phone and texted the muscle she’d hired. “I’m excited,” she said. “Are you excited?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fucking terrified.”

“You’re not the one who should be scared,” she said. “And I want to be there.”

I sighed. “Abby. Between me and Jorge and Dennis’s buddies, you are the person with the most to lose. If something goes wrong, you do not want to be anywhere near this. You know I would never give up your part in this, but if something goes wrong—”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” she said. “I want to see him suffer.”

Nick and Shane showed up only ten minutes late. I was standing in a streetlight beam that was shining through the trees.

“Okay, where is it?” Nick said.

“Let him have it,” I said, and two big guys materialized out of the trees and started raining punches on Nick and Shane. They were unprepared and probably less practiced at this kind of violence than the guys we’d hired, and they were screaming and cowering, and pretty soon they were on the ground, both bloody messes. Abby stepped out of the trees, looked down at Nick, and spat.

“Fu’n bi,” Nick managed to spit out, along with some blood.

“Say it again and I’ll have all your teeth knocked down your throat. Go ahead. Say it.”

Nick was silent. And that’s when the blue lights came on.

Our guys vanished as quickly as they’d appeared. Abby looked at me.

“Do what I say and don’t ask questions. Rip my shirt open.” I actually found Abby more intimidating than the muscle we hired, so I did what she said, ripping the button-down blouse from the collar, popping buttons.

“Skirt,” she said. “Pull it down.” I yanked it. Hard. It tore a little bit as it passed her hips. She reached down, grabbed some dirt, and rubbed it on her face and in her hair. “Hide, idiot!” she said, and I did.

The cops came down the path seconds later, and Abby was crying. “Oh thank God,” she said.

“What seems to be the trouble here?” they said.

“I was…he said let’s go for a walk in the park, but then his friend was here, and he assaulted me when I said no, and these guys pulled him off me—” She looked around, “I guess they’re gone,” she dissolved into tears.

They called for ambulances. I stayed in the woods listening, and peeking out when I could.

They took Nick and Shane away and gave Abby the card of a social worker and told her she could go to the hospital if she wanted, but she said no. By now there were about twenty cops on the scene, and one of them, a young Black woman, came up to Abby.

“I’m gonna be straight with you, okay?” She said. “You can press charges, but that boy’s father owns half of Cincinnati. His lawyers will take you apart, call you a slut, blame you for everything. The way I look at it, he got the shit beaten out of him tonight, and that’s gonna have to be justice for you. What do you think?”

“I think you’re right,” Abby said.

“All right,” she said. “So we’re not gonna have you make a statement. We’re just going to pretend you weren’t here at all. Too bad a rich boy decided to take a walk in the dark. You okay to drive home?”

“I can call my friend,” she said. “He lives nearby.”

“Okay,” the cop said. Abby took out her real phone and called me.

Ten minutes later, I walked out of the woods. Abby was by herself. All the cops were gone, just happy they didn’t have to deal with arresting a Last Name Redacted in the park.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” She said.

“How do you feel,” I asked.

“Honestly? I feel great,” she said, smiling.

I couldn’t actually say the same. The beating Nick had given me was nothing compared to the one he’d just received. Nick was a piece of shit, but it was sickening to watch him beaten bloody. And Abby’s quick thinking and acting skills were amazing, but also a little terrifying.

“I’m glad,” I said. “Sorry about your clothes.”

“I can buy more,” she said. “And anyway, I asked you to do it. That makes it consensual.” She smiled at me.

“Um,” I said. “are you flirting with me?”

“Jesus Christ, you are slow. Why do you think I let you use my truck to store your weed and Adderall?”

“Well, I gave you a price break,” I said, trailing off weakly as the stupidity of my statement caught up to me.

“I drive a fifty-thousand-dollar truck I got for my sixteenth birthday. I just paid those guys a thousand dollars. Do you think I can’t afford full price Adderall?”

“I. Uh.”

She smiled at me.

“Get in the truck,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

Finding authenticity between the stagecraft and theology of 18th century Western alchemy

A short dialogue buried in an 18th-century German alchemical anthology, Wasserstein der Weisen ('The Water-Stone of the Wise'), reprinted in 1743 and traditionally attributed to Johann Siebmacher, begins like a domestic quarrel. Nature appears as a central female power figure, speaking through a name other than the author's, and she arrives on scene with quite the temper. She calls the seeker a fantastical fool and a coarse ass who breaks glassware and burns coal until the fumes cloud his head (p. 118). Every other creature does its office faithfully, she complains, and only man, presuming to take up hers, strays from it (p. 120). For a text about sacred secrets, the opening is strangely familiar — not the voice of an oracle, but of someone who has been misunderstood one too many times.

But the tone soon turns. Around p. 128 the scold becomes a plea: have mercy on yourself, I beg you... I will lie to you in nothing. There is something revealing in that twist — she asks for acquaintance rather than worship. “Learn to know me first, before you call yourself a master” (p. 135). The art does not lie in the skill of his hands but in knowing hers (p. 129). What she offers goes to the one who trusts her, to the good-hearted who followed with patience “at the time I ordain,” not to the merely learned (pp. 132, 136). Then, unexpectedly, something like a covenant appears: Help me, and I will help you; as you do for me, so I will do (p. 134). The alchemist echoes it late in his reply: the stone comes from Nature alone, yet not without her instrument, nor without the help of a wise person who understands the work (p. 150). Neither party is sufficient alone. Transformation is something done with, not something received or achieved. Anyone who has learned this the hard way will recognize the terms and conditions.

At another point in the narrative, the alchemist stops arguing. Not an hour passes before he says he does not think on what she told him, and whether he lies, walks, or stands, her words are there right before his eyes. It is the only place where the tract gives way to testimony — where the evidence becomes less about the interaction and more about how the one addressed has changed in thought, word, and action. That shift matters. The witness no longer describes the encounter; he describes what remains of it.

There is also a lesson in restraint. Once the seed is sealed in its vessel, he says, it needs no opening, no closing, no touching (p. 144). The work is to prepare the conditions and then take one's hands away. That may be the hardest part of any participatory practice, knowing the difference between tending, participating, interfering, and exploiting — helping versus hurting.

But the text is not without its contradictions, and I am no longer sure which side of the narrative is truth and which is stagecraft. The author's talk of reciprocity is incongruent with the book's language of hierarchy: nature is God's handmaid (p. 121); the alchemist thanks the power figure with “honor and praise” (p. 139). She contradicts her own claims about the secrets she may or may not possess or share (pp. 121–138). The author tells us out of both sides of his mouth that we are expected to be a partner, yet keeps writing as patron. He argues for partnership and participation while actively performing deference. Furthermore, all of this is a personified nature, staged as a debate, with a long history in theology and mythology. The overall narrative feels borrowed, with no indication of actual phenomenology, whether original or imported.

What I missed on first reading is that these are not small errors on the part of the author or the cosmology of Western alchemy. My own transformation has come through commitment and cooperation, not dramatic conflict or deliberate misdirection wrapped in hierarchical worship. What I have lived and learned through my own inner experiences has been attention, patience, thoughtfulness, and trust extended and tested — through learning the conditions of another's way of being before presuming to discern anything of or for myself. The book grasps that knowing comes by the company one keeps. What it fails to discover is that true reciprocity in partnership is wholly unexpected and unconditional, without rank or privilege.

The pleading, the afterimage, and the sealed vessel are the things I remember most. The text feels its most authentic when it momentarily forgets its theology and simply describes the relationship, the need, and the connection. Learn to know another fully, first. I believe this is a better rule for the actual inner metamorphosis than any of its prescriptions or borrowed concoctions.

#Philology #Intermundia

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Notes:

1. My copy is a 1743 German edition in Fraktur, which I cannot read unaided. The quoted lines are working translations and may differ from published English versions of this dialogue, which appears to descend from an earlier French original. This affects my accuracy for quotes and citations from the book.

2. Via Veritatis makes the same claim in this volume, that the old books mislead and the seeker must go to the source. Because they are compiled by teh same person, I count them as one witness. The admission of misdirection, though not uncommon, challenges credibility.

3. If a given work borrows its conceptual and lexical DNA from another, can we tell from the text alone which is which? Value is not always in being first, however. (See What we tell of the teller's telling.)

4. Can a relationship be both instructive and mutual? Nature claims to need the pupil's help, yet demands his obedience. This is not equality, partnership, or symbiosis. This draws my ire and skepticism based on my own lived experiences. But then, perhaps such a position was necessary given the witness’s mind and circumstances. As with most relationships, that question is best left to the two people involved.

5. The alchemist mentioned around p. 141 has already changed before he takes any action, which usually forms the basis for transmutation, and it feels unearned, or at least inconsistent. Though the physics of causality is not universal across orders or reality, the example given is immediately suspect. Perhaps the opus should’ve begun elsewhere? (See Truth as surrender, transit, and transformation.)

6. Alchemic texts have a problem of clarity in the way they are written to conceal as much as reveal.  Beweis der Natur and Via Veritatis both claim that the old books were written darkly on purpose, and that the reader must therefore go elsewhere. The question I once asked was why write a book only to tell people to look elsewhere? I suppose it reflects the truth that true wisdom is forged person by person and event by event rather than gifted from sage to student. I suppose it also reflects the fact that some witnesses must propagate their experience rather than suppress it.

7. An aside for the curious, the last stretch of this volume is a small comedy of attribution. The Nature dialogue is credited to “Johann von Mesung,” a borrowed name for who I believe to be the medieval poet Jean de Meun. Right after it comes the Summarium philosophicum (the French Sommaire philosophique), credited to Nicolas Flamel, who died in 1418 and very likely never wrote it. Flamel isn't even listed on the title page. He simply turns up as an uninvited guest as if on cue. Last comes the Via Veritatis, which names no author at all and spends most of its length warning the reader, rather oddly, not to trust books. That makes one borrowed name, one dead man's name, and one missing name. Two of the three agree that the old books mislead, and the third, Flamel's, is mostly a recipe involving dragons and a hen. Perhaps this was the way some people could only explain the unexplainable, for magic remains magic until it can be named, explained, and understood otherwise. As always, readers must draw their own conclusions, especially where the corridors are remote and the intersections are mislabeled.

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.