17.

But it’s not gonna help the Great Illusion deal with any of its real problems is it mush?

I admit, I don’t know.

I confess, I do wonder.

I realise, of course it shall.

A life without truth is like a person without a soul. So I suppose it’s not really about being helpful. I think the worry is all in that word illusion, as if it means something akin to then why even get out of bed? when it means just as well there is no reason to stay there, less in fact. As if it is the same as living in a post-truth world where you are no longer sure what’s real any more, instead of realising you’re it. As if it means to let the rich carry on with their thieving or the liars get away with their lies, instead of relieving you of the worst of their influence, steadying you & readying you for the fight (the one you’ve already won).

Truth be told whatever it means is still unfolding for me, & while I can talk & think about it any old time, & while I know the truth is never not true, it only really lives in the moments that it strikes you. That’s the problem with formulaic truth, by the way, things you can state as true because of an arrangement of propositions that constitute their proof: it makes it possible to speak the truth as a lie. The truth is a living truth & it feels alive — it can’t really be recited, though poetry & song might give it a good try. It’s why it has so much in common with honesty, I guess they are one in revelation, where ordinary human honesty can perhaps be compromised by first swallowing lies. Or so I've heard.

My life has more than one way out now, I can say that. I won’t say I’ve been reborn but I’ve died right in the middle of things, perhaps more than once, & that’s rather refreshing. But I must admit it terrified me & still does. It is at once peaceful & disconcerting. For all the rainbows in my eyes my life has a black heart. A steady & sensitive heart for all it does not beat, as reassuring as my lover’s hand upon me, as weirdly cute as the bunny jumping on the bed, as oblique, as distant & intimate as these words must seem, as troubled & settled as my person. My kind of person.

We’ll be fine.