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Perfect hearts break
Broken souls heal
Truth needs both
-安天美
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Titi believed herself incapable of cruelty. When she met David at university, she catalogued his flaws like pressed flowers in a journal: his tendency to arrive late, his habit of interrupting, the way he sometimes forgot to call his mother. She loved him, certainly, but with the careful distance of someone who knew herself to be fundamentally different. Better. More considerate. More aware.
The righteousness felt warm in her chest, a small fire that never went out. She corrected his grammar in public. Suggested better books. Explained why his political opinions needed refining. Each correction was a gift, she told herself. Each suggestion was love made manifest. The fire grew brighter with every improvement she offered, every gentle redirection toward the person she knew he could become.
What she didn't realise was that this false purity was making her brittle. Real resilience requires the flexibility to bend without breaking, but Titi had constructed herself like a cathedral: beautiful, imposing, and utterly inflexible when the storms came.
Three years later, when David finally walked away, Titi’s carefully constructed goodness cracked like ancient pottery. The words that spilled from her lips in that final argument were not the words of someone who had never caused harm. They were precise. Cutting. Designed to wound in places only she knew were tender. The woman who emerged in that moment was a stranger: someone capable of weaponising intimacy, of turning love's knowledge into cruelty's blade.
The mirror that night showed her a face she didn't recognise. Not because it was ugly, but because it was complete. The saint and the sinner occupied the same skin, breathed through the same lungs, beat within the same heart. For the first time, she understood what her friends meant when they spoke of their own struggles with anger, with jealousy, with the small violences they committed in moments of pain. She had been so busy being good that she had forgotten to be human.
This breaking open was the beginning of true resilience. Not the brittle kind that shatters at the first real test, but the flexible strength that comes from knowing yourself capable of both creation and destruction, love and harm.
Recovery began with a phone call to her sister, the one family member who had never been impressed by Titi’s moral performances. "I think I might be a terrible person," Titi whispered into the receiver. Her sister's laughter was not unkind. "Welcome to the human race, darling. We've been waiting for you." The conversation that followed lasted three hours and covered territory Titi had spent years avoiding: the times she had been selfish, dismissive, unconsciously cruel.
Learning to see herself clearly required the kind of courage she had never needed when goodness was her shield. It meant acknowledging the part of her that had enjoyed feeling superior to David, that had thrived on being the teacher rather than the student. It meant recognising that her helpfulness had sometimes been control, her kindness sometimes condescension. The woman who emerged from this reckoning was not perfect, but she was real.
This was where resilience truly began: in the willingness to look honestly at the full spectrum of who she was and choose growth over the comfortable fiction of moral superiority.
When Titi returned to her friend group months later, something had shifted. Where she once offered advice, she now asked questions. Where she once corrected, she now listened. The change was subtle, like a radio finally tuned to the right frequency. Her friends began sharing struggles they had never mentioned before, struggles they had hidden from someone who seemed too pure to understand messiness.
Maya Angelou once wrote about the necessity of being human in all its complexity, and Titi began to understand what that meant in practice. It meant sitting with Sarah when she confessed to the affair that ended her marriage, without offering solutions or judgements. It meant celebrating Kemi's promotion whilst acknowledging her own envy. It meant showing up as someone who had also made mistakes, who had also hurt people she loved, who had also failed to live up to her own standards.
The resilience she built in community was different from what she had imagined. It wasn't the solitary strength of someone who never falls down, but the collective power of people who help each other get back up, who see falling as part of the dance rather than evidence of failure.
The community that formed around this new honesty was stronger than anything Titi had known before. When conflicts arose, they were met with curiosity rather than cancellation. When someone caused harm, they were met with accountability that included the possibility of repair. The social contract they built together was not based on perfection but on the shared commitment to growth, to seeing each other clearly, to holding space for both the light and shadow in every human heart.
Titi never spoke to David again, but she carried the lesson of their relationship forward. In her new friendships, her family relationships, her professional collaborations, she practiced the art of being whole rather than good. She discovered that when she stopped trying to be the saint in every story, others stopped needing to be the sinners. When she embraced her capacity for both love and harm, she could finally offer the kind of compassion that heals rather than judges.
This was the resilience she needed: not the kind that pretends harm doesn't exist, but the kind that faces it honestly and chooses healing anyway. Not strength that stands alone, but courage that builds bridges even after they've been burned.
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<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> River Season
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<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Chisel Joy
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