Appropriate Lies

We pretend this conversation lives between truth and lies, but it never has. It lives between capacity and collapse. Between what can be known and what can be survived. Between what feels morally clean and what actually keeps human systems intact. Truth does not enter a vacuum. It enters bodies. Nervous systems. Attachment histories. Unfinished developmental arcs. And the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves sounds like virtue: that truth, by virtue of being accurate, must always heal. That belief has destroyed more relationships, more psyches, and more lives than deception ever could.