Undeceived, with Love

For over twenty years, I have sat with people at the precise moment their lives stop making sense — when the story they built breaks, and what remains is not yet a story.

I am also a writer. Not because I chose it, but because some things cannot be contained in the clinical hour alone. They need form where the self is both therapist and subject. Where the question is not what do you need but what remains unanswered—and why that is the most intimate.

These essays begin there. I write about love that does not survive what it teaches. About the stranger who appears only when the known self has exhausted itself. About what happens when the distance between the one who listens and the one who speaks vanishes—and neither can tell.

— Yoon Im Kane

Undeceived, with Love

Deceive — decipere — to ensnare. To be deceived is to be trapped. And what I cannot unsee is that the trap was never the untruth someone told me. Never the lover. Never the institution. Never the one that got away.

The trap is the mind's own architecture. The mind that looks at itself and cannot see that the looking is the problem.

I love you — wall. I hate you — wall. My wound, my healing — wall. Each one a room the self builds and furnishes and calls my inner life. And the totality of those rooms is the prison. Built from the inside, thought by thought, until the architect forgets she is the architect. She moves through her own construction believing something else trapped her.

Even belonging. Even the house we build from our own voice and call home. Because the self that arrives and says I finally belong here is still building. Still naming the construction so it never has to face what lies beneath the foundation.

To be undeceived is to see this without looking away. Without the mind rushing to convert what it sees into a story about seeing.

And that seeing is violent. Not like war. Violent like a thread pulled from the center of a garment. The whole thing comes apart. Quietly. Completely. What remains is not a better costume. It is the thread. The thing before the pattern. Before the name.

Then a voice, from somewhere I did not expect:

"I am so relieved… I thought I had destroyed you."

What remained…

simply was.