Sooner or later, the truth hits you

 

May 17, 2026

I didn't sleep well again last night. I woke up around five in the morning, just before sunrise. The room is chilly, the window is cracked open a bit, and it smells like wet earth and the oncoming day. In moments like this, when the whole world is still asleep, it gets too quiet. Around me and inside me. The chaotic rush of the daytime - the one we hide in so easily - is gone, and you’re left completely alone with yourself. Stripped bare.

I stare into the dark and think about what fools we can be sometimes. For years, we can live inside these made-up, comfortable worlds. We decorate our wounds with beautiful words, calling the fear of loneliness "a great love," toxic attachment "destiny," and total isolation "a spiritual quest." It’s amazing how long a person can remain faithful to their own naivety. And it’s not because we are stupid or don’t understand what’s happening. We just desperately want there to be hope. Naivety is exactly that - a stubborn, childlike hope that this time everything will be fine, that the pain won’t repeat itself, that finally someone will come along, see us, and save us from our own chaos.

Except life doesn’t work that way. Sooner or later, the truth hits you. Not like a bolt from the blue or some massive life drama, but more like this morning light slowly and silently creeping into the room. It doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It just illuminates things exactly as they are - the dust on the furniture, the stains on the floor, the cracks. At some point, you stop blaming exes, parents, or bad luck for your unhappiness. You have to sit in front of the mirror and admit something pretty ugly: that you inflicted half of these wounds on yourself, simply because you chose to close your eyes when you should have been looking.

Therapists call it "meeting the shadow." It’s all those weak, frightened, sometimes selfish parts of ourselves that we’ve locked away in the basement of our minds because we’re ashamed of them. So we start living split in two. On the outside we say, "Everything is fine, I believe, I am strong," while on the inside everything is shrinking from pure, primal fear. But the body remembers every single lie, even when the mind masks it perfectly. Books call this a contradiction, but in reality, it's just a lack of wholeness. We live in the fault line between who we actually are and the image we desperately try to maintain for the world.

For a long time, I thought spirituality would save me from myself. I thought if I meditated enough, prayed regularly, or read thick books, my anxiety would disappear and God would fill all my gaps with some magical peace. Total nonsense. The spiritual path isn't an escape from human pain at all. It turned out to be the exact opposite - a descent straight into it. True prayer doesn't start when you feel purified, good, and holy. It starts when you are in pieces, sitting on the kitchen floor among the ruins of your own illusions, and despite everything, you're just looking for the strength to keep breathing.

That's why awakening hurts so much. It isn’t some cinematic enlightenment with angels and light. It’s a slow, creaking, and honestly pretty ugly collapse of everything you built your ego on. Suddenly you see that you loved people who simply didn't have the emotional capacity to meet your needs. You see that you sacrificed pieces of yourself for approval that never came. That you stayed silent for too long just to avoid losing someone else's presence, only to end up losing your own presence in your own life.

But there is a strange freedom in this collapse. The soul just gets tired of playing roles and pretending. The body starts to rebel—through insomnia, panic attacks, through that dull, heavy emptiness in your chest that no outside distraction can fix. The psyche forgets nothing. Trauma doesn't disappear when you ignore it or force yourself to be positive. It just finds another language - sometimes it turns into sickness, other times into depression, or into that heavy spiritual crisis where nothing makes sense anymore.

And right there in that personal desert, when everything has burned down, something real begins to sprout. Not when you’re inspired and everything is going well, but on mornings like this - when you’re sitting alone with a cup of cold tea and you just don’t have the strength to pretend anymore. When you don’t want to impress anyone - not people, not fate, not even God. Then your entire complex philosophy shrinks down to just a few words: "Help me just be real." I don't think God comes with thunder and miracles. He comes as silence and cold clarity. As the feeling that you no longer need to run away from the truth.

How strange it is that we spend years looking for love, when we are actually just looking for permission to exist. We want someone to tell us we are enough, that we are allowed to be here. Psychoanalysis is right about one thing: we inevitably love through the cracks of our old wounds. Almost always, we unconsciously choose people who cause us the same familiar childhood pain, simply because our psyche prefers a familiar hell over an unfamiliar freedom. It hurts when you realize this about yourself. You understand that in many of your relationships, you weren't driven by mature love, but by a deep, starving, childlike hunger.

But this painful clarity is also the beginning of true mercy. Not that superficial, sentimental sympathy, but a deep forgiveness toward your own human fragility. To be able to look at yourself - confused, scared, broken, and having messed up so many times - and still choose not to walk away from yourself. To not abandon your own soul right when it’s at its ugliest. That's when you understand that healing doesn't mean becoming perfect, it just means integrating everything. Gathering the scattered pieces and bringing them back home.

Sometimes I imagine the soul as an old house after a harsh winter. It’s cold inside, the walls are cracked, and the windows haven't been opened for years because we were terrified the wind would shatter the glass. And yet, when the first ray of sunlight cuts through, the dust in the air begins to glow. It doesn't magically vanish; the light just makes it beautiful. Maybe that's exactly what grace is - it doesn't erase our past or remove the scars, it just illuminates them with such tenderness that they stop looking so terrifying and unbearable.

The sun outside is finally rising. I can hear the birds starting to sing in the garden. Inside me, there’s no burst of euphoric happiness, but rather a very quiet, steady kind of calm. I accept that life will probably never be completely orderly, clear, or perfect. True maturity is exactly that - stopping the fight with the questions and learning to live with them.

To accept that faith is sometimes just this - keeping your heart open in the dark. Continuing to breathe. Refusing to let the pain turn you into a cynic. Having the courage to wake up to the truth over and over again, even when it shatters your old ideas about yourself, your relationships, and the world.

Because sooner or later, you just have to wake up. Not because of some high moral demands. But because staying asleep hurts too much, and your soul simply cannot survive in that dream.