When we talk about growth, correction, or endurance, it is easy to forget that these things are not abstract. They are lived. They land in people who have already invested years, identity, and love into a place they chose as home.

Uprooting a life is not a thought experiment. It leaves wounds that do not fade just because other lives continue on. The measure of the response to that pain matters, even when it demands expression.

Sometimes it sharpens into resolve. Sometimes it hardens into anger. Sometimes it withdraws into quiet. Sometimes it sheds the scars of its old life for something new and lives with the phantom pain of a life half-remembered.

None of these are moral failures. But they do shape our world. And at what cost? Our world is diminished by what we refuse to make room for and defined by the absences we enforce. How forcefully we correct and how easily we discard others must change.

Strength that cannot hold grief, doubt, dissent, anger, fear, longing, or exhaustion is not stable. Its adherents are not well-stewarded. It is not righteousness, the restoration of balance, or even necessity.

It is only strain, a tightening of space, a narrowing that waits for someone else to break within it, to be forced out, or to vanish because remaining becomes impossible.

TD


Penned by my hand on the 12th of Scarlatan, in the year 994 AF.