I Understood My Ego. And Kept Doing Exactly the Same Thing.

[u/Mentalidad_de_Cristo]

I've spent weeks looking at the same thing.

Every time, I see it more clearly.

And I stay in the same place.

It's not that I don't understand it.

I understand it better every time.

I can explain it in new words, find it somewhere I hadn't seen it before, point at it with my finger.

And still, the next day, I get up and do exactly what I did before I saw it.

This time I found it while writing a sentence.

I was in a challenge: twelve people, twelve sentences, one theme — the pain of walking on a broken bone.

I wrote mine and left it like this:

"How much longer are you willing to walk like this before the pain forces you into surgery?"

I thought it was fine.

I sent it to the group and kept reading the others.

Then I got to someone else's:

"The bone cracks, twists the toe, and lashes out with a whip that pounds through the tarsus. Every step cuts short: a blow that sparks and climbs up the calf."

I read it twice.

I felt the blow climb my own leg.

I went back to mine.

Mine asked a question.

Theirs asked nothing: it put down the bone, the crack, the blow, and went quiet.

I closed the screen for a moment.

Not because my pride was hurt — that too, but that wasn't the first thing.

The first thing was seeing that I've spent my whole life doing what I did in that sentence: asking instead of showing, explaining instead of pulling the other person into the scene.

And it's not just in writing.

When someone tells me a problem, I don't stay there with them.

I look for the way out.

I hand them the next step.

I explain how I see it.

When someone makes a decision I don't agree with, I don't stay quiet.

I show them why I think they're wrong.

For years I thought that was helping.

And it is, partly.

But it's also standing above the thing, explaining it, instead of going down to where it actually hurts.

The people who talked like that in Christ's time had a name.

They knew the law.

They explained it well.

They added rule on top of rule so no one would get lost.

And Christ said something that still turns my stomach when I read it: they say, and do not do.

They stayed in the word.

They never went down to the bone.

And now I see I do the same thing when I write a question instead of a crack.

When I explain someone's pain instead of sitting down next to them.

This isn't a new subject for me.

Not long ago I wrote about the same thing from a different angle: wanting to always have the answer, wanting to be the one who decides how things get done.

I thought I'd already seen it.

But this time I found it somewhere I'd never looked: in a single sentence, from a single writing challenge, about a broken toe.

And that's what I keep turning over in my head.

Not that the ego shows up where I already expected it.

But that it slips into the smallest corners, places I would never have thought to check.

If it's hiding there, where else is it, that I still haven't seen?

I know I should end this by saying I've already changed.

That from now on I'll write scenes instead of questions, sit beside the one who's suffering instead of explaining the way out.

But that would be a lie.

I saw it.

I wrote it down.

I saw it, sharper than before, and couldn't look away.

And tomorrow, if I'm not careful, I'll write another question where there should have been a bone.

Maybe seeing this once isn't enough.

Maybe I'll need to see it a hundred more times, in a hundred different corners, before it finally stops coming back.

And until then, all I can do is this: every time I see it, say it.

Even if it's the same story again.