I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to share this digitally, on here. After some time and processing⦠I felt that if I donāt then it would bring dishonor. It deserves its own recognition.
Intelligence makes you dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own. You stop borrowing thoughts. Instead, you start questioning. Looking deeper. Observing quietly. Reading patterns. You stop believing something just because everyone around you believes it. Trends, popular opinions have zero effect on you. You draw your own conclusions by experiencing life directly. You test. You understand. You only believe in things that feel true in your heart. That's what gives you the courage to stand alone with your own perception. And once someone learns how to think for themselves⦠they become impossible to control.
Trust your gut. Your body knows before your mind accepts it. The strange feeling you get around someone. The heaviness after every conversation. The little moments where their actions donāt match their words. Pay attention. Your intuition is quiet. It doesnāt scream. It just whispers: āsomething feels off.ā Learn to listen.
People are cold enough to destroy your reputation to climb higher without thinking twice. That's not coldness, that's strategy, and most folks are too busy nursing their wounds to notice the game being played.
Reputation is currency, and some people will counterfeit yours to fund their own rise. They don't lose sleep because they've already decided your downfall is just the toll for their upgrade. Stop expecting fairness from someone who never signed up for it.
The lesson isn't "trust no one," it's "stop handing your name to people who profit from burning it." Protect your story before someone else gets to narrate it for you.
Silence won't save you, receipts will.
Build quietly, document everything, and let your results do the talking when the smoke clears. Cold people don't need your forgiveness, they need your indifference. Outgrow the need to be understood by people who never intended to see you clearly in the first place.
Good people have high levels of empathy, but once that empathy is exhausted, they switch to a state of objective observation. They see you for exactly who you are, without the filter of their love. This is why their anger feels so cold, it is the absence of the warmth you took for granted
My father never read a book about parenting in his life. he was this kind of quiet, worn down man, strong posture, big hands, who came home every day smelling like work and sat next to me and said nothing half the time. but i watched his hands my entire childhood. i watched what he did when he was angry, i watched what he did when money ran out. i watched what he did when my mother cried, which was stay and not explain. he didn't know i was building my entire understanding of what a man is supposed to be from these stupid little moments. he didn't know that his silence was my only sermon
Russell Crowe on Gladiator 2:
āThey failed, and they failed because they didnāt understand what made the first film so successful: it had a moral core. Hereās the thing, most people want that. On the surface, they might go for entertainment, but if theyāre going to love something and keep it with them forever, like that movie? ā¦The love for that thing is because of its moral core. All guys want to be that man who can stay that strong, and all women want a man who can love them in that way.ā
Narcissists are the most dangerous for your mental health, never let them have a chance to hurt you.
They thrive on control, manipulation, and draining your energy. They twist reality until you doubt yourself, then feed off that confusion. They don't care about your feelings, only about maintaining their power. The longer you stay around them, the more damage they do.
Cut them off fast, don't negotiate, don't explain, don't give them space to crawl back. Protect your boundaries like they're nonānegotiable rules. Your peace of mind is worth more than their fake charm or empty promises. Walking away is not weakness, it's survival.
Once the veil lifts and you see that you are allowed to reach into the nothing and pull something sacred out of it, a woman, a company, a family, a book, a song that outlives you, you can never go back to being a consumer. you have tasted the blood of creation and the blood remembers you. from then on every day without making is a little death, and you will feel it in your chest like withdrawal, because the same hand that God used to separate light from darkness is living in yours, and it refuses to stay closed
Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings.
He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power ā but why?
Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself...
Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees." He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely.
This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot. Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil.
The hobbits meet Bombadil early on in their quest, before they reach Bree and the Prancing Pony Inn. He rescues Merry and Pippin from Old Man Willow, and invites the hobbits to stay at his house in the Old Forest.
There, the hobbits realize something strange about him: the Ring has no power over Bombadil whatsoever.
When he wears it, he remains visible. He treats it as a plaything, making it disappear with a magic trick. Indeed, at the Council of Elrond, Gandalf rejects the idea of giving the Ring to Tom, for he would likely misplace it or forget about it entirely.
So just who is he, exactly?
When Frodo asks this very question to Tom's wife Goldberry, she simply responds "He is." It's a cryptic answer that echoes God's famous answer to Moses in the Book of Exodus: "I am who I am."
Thus, many theorize that Bombadil is God, some kind of angelic being, or even the spirit of the Music of the Ainur (due to the fact that he is constantly singing). But Tolkien's letters reveal something considerably more interestingā¦
In April 1954, Tolkien wrote:
"The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship⦠but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control.But if you have, as it were, taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself⦠then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valuelessā¦"
So, Bombadil is a representation of what it means to take pure delight in the world around you ā to experience people and things simply as theyĀ are, without any thought for what they could be or how you could use them. And this is why the Ring has no power over him.
To Bombadil, the One Ring is simply a ring, and the possibilities of what can be achieved through its power are of no importance. He is able to resist its evil precisely because he is entirely content with the world around him.
At the end of the story, having accomplished what he set out to do in Middle-earth, Gandalf pays Tom a visit before returning to the Undying Lands:
"I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time."
If Bombadil is the epitome of simply enjoying life andĀ being, Gandalf is the epitome ofĀ doing. He guides the hobbits, fights the Balrog, and runs up and down Middle-earth to help destroy the One Ring.
But now that he's finally liberated fromĀ doing, he immediately heads to Bombadil's. He does so with a sense of relief, as if he's at last able to access a purer and higher mode of being ā a sort of innocence that cannot be fully experienced by those consumed by doing.
Of course, by this Tolkien doesn't disparage the value of action. The entirety ofĀ LOTRĀ displays the importance of rising up against evil, even in the face of all odds. But with the inclusion of Bombadil, he does remind readers that fighting isn'tĀ allĀ there is.
Bombadil reminds us that while it's important to strive andĀ *do*, it is just as important to occasionally step back andĀ *be*. Indeed, your ability to do so plays a crucial role in helping you resist the allure of evilā¦
Read the full piece here:
https://t.co/aqK2daehIL
The unsung hero of The Lord of the Rings...
Genuinely wanting the best for someone who hates you is such a specific flex. I mean most people can barely want the best for their own friends without some competitive shit creeping in. doing it for someone who actively dislikes you is borderline insane
The noise protects the narcissist.
The silence isolates the one who was hurt.
But here's what they don't tell you:
Standing alone doesn't mean you were wrong.
Most of the time, it means you refused to participate in the dysfunction.
Never date someone with an avoidant attachment. They will dodge intimacy, shut down when things get real, and leave you carrying the weight of the relationship alone.
You'll spend your time chasing connection that never comes, while they keep their distance and justify it as independence. That's not love, that's avoidance.
Don't waste energy trying to fix what they refuse to face. Walk away before their detachment turns into your frustration.
Abandonment is not just someone leaving you, it is also someone not meeting your needs, someone not respecting your boundaries, someone not keeping their word, someone not reciprocating the love you give, and someone not valuing your presence.
Abandonment is not just about those who fail to show up for you physically, but also about those who fail to show up mentally and emotionally.
Nothing will shape your worldview as much as simply reading how humans from the past thought.
You realize very quickly that our time is a radical anomaly in human history.