Careless Whisper - George Michael

"To the heart and mind. Ignorance is kind. There's no comfort in the truth. Pain is all you'll find"

There is a certain kind of truth that does not arrive as a revelation. It arrives as a receipt. You already knew what happened. You knew what was said, what was avoided, what changed in the room. But for a while, you could live beside it without naming it. You could make excuses. You could leave a little space around the facts and call it hope.

That is why ignorance can feel kind. It lets the heart keep its shoes on and it lets you move through the day without having to lay down in the middle of the room and admit that something you loved is different now.

Truth does not always heal immediately, sometimes it just removes the insulation. The grown-up mistake is assuming that truth is automatically comforting because it is better than a lie. It is better, eventually. But first, it can be brutal. It takes away the version of the story that allowed you to function. It makes you look directly at the gap between what you wanted and what actually happened.

Pain is not proof that truth was the wrong choice. It is often proof that the truth finally reached the part of you that had been protected from it. That is the terrible bargain: you can keep the comfort of not knowing, or you can know and lose the comfort.

Most of us do both for a while. We carry the truth around unopened until it gets too heavy to pretend it is not there.