Blog Full - Maurice Leavitt | Personal Essays, Travel Writing & Reflections

8 Oct 2025

Power Over vs Power With

by Maurice | posted in: Adventure | 0

The concept of power is misunderstood. We see it all over the media, politics & government, academics, leadership, and relationships. Most often, power is distorted into a hierarchical form, a chain of command. Which is true but, only partially true. There is another side to power rarely talked about, and it deserves a voice.

The Shape of Power

Power is everywhere. From kings conquering empires and committing genocide. To the quiet power of love and connection between people and communities.

It moves through families as silence, abandonment and favoritism. It governs classrooms and workplaces through fear or mistrust. It shapes governments, economies, cultures and markets. It also shows up in the body as sexuality … raw, undeniable and impossible to fake.

In each encounter we make, the concept of power can bend either way.
Power over … domination, control, diminishment.
Power with … connection, illumination, expansion

We can feel the difference in our bodies. The tightening of our throats when we hesitate to speak or when we are silenced. The expansion in our chest, breathing more easily, when we are given the chance to be heard, to tell our story and be seen.

Power is never a neutral concept. It always shapes who we are becoming … as individuals and as a human race.

First Lessons: The Family

This is our first taste of power.

Some parents were heavy handed, ruling with anger and punishment. Pinning siblings against each other, playing favorites, and demanding loyalty at any cost. More often, though, power hid in silence, in what could not be said. Truths were buried for the sake of keeping the family intact, even if it meant tearing the family apart from the inside.
This is power over … thriving on secrecy, shame and control.

And then the truth teller arrives. The one who speaks the unsayable. Who questions and refuses the inherited family storyline script. Their intention may be repair, but their reflection can sometimes feel like an attack on the status quo. They get accused of being disloyal, cruel and judgmental.

Because power over cannot tolerate reflections or mirrors. To reflect is to be a rebel.

What the truth teller offers is not the concept of “power over” but the invitation into power with. To face problems together. To be a compassionate listener, even when it hurts to hear. To risk honesty for something more than the silence. For the sake of real love and connection.

Families can rise, or they can fall apart, on this choice.

Work & Authority

I worked at a government community college for 25 years, through six different administrations. This same choice between power over and power with plays out in every workplace as well.

One president of the college I worked at shoved his decisions down everyone’s throats. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” Not many people had the courage to stand up to him. Fear drove obedience. But obedience did not inspire anyone to be a better person or improve their performance. It encouraged people to protect themselves. Not step out of line. Work to rule. Creativity died.

Another president expressed appreciation often. “We are all in this together.” He held his authority, sharing successes and decision-making responsibility. He welcomed every voice. He kept an open-door policy and encouraged conversation. Trust grew. People gave more than they were asked. Not because they were afraid, but because they felt seen.

It isn’t about questioning authority. The real question is: how is authority held?

In the Classroom

I saw the same power dynamics in the classroom with students. There is always a hierarchy between teacher and student. The teacher holds the experience and curriculum… and the student must demonstrate their acquired knowledge.

But what happens when a student takes longer to learn than the time allotted? Who is responsible for the learning?
In modern academics, the power over concept dominates. Administrators are responsible for the budget, matriculation numbers and graduation rates. They pressure the teachers to move students through the system. When students don’t make the cut, the teachers are blamed. Money and control drive this power over model.

I chose a different approach, the power with model. Students are responsible for their own learning. I cannot make them learn. Just like in life, we cannot make anyone do anything. What I can do is make myself available, create the space for the students to practice, and walk beside them.

If a student drops out because they realize they want to do something else, I still believe I have done my job as a teacher. Because education is not just about skills, but about helping students find direction, purpose, and a path that belongs to them.

Politics and Culture

Stretch the lens wider, and the stakes sharpen.

Fascistic regimes are built on power over. Look at what is happening in America and other nations. Resources are being hoarded by the rich, promises made and remain undelivered. Team members who disagree do not verbalize, which serves to control public opinion and stifle debate. Fear rules. Safety is guaranteed, but only if you obey.
Corruption is power over. Manufacturing scarcity so the few can control the many.

Capitalism carries the same power over principles. Relationships… human, ecological, relational … are reduced to resources for profit making. Culture is flattened by stripping away our multi-dimensional complexities and sold as something to be consumed. Big-box stores replace the messy resilience of local markets. People are reduced to consumers whose worth is measured by their spending.

But there are other ways.

Local markets are noisy, chaotic, alive and sometimes overwhelming. They embody power with. They build resilience by shortening the distance between the people and the resources that sustain life. Sellers are makers. Buyers are neighbors. Exchange becomes relationship. These roles multiply by restoring dignity beyond “consumerism”. Community is built through commerce.

Every culture leans one way or the other. Toward domination or cooperation. Toward diminishment or illumination. And the consequences are lived inside our bodies, our economies, and shows up on our streets.

Sexuality: The Body’s Laboratory

Nowhere is the difference between power over and power with felt more nakedly than in sex. The body becomes the place where “domination over” and “connection with” show their truth. Flesh doesn’t lie.

“Power Over” Sex

The conquest … and one of the oldest scripts. Penis power!

He takes her. Owns her. She yields. Sometimes resistance provokes his violence. His penetration, his orgasm – the end of the story. Her climax? Her pleasure? Optional. Secondary. Sometimes not even tended to or considered.
This is power over… Domination confused with intimacy. Submission confused with connection. Possession mistaken for love. Control mistaken for safety. Presence replaced by performance, masking the vulnerable act of truly being with another. The freedom to be fully yourself is love.

Power over thrives on illusion. Feeding on the gap between appearance and reality. Offering only the shadows of what we long for and need: safety, belonging, and even love. But behind the curtain, what’s revealed is control instead of protection, dependence instead of belonging, possession instead of love.

“Power With” Sex

Now, turn it all around … pussy power!

The woman’s pleasure is the priority. She comes first. This is where everything changes.

The penis is no longer the conqueror but a partner and co-creator. Her orgasm is not the icing on the cake, it becomes the entire meal, and you don’t get to skip it. Sex shifts from a goal-oriented race to an expansion of connection and love. Desire is no longer taken for granted… it is a shared commodity.

When sex is practiced as power with, bodies fuse in union. Lovers become undone together. Not by taking from each other, but by giving.

The BDSM Paradox

No arena shows this truth sharper than BDSM. From the amateur and outsider perspective, it looks like power over. The bondage, submission, pain and commands.

But deeper on the inside, the dynamic flips, and it tells a completely different story. Every action, every scene, rests on trust and negotiation. With each swing of the flogger, every spanking, every command is ruled by consent. The dom’s power is made real only because the sub chooses it to be.

It’s not the sub being of service to the dom. It’s the dom in service to the submissive. Submission becomes the authority. The safe word is the true center of gravity.

This is where we can see the paradox of power over versus power with. The one who is bound and submissive is free and the one who we think is in control is serving.

Flesh as Revelation

In the logic of power over, sex collapses into a performance. The body is treated as object rather than participant. Bodies meet, without honor, without compassion. Pleasure becomes an extraction, intimacy simulated, and the encounter reduced to pure friction without embodied intimate recognition. What passes as connection is only the illusion of closeness — release mistaken for relationship, dominance mistaken for connection.

In contrast, power with sexuality shifts into discovery. A reciprocal exchange. Intimacy is not taken for granted but co-created. Needs are exchanged, not imposed upon. Giving and receiving are in union. Intimacy grows through shared vulnerability, through the willingness to learn each other’s humanness. Here, sexuality becomes a practice ground, showing us that genuine connection cannot be built on control, but only on co-creation.

Moral Repair

Power is not only about who leads or who follows. It sets the conditions in which our moral lives grow—conditions that can either strengthen us or slowly wear us down.

David Brooks speaks of illuminators and diminishers—the people who expand humanity and the ones who want to shrink it.

Power over diminishes, severing trust. It promotes silence, compliance, and self-betrayal until people forget the strength of their own voice.

Power with illuminates. It multiplies strength. It builds togetherness. It creates belonging. It restores our dignity.
The crisis of our time is not intelligence—we are already drowning in information. It is not technology—we are wired beyond measure. The crisis is relational. We have forgotten what it means to have power with. We are living through a crisis of intimacy.

Moral repair begins here. In remembering that strength is not found in putting others down but in helping them stand. Not in possession or control, but in showing up honestly, vulnerably, willing to be seen. Not through dramatic gestures, but through ordinary everyday acts of generosity and kindness. Listening without interrupting or offering unsolicited advice. Showing ourselves without deception and carrying power in a way that we can share.

29 Sep 2025

The Double Edge of Sarcasm

by Maurice | posted in: Ask For What You Want, Compassion, Conflict Resolution, Ethics, Heart Opening, Relationship | 0

The Laugh That Also Stings

I have been told I have this sarcastic wit about me … sometimes humorous and sometimes even acerbic. I’m not exactly sure where I inherited it, where it came from or where I have learned it. The double edge of sarcasm. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism. A way to manage difficult situations with what I called “humor.”

“Were you the one who bought the milk in the refrigerator? … No, the milk bottle grew legs and landed in the refrigerator by itself”

The Double Edge: Behind the Curtain

Sarcasm is a double-edged sword and sometimes I struggle to find its lighter edge. At its best, it bonds—through inside jokes like, “Oh sure, you never burned anything that you were cooking before.” Said with a smile … meant to be the opposite of criticism… it lands as the play of an inside joke rather than a stinging barb.

Sometimes sarcasm can make a hard truth more palatable. Instead of telling someone they are full of shit… I can say “Good thing I wore my boots – it’s getting pretty deep in here.” Humor softens the confrontation. But for sarcasm to carry light, the relationship needs to have enough trust built for the message to be heard with the humor in which it was intended. But sarcasm is risky and can be slippery: it hides the true message under a layer of irony, and the listener must unpack it. Sometimes they laugh, sometimes they flinch. Out of our control.

More often in my life, I’ve felt the other edge … cutting, dismissive, evasive. I’ve used sarcasm against myself, too— as a protection mechanism. Shielding both past and future wounds with irony. Pretending not to care when I cared deeply. In the process, I cut myself off from my own healing. Sarcasm can bond, yes—but for me, it has more often cut than healed. It’s a sword I’ve struggled to set down.

The Cultural Mirror

Sarcasm wears different faces in different cultures. Watching “The Roses”, a dark comedy soaked in sarcasm, two people who can no longer meet in tenderness Their wit becoming the language of destruction. How easily wit can turn into cruelty. We laugh because it’s familiar, but underneath the humor is the heartbreak left unattended. Sarcasm becomes the clever phrase that covers up a wound, avoids vulnerability, and sincerity.

By contrast, much of British comedy treats sarcasm almost like it might be affection. Quick banter, playful exaggeration, a sly dig that says, we know each other well enough to laugh at this. The cultural meaning becomes a sign of cleverness and belonging.

But sarcasm doesn’t travel the same everywhere in the world.

In America, sarcasm often becomes a coping mechanism for what feels unbearable. After yet another mass shooting in a school, “Thoughts and prayers — that’ll fix it,” or, “At least the Second Amendment is doing its job”. The sarcastic bitter humor says what people are afraid to say plainly… That the government refuses to act while lives keep being lost. The bitter humor becomes a way of surviving the violence met with inaction. The constant sarcasm also risks numbing the feelings by turning tragedy into memes and a punchline. Sarcasm shows us the wound but doesn’t heal it.

In parts of Asia, sarcasm is far less common, rare, and often unwelcome. It is too risky and has potential for disrupting social harmony. Likely causing someone to lose face. What one culture hears as wit, another hears as insult. Sarcasm doesn’t always bond … it causes confusion and alienation.

asiansarcasm2 — A scenario plugged into the framework of Japan Insight’s Cross-Cultural Communication Model (Copyright © 2019)

The Classroom Ache

As a teacher, I leaned on sarcasm to energize a classroom. In a kitchen, everyone is a food critic. We are all critical about the taste in the food dishes we cook. My intent was to alleviate and quiet some of the internal critic inherent we all carry. To help students laugh at our mistakes instead of being buried by them.

“Everyone gets a trophy? Everyone gets an “A”? Not in my classroom kitchen. Not every restaurant earns a Michelin star either.”

What happens when we get critical feedback or make a mistake with our cooking?

My intention and goal was to help students handle mistakes, and to take critical feedback without collapsing under it. To lighten up the critical voice we have inside our heads, criticizing ourselves. But later, I heard that some students felt diminished by my sarcasm. What I meant as light humor had landed as insult. That ache stays with me, because intent never erases impact.

Sarcasm as Shield

Sarcasm can feel safer than the true expression of sadness, grief or love. It is closer at hand than risking speech from our tender, vulnerable hearts. A teacher once told me that sarcasm is often a way to avoid speaking the truth. I’ve seen how often that has been true for me. As the black sheep in my family, I have used sarcasm to protect myself from saying what I most long to say: I care, I hurt, I love.

We use sarcasm to mask revealing old wounds and to guard against new ones. To sidestep affection for fear it will not be returned. To keep from revealing how deeply we feel about someone or something. Or to avoid the embarrassment of saying “I don’t know”. Sarcasm lets us push away our tenderness with wit and pretend not to care when, in fact, we care the most.

But the cost of is steep. Sarcasm may keep us safe from rejection, but it also dismisses us from our own healing, staying in avoidance instead of presence, and from intimacy with ourselves and with others. It shields us from the expression of longing—and at the same time, it shields us from one of the most important things in life… giving and receiving love.

Closing – The Invitation

My reasoning for this writing was to acknowledge the duality: sarcasm isn’t all inherently bad. It can bond, lighten, release tension, and carry us through the absurdity of situations. But when it hardens us into shielding ourselves or a weaponizing our words… It distances us from truth, connection, and from the very healing we need the most.

So here is the invitation…. What if, in the moments when sarcasm feels like the closest thing to grab, we risked being sincerity instead? What if we choose tenderness over cleverness, presence over irony, love over defense?
The cost of sarcasm is safety without intimacy.

The promise of sincerity is in the risk with the possibility of belonging.

3 Sep 2025

Madonna: Material Girl to Mystical Struggles

by Maurice | posted in: philosophy, reflections, Spirituality, Vulnerability | 0

Preface

This is not just an essay about Madonna. It’s about all of us — about how the ego shows up in our lives. Our hunger for recognition. The resistance to limits. The clash with authority, and the yearning to be seen on our own terms. Madonna’s career gives us a vivid stage where ego plays out in the spotlight. But, the same dynamics unfold quietly in our families, workplaces, and inner lives. What follows is less a biography than a mirror.

From Boy Toy to Ego Battle

Madonna has never been just a pop star. She has been a mirror, a provocation, and at times, a spiritual experiment played out on the world’s stage. To watch her career is to watch someone wrestle with ego in public. Not only flaunting it, but also trying, again and again, to transcend it.

It took me a while to become fond of Madonna. I didn’t see the appeal of her pop music or style when she made her first appearance in the 80s. She seemed hungry for attention and was willing to push the limits of the music industry and of society itself.

But by the late 90’s and early 2000s came, her music shifted. The sharp edges of ego softened as well as some of her self-centeredness. She became a mother, embraced yoga and Kabbalah, and her spiritual practice showed in the evolution of her music. She seemed more interested in growth and self-examination than in controversy … at least for a time.

This evolution feels familiar: how we go from “I”-centered, to “we”-centered over the course of life. David Brooks writes in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life … “The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self; the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self”.

I became more interested after I watched Madonna’s video Die Another Day for the 100^th or so time. I hadn’t seen it in years and this time I noticed something new. The Hebrew letters tattooed on her arm … ל (Lamed), א (Aleph), ו (Vav). In Kabbalah, ל־א־ו is traditionally linked with ego-dissolution, the movement from selfishness to humility. That detail pulled me in and motivated me to write about Madonna’s musical expression as an ego battle.

Express Yourself: Ego as Empowerment

She broke through in the 80’s with her songs “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin”. Her style was bold and unapologetically self-focused. With lace gloves, crucifixes, tulle skirts and her “boy toy” belt buckle. It screamed: look at me, I’m in charge of my sexuality, I make the rules. Young women copied her, creating the Madonna craze.
Then came Express Yourself (1989). Here, Madonna turned ego into an anthem — the will to want more, demand more, and refusing to settle.

“Don’t go for second best, baby, put your love to the test.”

It wasn’t just a hunger for attention. It was about knowing your worth, self-respect, self-assertion, and a refusal to accept crumbs.

This was Madonna’s “ego era”. She fueled dignity, empowerment, and liberation for women in a culture that often-told women to stay small. Through ambition, grabbing attention, eroticism, and breaking rules, she made ego a force of self-empowerment.

Blond Ambition: Wrestling with Authority

By the 1990’s ego became the spectacle. The Blonde Ambition Tour. Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bras, simulated sex acts, and Catholic imagery. Madonna pushed the limits of taste, art, and religion. Her stagecraft turned into an open war against authority.

This was the Vatican’s first condemnation. Officials pressured the Italian government to intervene, calling the show “blasphemous”. (It also happened again during her “confessions” world tour.) In Toronto, police threatened to arrest her for “indecency” because of her simulated masturbation scene during “Like a Virgin”. She refused to change, went ahead, and no arrests followed. What began as self-promotion was now rebellion.

Through the 90s, Madonna wore ego like a mask. Vogue glamorized reinvention. Erotica flaunted provocation. Bedtime Stories softened her image. Ray of Light shifted toward spirituality and motherhood. The decade was experimentation: ego not erased, but fluid, changing masks at will.

Madonna wasn’t just hungry for attention; she was experimenting with identity itself. Her study of Kabbalah and her becoming a mother added layers of depth to her reinventions. Through her songwriting, she demonstrated that her ego was still central — but no longer rigid. It became more fluid, a mask she could slip on and off, a tool for exploring who she might become.

Die Another Day: The Inner Duel

By the early 2000s, her relationship with ego shifted again and she turned inward and became more reflective. Motherhood and Kabbalah deepened her themes. What once was done for shock value, turned into a self-examination. Nowhere clearer than in her James Bond soundtrack single, Die Another Day (2002).

In the video, she doesn’t fight Bond villains — she fights herself. The ego that once gave her self-empowerment now becomes her opponent. Tied, gagged, shocked, drowned, fencing with her own double. These aren’t just spy-movie clichés. They mirror the everyday battle with ego … craving more, never being satisfied, the pride that keeps us armored, the fear of letting go. Ego doesn’t just sit quietly — it drags us into battles we didn’t ask for and leaves us exhausted.

Madonna herself said the song was about inner conflict and transformation. The Hebrew letters ל־א־ו tattooed on her arm marked that struggle. These letters are connected to “transcending the ego”. Ego, in this sense, is what traps us in destructive cycles — pride, rage, fear, self-importance.

In Kabbalah, ego isn’t destroyed — it’s redirected. The vessel of self can either hoard for itself or open to share. Kabbalah doesn’t call for ego death but for restriction. The learning to pause before acting, so the same fire that fuels self-centeredness can be turned outward to serve. Madonna’s video shows the duel between those two impulses — the self that clings, and the self that surrenders.

The Shadow of Service

Even as her music shifted, Madonna’s public life reflected the same paradox.

Over the years, Madonna was involved in many philanthropic efforts. During the height of the AIDS crisis. She was one of the few megastars to speak openly and fundraise for research. She has been a consistent ally to the LGBTQ+ community. Raising money and awareness for LGBTQ+ rights, HIV prevention, and anti-discrimination campaigns.
She performed at Live Aid (1985), for Ethiopian famine relief, and at Live 8 (2005) to raise awareness about global poverty. She appeared on the Tsunami Aid (2005) telethon and donated proceeds from her “Hung Up” single to Hurricane Katrina disaster victims.

In 2006 she founded Raising Malawi, a nonprofit to support orphans and vulnerable children. She built 10 schools and created the Mercy James Centre for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care in Lilongwe. The hospital named after her adopted daughter. She adopted four children from Malawi. With the documentary I Am Because We Are (2008) she tried to spotlight the crisis. Some critics accused her of this being another one of her famous publicity stunts.

From her perspective, this was Kabbalah in action — tikkun olam, repairing the world with the platform she’d been given. From her critics’ view, it was ego masquerading as service, the “white savior” centering herself in another people’s story. The truth is probably both. The same ego she tried to shed was also the engine that made her philanthropy visible.

That paradox is as human as it gets.

Ego’s True Work

Madonna never killed her ego. Maybe she never needed to. Is the ego meant to be destroyed? Kabbalah doesn’t teach ego death. It teaches restriction. The discipline of pausing before acting. So the same fire that fuels self-centeredness can be redirected toward something larger than the self.

Sometimes her ego betrayed her. Sometimes it lifted others. But the fight with the ego itself … and the endless wrestling between self-centeredness and service, between spotlight and surrender … is what made her career more than a pop music and superstar spectacle.

In the end, Madonna’s journey shows us something true: the ego doesn’t die. It doesn’t need to. It cannot. What matters is not erasing the ego but choosing how we wield it. Whether for our own personal gain, or for something greater that reaches beyond ourselves.

24 Aug 2025

The Truth-Teller, the Disturber, and the Black Sheep

by Maurice | posted in: Compassionate Conversation, Conflict Resolution, Retirement, Speaking Your Truth, Thailand, Truth | 2

How silence shapes families, workplaces, and cultures — and those who dare to break it.

Every human group — families, workplaces, communities, even entire cultures — develops its own agreements, spoken and unspoken, about what can be said and what must be left unsaid. Some of those agreements are written into policy or passed down through cultural norms and rituals, but many are silent, enforced only by the fear of what happens someone dares to break them.

These silences shape the families we grow up in, the workplaces we adapt to, and the cultures we move within. Often, we don’t notice any of this happening –until suddenly, we do.

The Roles We Inherit

It is within these environments that our roles emerge. There will always be the caretakers, the over-achievers, the peacekeepers. And often, there is the truth-teller – sometimes called the disturber, more often branded the black sheep. The one who feels the weight of oppressive silence pressing down until words rise up against it. The one who names what others would rather keep hidden, whether in a living room, a boardroom, or a culture that values harmony over honesty.

I know this role well. It wasn’t one I chose for myself, but one I seemed to fall into again and again. I have vivid memories of starting conversations about difficult things as early as 6 years old. At that age, I didn’t have any language for it – I just felt the pressure of building silence and I couldn’t hold it.

What I did learn, even back then, was the cost. Speaking carried risk. Sometimes it meant facing someone’s anger or sadness and sometimes being dismissed as “too much”.

“Learning when to tell the truth and when to hold it has been a lifelong practice — not because I doubt the truth itself, but because I’ve had to weigh when the relationship could bear it.”

Seeing What Others Avoid

The role of a truth-teller is carried out by those who see clearly in places where others prefer the illusion of harmony. Families guard their appearance of peace, workplaces their measures of productivity and profit, and nations their performance of stability. Cracks in these images can feel like threats to the fragile sense of belonging everyone depends on, however illusory it may be. When the truth teller names those cracks, they are branded disruptive, disloyal, or ungrateful.

I learned this first in the atmosphere of my family home. Frustration with a situation was expressed as anger. Silence met that anger just as often, and avoidance carried its own cost – solving nothing, only postponing what would eventually return. One parent would provoke, escalating the situation, while the other would deny and retreat, until the pressure built into eruption — but never a resolution. The cycle repeated itself again and again: provocation, withdrawal, blow-up, retreat.

As a child, I felt the cycle itself … and the tension of it surrounding me, even when nobody spoke. Others coped by running out of the room or forgetting altogether, hoping it would magically vanish if no one brought it up again. But for reasons I didn’t fully understand, my way was different. I remembered — and I spoke to the shadow of the elephant in the room.

I have memories of being terrified, yet still starting conversations about the things no one wanted to talk about. I didn’t know then that I was playing the role of the truth-teller, or what others would later call the black sheep. I only knew that something was not right and the silence around the problem was suffocating.

And yet, I also learned the cost. Telling the truth often drew an angry reaction or could send someone into a heavy silence that slipped into sadness. Sometimes the conflict from truth telling ended in physical distancing, rejection or outright abandonment. It set me apart from the rest of the family, who chose silence over confrontation. I was disrupting the fragile harmony that the silence was supposed to protecting.

Still, those early experiences became the foundation for how I would later understand human connection and conflict when truth is buried. I became aware of the price of avoidance, and I was unwilling to pretend that silence heals what it is trying to hide.

Sometimes families create triangles. One person avoids, another confronts, and the parent in the middle feels indispensable. Instead of healing rifts, the pattern keeps them alive — because the person in the middle needs to be needed. What’s lost is the clean connection between siblings, or between any two people who might otherwise meet each other honestly. It’s heartbreaking, because you long for that connection — but the system keeps pulling you apart.

Beyond the Family

What begins in families rarely stays contained there. The same patterns of silence and avoidance repeat themselves in larger systems. Workplaces, communities, and even entire cultures develop their own ways of rewarding conformity while shaming or punishing disruption. All of them have their truth-tellers … tolerated at best, rarely welcomed, half-exiled, yet quietly necessary.

I experienced this firsthand during my years in education. At one point, the college president hired a department head for Culinary Arts who had no background in the field. At the same time, the curriculum we were teaching from was more than twenty years old, hopelessly behind a profession that had already reinvented itself many times over. Everyone knew it, but few said anything. Silence felt safer.

I was beside myself. Was I the only one seeing this? Why wasn’t anyone from my industry or department speaking up? Directly questioning the president of the college would mean stepping out of line, drawing the label of being “difficult” or “not a team player” or worse, insubordinate. And yet, to remain silent would hold its own kind of betrayal — to the students who trusted us, to the profession I had given my life to, and to my own integrity.

I was told to “give it some time”, year after year.

That same tension showed up on a larger scale here in Thailand. Here, saving face is everywhere— not simply politeness; it’s a cultural protocol that avoids public discomfort and preserves social harmony. It can feel like grace—protecting dignity in moments of slip. But when it becomes a mask that protects image over truth, what grows in the shadows can turn toxic. To speak directly, especially to someone “above” you in age or rank, can be seen as disrespectful, even dishonorable.

That delicate tightrope—between grace and suppression, compassion and control—is where many conversations fail to land. Truth becomes the casualty.

The Paradox

To tell the truth is both gift and exile. Some people thank me for it — I appreciate you because you are courageous to tell the truth and you’re not afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. Others ask why I would cause such unnecessary disruption — Why bring conflict onto yourself by speaking up? The truth-teller never gets to choose how their role will be received.

There is clarity, relief, and a kind of integrity in no longer feeling the need to pretend. But it also carries isolation and loneliness. The truth-teller knows that relationships without reciprocity are not sustainable. They learn to keep the door cracked — enough to let love through if it comes honestly, but not wide open to harm. To speak what others avoid often means risking belonging — but preserving courage and integrity.

“Belonging built on silence is not belonging at all.”

The paradox is this: the truth-teller is not seeking approval for their actions. Their role is not to comfort but to disrupt unhealthy patterns. They are the ones who remind us that belonging built on silence is not belonging at all. Without truth-tellers, our illusions harden into a make-believe reality, and the denial and avoidance becomes the norm. With them, there is at least the possibility of change — though rarely without friction.

And maybe that is the deeper gift. Not to destroy, but to refuse false harmony. Not to wound, but to keep alive the possibility that relationships — families, communities, even whole societies — might grow strong enough to hold the truth.

For me, the role has always been both blessing and curse. It has set me apart, sometimes painfully so, yet it has also given me clarity and integrity. I have come to accept and appreciate that tension — the strange necessity of the truth-teller , and the half-exile of the black sheep.

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