📅 Thursday’s Truth – 4 September 2025
✍️ Riaan M. Odendaal
The Mirror They Can’t Face
It starts quietly.
Not with shouting, but with small dismissals.
A forgotten birthday. A compliment with a barb.
A way of making you feel like the difficult one —
when you’re only asking for decency.
They rarely look like villains.
Sometimes they’re the ones others admire most.
They smile. They help at church.
They post quotes about kindness.
But behind closed doors,
they rewrite the rules — and make you the villain
for noticing.
There’s a kind of person who feeds on admiration
but cannot return love.
Who performs goodness
but punishes honesty.
Who needs applause
more than they need truth.
You may not have the words for it.
You may second-guess yourself.
You may Google things late at night
and find descriptions that chill you.
And still —
you stay.
Because you hope.
Because you’ve invested years.
Because the cost of leaving feels too big.
But here’s the truth:
When someone’s love requires your silence,
it’s not love.
You are not crazy.
You are not too much.
You are not the problem.
You just finally opened your eyes.
And once the mask slips,
you don’t owe them another curtain call.
