The paradox of love and cruelty…

We are all capable of great love and great cruelty—sometimes in the same breath. The line between mercy and malice is thinner than we want to admit, and sometimes our mouths don’t know which one they’re offering.

A word meant to heal can cut, and a silence meant to protect can leave someone bleeding. We forgive ourselves for the things we call “mistakes” and forget that others call them harm.

We can cradle a friend in one moment and betray a stranger the next, all while believing we are good. Even our love can be possessive, conditional, codependent, and demanding—masked as care.

Even our cruelty can come dressed in righteousness, wrapped in the belief that we are helping. We are full of contradictions and holy contradictions, too—how strange that grace and damage can live under the same roof.

Sometimes we don’t notice the way our love clings too tightly, or how our fear bites without warning. We can break someone’s spirit while believing we’re saving their soul.

We think with grandiose and self righteous delusions about who we are to make the guilt bearable, to soften the jagged truth. And yet, even in the face of our failures, the capacity to begin again remains.

Love, real love, humbles us—teaches us to look at the wreckage and still choose tenderness, sacrifice, and surrender. Cruelty, unchecked, teaches us nothing but repetition, until we wake up to damage—damage to others and most certainly damage to ourselves.

For the breath that wounds can also mend—if we learn to speak with honesty, with softness, with care, often with apologies, frequently with surrender, with grace, and in the knowledge of all to human imperfections.