I Can’t Handle The Truth

I’m Just Like You. Ok?

This mythical figure, Xplisset, I’ve created is all a lie. It’s performative. Or maybe let me say this. It is a costume I built because the honest to God truth is I cannot handle the truth.

It’s why I joined the church. It’s why I joined the army. It’s why I became a cop. It’s why I avoided my own writing all these years. Every one of those institutions gave me structure, duty, language, ritual, a uniform, a script. Somewhere to stand so I would not have to stand fully in myself. Somewhere to hide in plain sight while still calling it service.

When I began to reconcile with the fact that I cannot handle this is when I started to see it. Today that’s called being woke. Way back when it was called grace.

And really, the good Book told us this a long time ago. Eve and the knowledge of good and evil. That story hits different when you stop reading it like a Sunday school hall monitor and start reading it like a human being. The wound was not sex. The wound was sight. The wound was consciousness. The wound was that once you know, you cannot unknow. Once your eyes are opened, innocence is gone and all the little costumes you used to wear start feeling flimsy as hell. That is the burden. That is the fall. Not that Eve became evil, but that she became aware. And awareness is expensive.

Amazing Grace ain’t about some normie who took a red pill and suddenly came to the realization that women were the enemy and white nationalism was the answer. It’s about a man whose realization was that he had participated in a system of utter depravity. That was the slave trade. John Newton’s awakening was not cleverness. It was horror. It was conscience finally breaking through the story he had been telling himself. And were he alive today, I believe he would be railing against the same white supremacist forces now that he was railing against then.

So when I say you are witnessing my own reconciliation and reconstruction, I am not trying to sound poetic. I mean that literally. That, to me, is art at its rawest definition. Not branding. Not content. Not some slick little persona with a nice little logo and a catchy little title. Reconstruction.

Because I do not write from the other side of truth. I write to survive the process of getting closer to it. I write because I cannot handle the truth all at once. I write to reconcile myself from not being able to bear it to bearing a little more of it than I could yesterday. The page is where I go to negotiate with it. The page is where I go to inch toward it without it blowing my damn back out.

That is what you the reader is feeling too, whether you have language for it or not. You all aren’t just reading conclusions. You are witnessing somebody become able to say what he previously could not survive saying. You are not drawn to perfection. You are drawn to the visible struggle. To the sound of a man trying to tell the truth before the lie seals back up around him again.

That is why myth matters. George Lucas did not build Star Wars because he had humanity all figured out and wanted to show off. He built a symbolic machine big enough to carry what he was trying to reconcile in himself about empire, war, innocence, fathers, technology, power, Vietnam, good, evil, destiny, corruption. He reached for symbols and the hero’s journey because raw truth is too hot for most people to touch directly. Symbol lets you approach what would otherwise send you running. Story lets you smuggle unbearable truth past the guards. Myth is how the soul tells the truth to itself without dying of shame.

And here is where I probably lose some of y’all.

I have this theory that Homo sapiens, modern humans that arose out of the African savanna hundreds of thousands of years ago, first looked less like destiny and more like defects. Weird mentally handicapped little humanoids who sat too long, thought too much, foresaw too much, imagined too much. The kind of creatures who stared upward into some invisible place while everybody else stayed focused on the brutal day to day business of survival.

Just writing this little post required that exact kind of suspicious behavior. A lot of detached sitting. A lot of staring upward into some imaginary void listening for a voice. I can hear our more practical ancestors yelling at me now to stop looking at the damn stars and make myself useful. Ok, maybe they did not have language per se. You get my point.

And maybe that is exactly the point.

I imagine those dreamers were shunned as burdens. Soft. Unproductive. Distracted. Broken. I imagine some of them were violently extracted from the tribe and left to fend for themselves. But enough of those so called defective primates found one another. Enough of them gathered. Enough of them reproduced. Enough of them formed tighter bonds and stranger rituals and deeper meanings. They wore jewelry. They buried their dead. They drew strange symbols on walls. The extreme versions of those abstract thinking specimens, the shamans, became the spiritual leaders.

Essentially, the first gatherings of modern humans may have looked less like the beginning of civilization and more like a prehistoric art colony.

And before anybody laughs too hard at that, listen, civilization has always ended up crawling back to one of these supposedly useless starers. Call him shaman. Call him prophet. Call him poet. Call him Einstein. Same problem. Same gift. Some odd little bastard staring into the void long enough to come back with a symbol, an equation, a story, a map, a warning, a way forward. The very kind of mind that looks impractical to the tribe in one century becomes the mind the whole species depends on in another.

That is my Genesis of humanity. Abstract thinking, once treated like a curse, became the strength. The handicap became the faculty. The defect became vision. The ones who sat too long with their thoughts became the ones who made symbols, ritual, memory, myth, tools, maps, meaning.

Eventually a species that had once been mocked for staring up at the moon built a way to go there.

And the thing is, we still got those Homo Erectus genes in us. We still carry that old suspicion of the dreamer, the moon-starer, the one sitting off to the side hearing voices, making symbols, and coming back with truths the tribe does not want to hear. That is why people still burn books. A book is just a modern cave wall. A writer is just another strange primate staring into the void too long and returning with something unsettling.

Same ancient resentment toward abstract thought. Same old hostility toward the one who ate from the tree of knowledge and came back seeing too much. But history keeps humiliating that instinct. Because the very minds the tribe mocks as soft, distracted, or defective are the same minds that become the shamans, the prophets, the poets, the Einsteins, the mapmakers, the ones who drag the species forward. So let them laugh at the one staring at the moon. Our prehistoric ancestor got the last laugh.

The same moon our prehistoric ancestor was shunned for spending too much time staring at. Guess what y’all. Our prehistoric ancestor got the last laugh.

And maybe that is why I should not be saying this.

Because once I admit that Xplisset is performative, I also have to admit that performance may have been the only way I could inch toward the truth without it tearing me apart. Xplisset was not just a lie. It was a brace. A splint. A way to keep moving while the deeper part of me was still trying to set itself back into place. Sometimes the mask is not deceit. Sometimes it is medical equipment.

The church gave me hymns. The army gave me order. The badge gave me distance. But the writing, Lawd have mercy, the writing gave me back my face.

And maybe that is the greater meaning of all this. Not that I have arrived at truth. Not that I have conquered it. Not that I am brave enough to hold it in my hands without trembling. But that I have finally stopped pretending I do not tremble. I have finally stopped mistaking the trembling for failure. The writing is the place where I take what I cannot bear and try to bear it anyway. Sentence by sentence. Image by image. Symbol by symbol. That is the reconciliation.

And you, whether you know it or not, are witnesses to that process.

Maybe that is why you keep coming back. Not because I got the truth in my pocket. Not because Xplisset is some finished mythic figure who has solved the riddle of America, whiteness, blackness, manhood, power, God, history, and the moon. But because you can feel a man trying to become equal to what he sees. You can feel a man trying not to look away. You can feel the difference between performance as fraud and performance as the trembling bridge between who I had to be to survive and who I might become if I finally tell the truth.

Maybe that is all art has ever been.

One frightened human being making the truth survivable enough to say out loud.

After all this talk about Eve, grace, uniforms, masks, and our prehistoric ancestor getting the last laugh, it would be very on-brand for you to read this, nod like a thoughtful person on public television, and then quietly back away from the support button as if that too is part of your spiritual journey. Please don’t. Become a paid subscriber at

or buy me a coffee and help keep this reconstruction project alive.

Turns out dragging the truth into language requires a little grace, a little nerve, and, in this economy, a little cash.