Don't we all tell them?
We weave them constantly—those pretty little paintings we hang up to cover the cold, hard walls of truth.
We take the harsh, jagged edges of reality and drape them in convenient narratives, softening the view so we don't have to look at what lies beneath.
We point to our complete candor, yet we carefully guard the quiet omissions—the silent, deliberate things we leave out of our "honest to God truth."
That is the true nature of mind slavery.
It is the soft, comforting deception of telling ourselves we are here by choice, walking our own path, while in reality, we were simply led along.
We mistook the illusion of agency for genuine freedom, marching forward to a cadence set by someone else.
And through it all, all we did was follow—never halting, never looking back, and never questioning a single step.
Fools, the lot of us.