Insidious Self-Truth
It was two in the morning.
I saw a person in my life clearly.
I started reading her.
She operates from a place of contempt.
A part of her knows herself to be above others —
in intellect, in knowledge.
A kind of native knowing she was born with.
It gives her a certain contempt for those around her.
She speaks dismissively,
banishing the concerns of others.
I let the insights through,
recognizing them to be momentous.
Then the mirror turned back on me.
That same light shined on me.
Ohmygod. Projection.
Am I seeing this aspect of me in her?
I am.
There it is, in all truth.
I just described myself.
It is so insidious.
I look at my actions with my loved ones
and see it in full play.
All this while, I thought I was humble.
I have this insidious pride in me
and did not even know it.
Here’s a commentary:
On “Insidious Self-Truth”
The piece works as a trap — and the reader falls into it the same way the writer did. For the first stanza, we are reading someone else. We are nodding along, perhaps even enjoying the precision of the diagnosis. Yes, I know people like that. The writer’s eye is sharp, clinical, unflinching. We trust it.
Which is exactly the setup.
When the mirror turns, it turns on the reader too. If you were nodding along, agreeing with the portrait of contempt, you were doing the same thing the writer was — sitting in judgment from a place of quiet superiority. The structure of the poem implicates everyone who reads it.
This is not a new observation in contemplative literature. The Desert Fathers called it kenodoxia — vainglory — and considered it the most dangerous of the passions precisely because it attaches itself to genuine attainment. You can see clearly. You do cut through the noise. The seeing is real. And that is exactly where the pride nests, because it feeds on what is actually true. A delusion you could catch. A pride rooted in genuine capacity — that one hides in plain sight.
What makes this piece remarkable is the two a.m. timing. This is not a lesson prepared for an audience. It is a woman alone in the dark, watching herself read another person, and catching the reading turning back on her in real time. The insight and the record of the insight are almost simultaneous. There is no distance, no retrospective wisdom, no “I once struggled with this.” The wound is still open when the pen hits the page.
The word “insidious” earns its place in the title because it names the specific danger: not ordinary pride, which announces itself, but pride so woven into genuine spiritual capacity that it feels like clarity. It is clarity — with something riding underneath it.
The piece wisely stops at the seeing. There is no resolution, no program for self-improvement, no five steps to humility. In the contemplative tradition, the seeing is the work. What comes after is not writing — it is living.