Truth vs resentment
“When you stop projecting your anger and fear into the world, you can stand for truth without hurting others. You no longer stand against man, but against untruthfulness. Even if you resist falsehood, you have compassion for those who cling to false beliefs. You don't criticize them. But you resist their misguided notions with a certainty and clarity, which pushes up to the roots, and exposes the fear and uncertainty on which all illusions arise.”
Paul Ferrini
Your life has fallen apart, likely due to your own mistakes, but also to the malice and lack of charity of others. Your mistakes have rang the brought forward the projections and fears of the most judgmental and vindictive people in your life. You represent all that they hate about humanity and themselves, and this has left you often alone and rejected. It would make sense and fit the natural pattern of human nature for you to redirect your ire onto someone else; someone who is worse than you or who you think deserves your punishment more than you do. But this is not the path to recovery.
Once you feel like you no longer need to constantly defend yourself or your image, and once you have resisted the urge to displace your pain onto someone else as an act of revenge, you can begin to put your efforts in a more noble pursuit.
You have faced the blistering heat of the truth and withstood its flames and now, like a bridled horse, you have learned to live with and harness its power. You are on the side of truth, even though the truth has hurt you and even though others don’t afford it to you. You are no longer pretending to be someone you aren’t or living in a world based on lies. You are an ally with the truth.
As such you can see people not as your allies or enemies but as either fellow resistors or casualties of falsehood. You do not place yourself against anyone at all. It frees you of human adversaries, for your foe is greater and more powerful than any person. Your battle is against untruth and you can identify those who seem to be most ardently serving Falsehood as misguided, rather than evil. This cleanses you of hating anyone. It’s not necessary. You hate untruth and the damage it can cause but you have grace for those who have fallen into its trap.
You see, recovering from your own disgrace is not just a story of an injured person getting up and walking again. You begin to see that it is less and less about you and more about honouring and venerating truth and the beautiful connection that it creates between human beings. You have had a violent, new experience which has opened you up to the possibility of loving and understanding people from a deeper perspective. Deeper in the sense that you have descended below and you can now see and feel and lift others from this low position.
History, culture and folklore give us examples of heroes and gods who descend into our profane world to benefit us. Odysseus, Dante Alighieri, and Jesus Christ all descended from their thrones to explore Hell. This is not just to add drama or suffering but to learn and grow and defeat hell and misery itself. At the risk of exaggerating, you are able to now join the immortals because of your baptism of fire.