Sometimes what appears to be profound insight into oneself is the mind’s stratagem for turning away from the weight of feeling. Dissecting our own thoughts is to believe we have mastered them, when in truth we have only fled from what we cannot bear to feel. Reflection becomes anesthesia: a refusal to suffer, a sterile triumph over the very life it seeks to illuminate. There is beauty in self-awareness, but one risks gazing too long into the mirror of one’s own mind. Thought, untethered from feeling, grows pale. One wakes one day to find not depth but emptiness, not intimacy with but exile from oneself.