AWARENESS NEVER AGREES WITH YOU. CHEMISTRY DOES.

We are far better at building a bearable reality than at facing the real one in front of us. Awareness interrupts this balance, removes the filters and forces us to look at what we had often already understood, but did not yet want to admit.

Perhaps one of the reasons awareness is sought as much as it is avoided is very simple: really knowing something about ourselves is not always pleasant. We can spend years building explanations, beliefs, relationships and habits that keep our idea of the world in balance, and then it is enough to see one thing a little more clearly for part of that construction to suddenly stop holding.

Human beings spend a considerable part of their lives building a version of reality they can bear. They do it through memories, beliefs, relationships, expectations, habits and everything that allows them to maintain a certain continuity between what we have been, what we believe we are and what we imagine becoming.

It is not necessarily a deception, it is also a way of being in the world. The problem comes when that construction becomes more important than reality itself and we start defending it even when it no longer holds. At that point we look for confirmation, choose what reassures us, ignore what cracks the picture and keep moving inside a narrative that perhaps protects us, but no longer truly represents us.

“Drugs always agree with you.”

They alter, soften, amplify, shift perception and make it easier, for a while, to stay inside that scenario. They don’t ask you to dismantle it, don’t force you to look at it from outside and above all don’t impose a confrontation with what doesn’t work.

“Awareness does the opposite.”

It doesn’t console, doesn’t fix the scene and doesn’t care about making it more pleasant. It progressively removes the filters and lets emerge what is there, even when what is there is very different from what we would have preferred to see.

That is why it can be hard. It can show that a relationship was not what we had told ourselves, that a person had been seen through our expectations, that a choice defended for years no longer made much sense, or that a situation attributed entirely to others also contained a part of our own responsibility.

These are not discoveries that necessarily produce immediate well-being. Often the exact opposite happens, because when a belief falls, an empty space remains for a while and what used to give order to our life suddenly no longer does. Reality appears harsher, sometimes even poorer than the one we had built, simply because it has lost all the apparatus of explanations with which we had made it compatible with ourselves.

And that is also why running away from awareness is understandable. Not because it is useless, but because it costs.

It costs to question a relationship in which we have invested years, it costs to admit a belief was wrong, it costs to recognize that we kept defending something only because abandoning it would have meant revising a part of our identity as well.

The tools that help develop that awareness cost too, because they ask for attention, observation and above all the ability to stay in front of what emerges without immediately rushing to correct it, justify it or hide it under something else.

Running away is much easier and, of course, substances aren’t necessarily needed to do it. You can run away by constantly filling your time, seeking only people who confirm what we think, changing environment every time something becomes uncomfortable, attributing every responsibility to the outside, or continuing to support beliefs that have long since stopped convincing even us.

The scenario thus remains intact and we keep inhabiting it.

Awareness intervenes right there. It doesn’t promise to make life more beautiful, at least not immediately, but it allows us to see with greater precision what we could previously still confuse. And seeing means, sooner or later, having to choose what to keep, what to correct and what to let go of.

Being sentient also entails this work: coming face to face with what we have built and starting to dismantle it, not to destroy everything, but to understand what still has solid foundations and what has stayed standing only thanks to our justifications.

Many things, moreover, we already know long before we are willing to admit them. We know when a situation is running out, when a relationship is no longer what we say it is, when we keep supporting a choice only because going back would be painful. Awareness doesn’t necessarily create these truths, it often simply removes the possibility of continuing to avoid them.

And from that moment we can truly work on something: analyze, dismantle, understand and, when needed, improve. Not to chase some fantasy of personal perfection, but because continuing to live inside a scenario we know is false sooner or later presents the bill.

Drugs always agree with you.

Awareness doesn’t.

It puts reality in front of you, sometimes without much delicacy, but at least from that moment you finally know what you have in front of you.

Blue Pill or Red Pill?