Firsthand Thinking As A Way Home
Open the Lens
There’s a difference between thinking and thinking for yourself. Emerson called it “the active soul”—the part of us that sees freshly, not through the lens of dogma or tradition, but through direct encounter with life. “In every work of genius,” he said, “we recognize our own rejected thoughts.” Firsthand thinking is what we’ve known all along but were taught to distrust.
Annie Dillard urged us to “spend it all… give it now.” Not to wait for permission, but to speak from the live wire of presence.
Anne Carson wrote: “I want to be unbearable.” Because real thought—the kind that hasn’t been shaped to please or perform—is unbearable. It disrupts. It exposes. And it sets us free.
Rilke said: “Go into yourself.” Not into belief systems. Not into doctrine. Into the living pulse of your own awareness. That’s where truth begins. That’s where original wholeness waits.
And T.S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, reminds us why the journey matters:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
This is the work of deconstruction—not destruction, but reclamation. Peeling back layers of programming so we can remember what we’ve always known. So we can come home to ourselves—and know it, at last, for the first time.
What I call God now is this:
[ ]
A bracket.
A signal.
A gesture toward the unnameable.
God is not a word.
God is what remains when the words fall away.
4 Things I’ve Learned from De/Reconstructing My Cult Upbringing
You didn’t lose a self—you never got to form one. When you’re born and raised in a high-control group, the self is shaped by fear, obedience, and performance. Leaving isn’t just liberation; it’s the beginning of becoming.
Healing isn’t about replacing one certainty with another. It’s tempting to swap out old dogma for new ideology. But true reconstruction means learning to live with mystery, ambiguity, and inner authority without needing a system to tell you who you are.
Love and harm can coexist in the same people. It’s possible to hold compassion for your family and name the spiritual abuse. Refusing to split people into all-good or all-bad is part of reclaiming your complexity and your power.
The echo remains, but it doesn’t define you. The old language, the fear of hell, the reflex to comply—they linger. But they’re no longer in the driver’s seat. The imprint becomes the doorway to deeper freedom, not a life sentence.
One Thing
That’s all it takes to break a spell.
One generation saying “no” to the shame.
One voice refusing to pass it down.
It’s catching on.
And look—
she walks free.
On Repeat
They say, “Don’t come back no more.”
‘Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to
And I, I walk out on my own
A thousand miles from home…
~ Bob Dylan
Shout Out
opens up the lens in breathgiving ways over at . TNWWY exists to advocate for the recognition and full access to the original wholeness that is our birthright, no matter what we have faced.
This space is here to deconstruct everything that stands in the way.
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“You didn’t lose self, you never got to form one”. Exactly. I have recently been trying to put this into words. It’s a special situation for those of us born and raised in a high control group. You can’t just “be yourself” on command when you leave. It takes work to create that self. Because the self that existed when we left was a programmed one.
Firsthand thinking is the original sacrament, isn’t it? Before creeds, before pulpits, before some dude with a beard told you not to trust your gut. I was raised to recite the answers. Now I sit with the questions—and somehow, they feel more like home.
Anne Carson said she wanted to be unbearable. Same. Especially to the systems that tried to domesticate my soul.
This piece doesn’t just open the lens. It smashes the stained glass and says, “Look with your own damn eyes.” Thank you for that.