I. The Value of Being Told the Truth

(Losing the Middle Way)

There are moments in life when kindness arrives disguised as discomfort.

In recent years, public conversation has leaned heavily toward affirmation. Much of this shift has been necessary. It has reduced cruelty, widened dignity, and challenged lazy judgement. Yet something else has quietly slipped from view: the role of honest friction in personal change.

I once believed I was fine because no one was unkind to me.

Ten years ago, I was significantly overweight, managing health conditions with medication, and coping poorly in ways that were easy to excuse. People were polite. Accepting. Quiet. It wasn’t until someone spoke plainly—awkwardly, imperfectly—that the story I was telling myself began to crack.

Those words hurt. They lingered. And eventually, they forced me to look.

Change did not begin with shame, but it did begin with disruption. With the realisation that comfort and care are not the same thing. That acceptance, when it asks nothing of us, can become a soft form of abandonment.

There are truths that cannot be discovered alone. We are skilled at self-justification, less skilled at self-honesty. Sometimes another person must risk being disliked in order to tell us what we are avoiding.

This is not a defence of cruelty. Nor is it nostalgia for bluntness. It is an acknowledgement that growth often requires resistance. Muscles strengthen against load. Character sharpens against reality. Without some friction, we remain exactly where we are.

The danger, today, is not compassion. It is the assumption that compassion must always be silent.

When honesty disappears from care, we lose one side of the equation. We trade responsibility for reassurance. We avoid offence, but we also avoid transformation.

The middle way asks something harder: the courage to speak, and the willingness to hear.

II. The Value of Being Held

(On Care, Change, and Speaking Gently)

There are moments in life when truth, however accurate, arrives too early.

Change does not always begin with challenge. For many people, it begins with safety. With the sense that they are not being measured, corrected, or improved—but seen.

In a culture that prizes clarity and conviction, gentleness is often misread as indulgence. Yet gentleness is not the absence of standards. It is the presence of care.

People rarely change when they feel exposed. They change when they feel supported enough to look honestly at themselves. Shame narrows attention. Fear shortens time horizons. Care, by contrast, creates room to breathe—and in that space, responsibility can emerge.

What appears from the outside as denial or complacency is often fatigue. Or grief. Or survival. Not everyone is ready for the mirror at the same moment. The same words that catalyse growth in one season can entrench resistance in another.

This does not mean that truth should be hidden. It means that truth must be carried, not thrown.

Lasting change is sustained internally. It is not compliance with another’s expectations, but alignment with one’s own values. For many, that alignment only becomes possible when someone remains close without demanding progress on a schedule.

Acceptance, at its best, is not a refusal to change. It is the reassurance that change is possible without self-erasure.

The danger, here, is not honesty. It is urgency without attunement.

The middle way asks something equally demanding: the patience to wait, and the discipline not to withdraw.

Between the Panels

The middle way does not live in either essay alone.

It exists in the space between telling the truth and staying present.

Between challenge and care.

Between friction and holding.

To walk it requires judgement, humility, and restraint. It means knowing when to speak and when to listen. When to apply pressure, and when to remove it. When to risk being disliked, and when to simply remain.

There is no formula. Only responsibility.

Strength without compassion becomes brutality.

Compassion without truth becomes stagnation.

The work is not choosing a side.

The work is learning to stand in the tension—without letting go of either hand.