Me, Myself and Then Someone Else

“Well, why don’t you have another drink? I’m sure the state of Oklahoma has at least one more drop left somewhere.”

Susan grimaced, turning away as if the storm of anger rising on Reese’s face was invisible. Yet Reese pressed on, undeterred.

“You’re slipping further every day. Do you even notice how you stagger when you drink? You tell the same joke again and again, laughing like it’s brand new each time. It’s painfully dull. That’s what happens when your mind starts to rot. One idea gets stuck in your mind, and suddenly it’s all you can think to say. It’s so boring.”

Reece clung to her outrage. The self-righteous fire in her chest craved its due, and the pressure refused to subside. Whenever that pressure built up, Reese always managed to find a reason to let it spill out.

She worked from home for doctors in New York City, her days spent online. When the doctors pointed out mistakes she made, she shrugged them off, but the irritation lingered. The anger simmered as Reese let herself forget its true source, giving her the freedom to invent new reasons for her frustration. Susan was her favorite target. Rather than admit she was being childish about her work blunders and actually try to fix them, Reese redirected all her pent-up anger toward Susan’s drinking.

“You should see her. It’s disgusting,” Reese sneered to her sister. “She has no self-control, not even with her pets. She stuffs them with treats until they’re practically doomed,” she added, basking in her own sense of superiority.

“Well, Susan is the sweetest person I know. Maybe she has a reason she drinks,” offered her sister.

“Are you kidding? There is no excuse. She has zero self-control about anything!” Reese shouted, her voice rising with frustration. She doubled down, convinced that if she just screamed loud enough, her sister would finally see things her way.

Reese had quit drinking, but in truth, she was no better than those who still did drink. Reese’s self-righteousness was suffocating.

One of her most persistent flaws was the nagging belief that people whispered about her behind her back. Too anxious to face her supposed critics, she lashed out at those she trusted most. Each bout of frustration built upon the last, until Reese found herself suddenly erupting at someone she cared about, leaving them stunned and wounded by her outburst.

Reese’s suspicion that others whispered about her began with her own tangled emotions: jealousy, judgment, pretense, and dishonesty. Only in rare bursts of spiritual inspiration did she glimpse maturity, and those moments vanished as quickly as they came. But they became further evidence of her supremacy.

That was her one saving grace—the pursuit of spiritual studies. However, soon forgetting any taming of the heart they were meant for, they too were turned into just another crowning achievement of ammunition against religion.

“How can they believe such stupidity? The Bible isn’t an accounting of people. It’s an allegory. Jesus rising from a tomb is just laughable. Do they also believe in Santa Claus?”

Reese was not exactly mistaken. Yet for her, every judgment became another chisel shaping her sense of superiority. She was always searching for more reasons to keep that feeling alive. It was not enough for her to simply believe she was better; she needed evidence, however insignificant, to prove it. A careless remark, a wrinkled shirt, a late arrival, a poorly chosen word—each became another small piece of evidence she could tuck away and add to her private collection.

She noticed flaws in people the way some people noticed beauty. She could enter a room and, within seconds, identify who was insecure, who was pretending, who was desperate to impress, and who had simply stopped trying and let themselves go. Rarely did she wonder what had brought them there. Their circumstances were irrelevant. To Reese, people were the sum of their choices, and poor choices revealed poor character, and she was always able to spot those poor choices, whether real or imagined.

She told herself that she was merely observant. In reality, she had become dependent on comparison. If someone stumbled, she felt steadier. If someone failed, she felt accomplished. If someone was embarrassed, some small, hidden part of her felt reassured that she was still standing above them all.

The irony was that Reese considered herself incapable of being fooled.

What she could not see was that her certainty had become her own blindness.

Her own poor choices eventually gave her a disease that doctors were unable to diagnose, though she had been to several. Carrying a normal weight of 135 pounds at 5’8”, this dropped to 115. She was exhausted the whole day long. It continued month after month. Then one day, she received a letter from her mother voicing her intention to come to town for a visit. Reese’s fear of her mother’s own critical nature was so great that she could barely think. It finally led to her running off to Dallas with friends to escape.

To forget her mother and her own disease, she threw herself into reveling. Her choice to forget all of it was so complete that the reality of her situation did not reestablish itself until she returned home. As it turns out, running away from a crippling situation is often the best strategy.

Back at her office, she picked up a pencil and decided to try to figure out what was wrong with her, as all her doctors said it was just in her mind. As she began to write, a visit from another world crashed in on her. Preachers referred to this event as a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience. All she knew was that she was suddenly engulfed in perfect health with a message—diabetes. That word slammed into her mind with such certainty, she ran to the phone, called one of her doctors and told him she wanted a test for diabetes.

It showed she was suffering from hypoglycemia, a word not in her vocabulary and was actually the opposite of Diabetes. But the same test also showed what she had. She then pursued a diet that addressed her illness and recovery soon followed.

But now, something so wildly unlike anything she had ever known swept through her thoughts, planting a vigilant gaze that sifted through every moment, every face, every notion, hungry for a hint of what had truly happened in that experience of perfect health.

At a lively party, she overheard a woman passionately praising a book called “The Fourth Way.” The woman’s unwavering confidence in the book’s message unsettled her so much that she resolved to buy it herself, determined to use her sharp intellect to dismantle its claims.

The very next day, she tracked down the book, and by the time she reached page 11, she had completely forgotten her original mission. Instead, the book offered her the first real insight into that strange experience she could never explain. It was not a book she stumbled upon in any ordinary shop. Such books were rare. One helpful store owner searched for her and sent her to a tucked-away shop with an odd, devoted clientele.

Such clientele sent shivers up Reece’s spine. They seemed dark and foreign. This was her first foray into the unknown, an experience driven solely by one single encounter. The unknown would become a constant source of fear and abhorrence as she traversed each path it led her down, leading her far away from everything she had ever known.

Little did she know, this book would unravel her reign as the queen of immaturity and set her on a gripping journey toward self-discovery, even as she endured some truly agonizing trials.

One day, she realized the odd crowd she once viewed from a distance had quietly become her closest friends. She saw that her own strangeness mirrored theirs, and their connection was not built on whispered secrets or a sense of superiority, but on the shared journey to become something greater—kindred spirits brave enough to reveal their true selves.

They endured exposing their pettiness, their spitefulness, their jealousies, their small-minded grievances and carefully concealed resentments. Beneath the polished smiles and practiced civility lay a darker truth: they had spent so much time measuring themselves against others, nursing old wounds and quietly keeping score. Now, in the willingness to be stripped of pretense, there was nowhere left to hide. Every whispered criticism, every calculated slight, every act of envy stood revealed, leaving them to confront not only each other, but the parts of themselves they had worked so hard to conceal.

But the agony was rewarded with something none of them had expected: freedom. True freedom. Once the masks had fallen away, there was no longer any need to defend the person each had pretended to be. Shame gave way to honesty, resentment to understanding, and comparison to compassion. Reece never regretted a single agonizing moment. Instead, she saw how easily she could have missed this journey, how much she had to overcome to get here, and as she looked back, all she could think was,  thank god she was once in a partying mood.