As much as we need connection to others, attachment, to live full, healthy lives, we also need to be authentic — to act in accordance with our deepest needs and beliefs. If you can’t be honest with people you are attached to, you are in a vise that, eventually, will squeeze the life out of you.

So if you need to express something that may affect your attachment to people close to you, and you’re aware that the expression will place pressure on the relationship, you might as well just express the full thing as clearly as you can. If you try to hedge, be polite, respect the feelings of people who can’t accept you as you actually are, well, you’re probably already being sucked toward that treacherous waterfall anyway.

If you say gently that you’re having a hard time living with certain untruths that have been told, you are already gently assenting to your own punishment which is as sure to follow as night follows day. If someone is lying to you and expecting you to silently agree that the lie is necessary and proper, there’s not much point being attached to someone like that.

So whether you gently object, or make your objection as plainly and unmistakably as you can, the effect will be the same. Someone who knowingly lies will not tolerate a word like “untruth”. Anodyne expressions like “debatable”, “questionable” or “not necessarily true” will strike them as forcefully as the proper word, adorned or unadorned, a fucking lie.

In the end, no matter what you do, you cannot convince someone who has already decided that you are dead that there is really no reason to kill your memory too. There is every reason to! You are coming in after the conversation is finished, as you yourself are also finished. Nothing infuriates righteous killers more than when the accursèd dead insist on fucking speaking.