hearing your own voice on a recording and feeling a visceral cringe because the tone sounds foreign and hollow

The Light Waits Behind Your Mask

The morning light catches the mask you wore all day and holds it up like a recording, making you cringe at the hollow sound of your own voice. It feels foreign, as if a stranger has been speaking through your throat while you nodded and smiled.

But listen closer to that dissonance — it is not proof that you are fake. It is the sound of the gap between who you are and who you are pretending to be.

The light does not demand you keep performing; it simply waits behind the mask, quiet and steady, knowing the real you even when you forget. That hollow echo is not your identity; it is just the armor falling away in the safety of the dawn.

Drawing from

Gospel of Thomas, Matthew

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