Is the World Really Cruel, or Are We Just Bracing for It?

Years before, on a narrow bed pushed against a wall, a Christian station murmured somewhere in the room like a person half-listening. Two sixteen-year-olds sat close, their heads bent toward each other, trading worries about a mission trip she was about to take to Mexico. The trip pressed on the room the way a coming storm presses on the light. Separation has its own gravity; it pulls people nearer even as it prepares to tear them apart. I remember the whispered talk more than the words themselves, the way anxiety softens the voice and makes it lean in, the way a shared fear shrinks the distance between two bodies until there is almost none left. Her breath carried the low tremor of someone about to cross a border, to leave the familiar rooms of home for a country she had never touched. Mine carried a different fear, older and harder to name. That soft radio was the whole world’s cruelty made small and manageable—a voice about God running quietly behind two children who had already learned, each in their own way, that the world does not hold you gently. She was frightened of leaving. I was frightened of being left, though I did not yet have words for the shape of it. Looking back now, I can see how much I had already decided about the world by then: that it took, that it overlooked, that it hurt the small and moved on without turning its head. That belief had been pressed into me long before this bed, before this girl, before this quiet station filling the corners of a small room. The world felt cruel because something in it had once been cruel to me when I was too young to name it or push it away. So I did what wounded children do. I built. Over a year I had raised a defense inside myself, laying it down in careful layers, a fortress meant to keep out everything that could hurt me again. I told myself I was protecting a heart. What I was really doing was refusing to let anyone come close enough to prove the world could be otherwise. And here, on this bed, with the radio going and her face inches from mine, that structure was about to meet the one thing it was never built to withstand—not a blow, not a coldness, but a nearness that asked nothing except to be met. I could not have told you then that the world felt cruel partly because I had made myself unreachable within it. The closer she came, the more the whole careful architecture began to shudder in me, and I did not understand why peace should feel so much like collapse.

A defense against cruelty is a strange and tireless thing. It watches for blows. It braces for cold. It learns to read a face for the exact moment it will turn away, and it retreats first, so that the leaving can never be done to it. Mine had grown skilled over that year—a habitual watchfulness about being unseen, a low grief always humming beneath the ordinary hours, the settled fear that no one would ever truly want the boy I was. I thought the world was cruel because I was quietly proving it so, again and again. I would withdraw before anyone could reject me, and then I would read my own aloneness as evidence that no one cared. It is a closed circle, and from the inside it feels exactly like truth. On that bed the circle began to open without my permission. The space between us dissolved. What had been tender goodbyes turned urgent, and instinct rose up faster than any thought could catch it. She met me. Her hesitation gave way to the pull of the moment, and I felt her stop bracing, felt her become unafraid of me in a way that undid something. In that yielding, in her nearness that did not flinch, the thing I had spent a year fortifying simply came down, quiet as snow sliding from a roof. Here is what I have had to sit with for decades. The walls did not fall because she was forceful or because the moment overpowered me. They fell because they were never built for this at all. A defense against being hurt is helpless against being loved. It knows how to survive coldness. It has no answer for warmth. The fortress of the self can hold off every attack except the one it secretly aches for—actual intimacy, a person who sees you and does not look away. That is the bitter irony of the one who has decided the world is cruel. He arms himself against the exact thing that could heal him. He calls the world hard, and it is hard, but part of its hardness is his own hand holding the gate shut from the inside. I felt years of pent-up tension drain out of my body in that moment, muscles loosening that I had not known were clenched, a lifetime of guardedness pouring out onto a stranger’s small bed. For once I let myself feel good without the immediate sting of shame chasing it down. I mistook the collapse of my defenses for peace. I did not yet think to ask what it cost, or whom, or whether the ease flooding through me was rest at all, or only the exhaustion of a soldier who has finally set down a weapon he should never have been handed as a child.

In the days that followed I told myself a story, and the story was beautiful, and it was a lie. I began to believe that God Himself had sent her into my life—a living antidote to the coldness, a mercy pressed against the venom I felt festering somewhere behind my ribs. Being with her, I decided, meant I had no more use for evil. Life was good. Goodness drowned shame, at least for a while, the way a rising tide covers the sharp stones on a beach. I still loved God; that never wavered, not once, not even here. But I quietly set aside the thought of the priesthood and told myself I would deal with it later, the way a man closes a door on a room he cannot yet clean. See what I was doing. I was reading providence into relief. When you are certain the world is cruel, and then one person offers you tenderness, the temptation is nearly unbearable to make that person into a rescue sent from heaven. It flatters the wound. It whispers that your damage has cosmic purpose, that God noticed and reached down and intervened just for you. But this is the very fantasy that keeps us from facing the wound as it plainly is. I could not bear to see my hurt as simply hurt, so I dressed it in the language of salvation, and I set the weight of my rescue on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old girl who never asked to carry it. That was not fair to her. She was not an antidote. She was a frightened girl about to cross into another country to serve, close to me in the dark, real and breakable and sent by no one to fix me.

We do not build walls against cruelty; we build them against being loved, which frightens us more.

And because I would not face the wound, I fed on her instead. Through the flesh I told myself my soul had finally found its rest. I felt valued, wanted, seen. She had found in me what others overlooked, and I was glad it was her, glad in a way that had teeth. All of that longing was real. But I understand now that a hunger this deep will consume the person who feeds it if it is never named, if it is called peace when it is actually a starving man mistaking a girl for bread. God had not sent an antidote. God, I have come to believe, was in that room the whole time—not as the rescue I invented in my need, but as the quiet witness to two children who did not know what they were doing to each other.

The story could not hold its shape for long. After several weeks she asked me something on her porch swing, a small tilt of her head downward, a plain and vulnerable question about why I would never do a certain thing to her. The swing moved gently under us, the chains giving their soft complaint. I stammered for what felt like a long time, my mouth working around nothing. And then, in a rush that frightened me more than any confession before it, I gave up the deepest secret I carried: what had been done to me as a toddler by a sixteen-year-old babysitter. There it was, spoken into the evening air—the true source of my certainty that the world was cruel, said aloud on a swing that would not stop moving. This is the fallout no fantasy of divine rescue could hold. The peace I thought I had found was built over a fracture, and her honest question pressed down on the exact fracture line. What I see now, that I could not see then, is that the violation done to me in childhood never healed into smooth skin. It left a permanent shape in me, a form pressed into how I inhabit my own body and my own soul, changing the geometry of how I stand near another person. My defenses, my sureness that the world took and overlooked and hurt the small—these were not lies I told myself for no reason. They were the true report of a real cruelty. The world had been cruel to me. That was never a distortion. What was a distortion was believing a girl on a bed could undo it, or that my body could extract enough closeness to fill a wound that opened before I could even speak. Offering my shattered self to her felt like an act of profound trust, and perhaps some of it was. But I also handed a child my ruin and asked her, without ever asking, to hold it steady. I have wondered since whether I truly saw her at all—her own fear, the discomfort in her body I moved past for the sake of my own momentum, the sacred nearness of her consent that I did not honor the way holiness required of me. The world was cruel to me. And then, in my hunger to be healed of it, I let that same cruelty pass through me and reach toward her. That is the hardest thing the older man has to say about the boy he was, and there is no swing gentle enough to soften it.

So is the world cruel? Yes. I will not soften it into something easier to swallow. A child was hurt in a way that reshaped his soul, and he grew into a boy who braced for cruelty in every room he entered, and in his bracing, he wounded another. That is not a story with a tidy moral waiting at the end. If you came here certain the world is hard, I cannot tell you that you are wrong. It has been hard. Your walls are not paranoia; they were built over something real, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. But here is what I have slowly learned, and it is not a rescue. The cruelty is not the whole truth of the world. The same fortress that keeps out the cold keeps out the warmth, and a heart that has decided the world will only ever hurt it will read even love as a threat and retreat from the one thing that could ease the long ache. Grace, when it finally came, did not lift me out of the dark. It did not erase what was done to me, and it did not undo what I did. It was quieter than that—a presence walking beside me inside the ruin itself, in the room with the murmuring radio, on the moving swing, in the confession that shook loose of me before I could stop it. God was not the antidote I invented in my hunger. God was the one who stayed while I fed on the wrong bread, who did not turn away when I finally said the secret out loud, who was near in every tear I had once frozen into hard defensiveness. That nearness is the strange mercy of it: not that the world stops being cruel, but that we are not alone inside its cruelty, not even for a moment. Confessions to the Empty Chair is the long reckoning of a man learning to look at the boy he was without contempt—to soften toward the very self he was taught to despise, to name the wounds plainly and finally stop calling them salvation. If the world has convinced you that you must brace forever, this book is a companion for the dark, not a promise that the dark will lift. It sits down beside you. It lets the question stay open. And it dares to say that even here, even now, you are not as unseen as you long ago decided you were.