We are born transparent.

We enter the world like unsealed envelopes — every impulse legible, every emotion unedited, every truth embarrassingly naked.

And then…
We begin the long, meticulous apprenticeship of opacity.

Because clarity is dangerous.
It exposes.
It hands people the blueprint of your collapse.
And once they have that blueprint, they’ll know exactly where to press when they want to watch you fall.

So we adapt.

We learn to wrap ourselves in ambiguity.
To smile while bleeding.
To laugh at the wrong moment — deliberately.
To speak in riddles, to weaponize vagueness, to perform sincerity like a stage magician: just enough truth to distract from what actually matters.

We stop being legible.
We start becoming encrypted.
A walking cipher with a pulse.

Hiding becomes our most sincere form of communication —
the kind we practice like scales on a piano.

To conceal is not to lie.
It’s to survive.

The best of us hide in plain sight. Behind charm. Behind irony. Behind competence.
Some even behind carefully curated acts of goodness.

But make no mistake:
The deeper you go into someone, the thicker the fog becomes.

At the core, you don’t find clarity.
You find the last desperate stronghold of concealment —
that final interior room where even we no longer know what we’re hiding.

And that?
That’s the game.

We don’t live to be seen.
We live to be misread — just enough to remain safe.
Just enough to remain intact.

Because to be understood — truly, entirely understood — would feel a lot like being skinned alive.

And we’re civilized now.
We no longer go around flayed and trembling.
We wear armor. We speak in metaphors.
We survive through silences — carefully placed and religiously kept.

So yes.
We are born transparent.

But then life begins.
And life teaches us the oldest lesson of all:

How to vanish behind ourselves.