DO NOT BE MISTAKEN — THE MIDDLE WAY IS NOT BALANCE

You have likely heard of the “middle way.” You have probably read or heard this expression dozens of times being used as a synonym for balance, moderation, common sense. As if there were, between two extremes, a safe, comfortable point where you should position yourself to avoid excess. As if wisdom lay in never going too far to either side, in always keeping yourself in the tempered zone of existence, protected from the intensities that could destabilize you.
Forget that. Completely.
The middle way is not mediocrity disguised as wisdom. It is not the refusal of extremes in the name of supposed sanity. It is not the intermediate point where you settle in so as not to feel too much, not risk too much, not live too much. The true middle way — the one that demands courage, presence, and brutal maturity — is something entirely different, and far more frightening than any self-help book would dare admit.
It is the capacity to move through extremes with full intensity, but without identifying with any of them. To feel loneliness to the bone without defining yourself as lonely. To scream until your lungs are empty without becoming someone who screams. To love with absolute intensity without making love your permanent identity. To inhabit opposite polarities with total presence in each, but without settling in any as your definitive dwelling.
Because here is the problem nobody wants to face: most people have never come close to their own extremes. They live in a median zone not out of wisdom, but out of fear. Fear of feeling too much, wanting too much, failing too much, suffering too much, getting lost along the way. And then they call this defensive containment “balance,” this cautious paralysis “maturity,” this systematic refusal of intensity the “middle way.”
But what happens when you have never experienced your limits? You don’t know what you are capable of. You don’t know how much you can endure. You don’t know where your true edge is. And you spend your entire life behaving like someone who needs constant protection — from yourself, from others, from life. You become an edited, filtered, controlled version of who you could be. And you call that wisdom.
THE TRAP OF COHERENCE
There is a silent discomfort that runs through the lives of almost everyone I know. It’s not depression in the clinical sense, not diagnosable anxiety, not a dramatic existential crisis. It’s something more subtle and, perhaps because of that, more insidious: the persistent feeling of being divided, of carrying within oneself conflicting versions that never fully settle, that never truly make peace.
You know this feeling. It’s the one that appears when you are exhausted by people, but, at the same time, feel an emptiness from their lack. When you want to leave, and also want to stay. When you speak, yet wish you had remained silent, and when you are silent you wish you had shouted. I am not talking about indecision, lack of clarity, or emotional immaturity. I am talking about something much more fundamental: the concrete, lived experience of simultaneously being things that seem radically incompatible.
And then comes the trap — because we live in a time that has a true horror of incoherence. A time that demands from you a linear personal narrative, a well-defined brand, a clear position, an identity that can be summarized in three words. “Who are you?” has become a question that demands a unique, crystalline, repeatable answer. As if you were a product with stable characteristics, as if your existence could be packaged in a professional profile description or a social media bio.
But the thing is, you are not that. No one is.
There is a silent war happening inside every person who tries to behave as a singular and coherent “self.” Because at the exact moment you are feeling a deep need for solitude, there is another equally legitimate part desiring visceral connection with someone. While you are coldly planning your next career move, there is something in you that would like to drop everything and simply exist without purpose. You love and at the same time want distance from the same person. You trust and distrust. You know and do not know.
And what do we do with this? We spend enormous energy trying to resolve these contradictions, as if they were bugs in the system, character flaws, signs of immaturity. We seek therapies that “integrate” us, coaches that “align” us, methodologies that make us “find our true essence.” As if there were, somewhere hidden inside you, a definitive, coherent, final version — and everything else was just noise to be eliminated.
But what if there isn’t? What if this search for completeness, wholeness, absolute coherence is exactly what is destroying us?
THE COST OF BEING SINGULAR
Think of the amount of suffering that comes not from contradiction itself, but from its unacceptability. You feel guilty for wanting to be alone when you “should” be happy with company. You judge yourself for feeling anger towards someone you also love. You question your leadership ability because sometimes you feel insecure. You doubt your relationship because there are days when passion inexplicably cools. As if contradictory feelings invalidated each other, as if you needed to choose a side and eliminate the other to be a “healthy” person.
But the question nobody asks is: who defined that health is uniformity?
There is a profound — and frightening — wisdom in recognizing that you carry within you both the scream and the silence, and that neither is truer than the other. That there are moments when the memory of who you were occupies all the space, but there is another dimension of you that simply doesn’t know who it is — and perhaps never will. And that is not a flaw. It is the human condition in its rawest form.
The problem begins when we translate this inherent multiplicity as “lack of identity,” as if we needed a single, stable answer to the question “who am I?” When we force ourselves into performances of coherence that cost brutal psychic energy. When we build professional personas so rigid we can barely breathe within them. When we choose relationships with people who demand from us a singular, predictable, controllable version — and then we begin to hate ourselves for not being able to deliver this impossibility.
Have you noticed how certain relationships become sick not for lack of love, but for lack of space for contradiction? You love someone deeply, but also need distance. You want closeness, but also autonomy. And instead of this being treated as something natural — like breathing in and out, like systole and diastole — it becomes evidence of a problem. “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t need to be alone.” “If you were truly committed, you wouldn’t have doubts.” As if loving were a continuous state, without oscillation, without its own breath.
And in the corporate environment? Even worse. You are hired to be strategic, but also need to be an executor. To be creative, but also disciplined. To be an inspiring leader, but also a controlling manager. And instead of recognizing that these dimensions exist in tension — and that it is exactly from this tension that power comes — we create impossible expectations of the “complete professional,” of “360-degree leadership,” as if it were possible for someone to be all things at the same time without collapsing.
Contemporary exhaustion has much to do with this. With this obligation to be one when we are multiple. With this demand for narrative coherence when our experience is fundamentally fragmented. With this imperative to “know oneself” as if there were a stable self waiting to be discovered, when in reality what exists is a series of provisional configurations that reorganize according to context, moment, interlocutor, the intensity of what is being lived.
MOVING THROUGH WITHOUT BECOMING
I am not romanticizing fragmentation. I am not saying it is easy or comfortable to live in this condition. There is real pain in feeling opposite things simultaneously. There is genuine anguish in not having a definitive answer about who you are. There is weariness in carrying conflicting versions of yourself without being able to eliminate any of them.
But there is something infinitely worse: there is violence in trying to suppress parts of yourself to seem whole.
Because when you try to eliminate the part that wants solitude to be the “good companion,” you don’t become more present — you become resentful. When you suppress the part that doubts to be the “confident leader,” you don’t become stronger — you become rigid. When you silence the part that is quiet to always be the “authentic communicator,” you don’t become truer — you become performative. When you deny the part that wants to leave to be the “reliable person,” you don’t become more stable — you become imprisoned.
So what would be the true middle way? It is not finding a safe point of balance between opposites. It is developing the rare, brutally difficult capacity to experience extremes with total intensity without fixing yourself in any of them as a permanent identity.
You can plunge into deep solitude, explore every layer of silence, feel the weight of absence to the bone — and then emerge from it without carrying “loner” as a definitive label. You can feel anger with overwhelming intensity, let it run through your entire body, scream until empty — and then release it, without transforming it into who you are. You can love someone with absolute surrender, with total vulnerability — and at the same time sustain the clarity that this love is not your identity, it is one of the many movements you are capable of making.
This is not indifference. It is not emotional coldness. It is not defensive dissociation. It is something radically different: it is the capacity to sustain the entire field of tension — all opposites, all contradictions, all simultaneous versions — without collapsing, without needing to resolve, without forcing artificial synthesis.
It is being able to wear anger like one wears a coat — feel its weight, its texture, its warmth — and then take it off, without letting it become your skin. It is diving into the ocean of sadness, exploring its depths without fear — and then returning to the surface without bringing the ocean into your lungs. It is inhabiting the intensity of each pole without making any of them your definitive dwelling.
This demands a maturity that is not taught in courses. It demands presence without defense. It demands the courage to feel everything without clinging to anything. It demands that you develop a kind of consciousness that observes, that sustains, that allows — but that does not identify with any of the contents that pass through you.
THE COURAGE NOT TO DEFINE ONESELF
What happens when you allow contradictions to coexist? Not in a forced synthesis, not in an artificial integration, but in a living, productive, real tension? You stop spending energy trying to be a fiction of coherence. You stop punishing yourself for feeling what you feel. You stop demanding from others a stability that you yourself cannot — and should not — offer.
And curiously, it is then that a true relationship with the other becomes possible. Because as long as you need him to be always welcoming, always available, always coherent with the version of him you met, you are not relating to a person — you are relating to an idea, a projection, a fantasy of stability. And when he inevitably shows that he is also scream and silence, also departure and longing, also clarity and not knowing, you will feel betrayed by a promise he never made.
But if you can look at your own contradictions without turning them into defects, you can look at his too. And then, perhaps, you can meet not in fictitious completeness, but in real incompleteness. Not in forced harmony, but in honest dissonance. Not in resolution, but in conscious coexistence with what does not resolve.
There’s a perception that has haunted me for years: “I thought I needed to find myself. I discovered I needed to support myself.” Not in the sense of condescending tolerance, but in the literal sense of giving support, of structurally sustaining. Of stopping treating parts of yourself as manufacturing errors that need to be corrected.
Because what we call “personal development” has largely become a project of elimination. Eliminate insecurity. Eliminate doubt. Eliminate contradiction. Become an optimized, functional, coherent version of yourself. And the more you try, the more you realize that there is something that will not be eliminated, that insists on returning, that resists programming, that refuses to disappear.
And what if that “something” is exactly what is most human in you? What if the true pathology is not being contradictory, but the violent refusal to accept that we are made of simultaneous impulses that do not harmonize into a comfortable synthesis?
I am not suggesting that you should passively surrender to any contradictory impulse. I am not saying to live without direction or purpose, adrift of every internal change. I am saying there is a brutal difference between consciously choosing between simultaneous possibilities and trying to exterminate halves of yourself to simplify the equation.
You may want to leave and also want to stay. And you can choose to stay today, knowing that tomorrow the desire to leave will be there again. Not because you are indecisive, but because you are alive. You can love someone deeply and also need distance from that person. Not because the love is false, but because love is not total occupation of psychic space — it is one of the many movements you make.
The question stops being “who am I really?” and becomes “which of these simultaneous versions of me will guide my action now?” There is no final resolution. There are provisional, conscious, responsible choices — but provisional. And not only is it okay that this is so, it is the only honest way to live.
It is okay for you to be scream and silence. It is okay for you not to know half of yourself. It is okay for you to be shelter and weariness at the same time. Because perhaps health is not in the elimination of tension, but in the capacity to inhabit it without collapsing. In the capacity to move through extremes with full intensity, but without crystallizing in any of them.
Perhaps the greatest fear is not feeling opposite things. Perhaps it is discovering that you do not need to be any of them to act. That you can experience deep solitude without defining yourself as a loner. That you can feel brutal insecurity without becoming insecure. That you can inhabit doubt without making it your identity.
This is not for everyone. It demands the courage to feel everything without clinging to anything. It demands presence without defense. It demands the capacity to be intense without being rigid, to be multiple without being fragmented, to be contradictory without being incoherent. And most people will prefer the comfortable prison of a fixed identity over the terrifying freedom of being multiple, fluid, alive.
But if you can? If you develop this rare capacity to sustain the entire field of tension, to move through extremes without getting lost in them, to experience without identifying? You discover something extraordinary: that you never needed to complete yourself. You only needed to stop dividing yourself.
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