🧭 The One Thing I Keep No Matter What

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

The most important thing I carry is this:

The belief that I can survive knowing the truth.

Not just the truth about others.

The truth about me.

It’s the thing that steadies me

when I want to explain, defend, prove, apologize, collapse, disappear.

Because truth doesn’t always feel good.

But it always feels clean.

And clean pain is something I can work with.

Some people carry optimism.

Others carry faith.

I carry truth like a blade I’ve learned to hold with reverence.

Not to wound—but to cut myself free when I get tangled in someone else’s story.

This belief weighs nothing.

But it has saved me more times than I can count.

When love ended. When people lied. When I had to begin again.

It told me: You’ll survive this. Because you didn’t abandon what was real.

And when I forget who I am –

it brings me back.

This reflection responds to the Daily Prompt:

“What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?”

And to the deeper lesson inside it:

“When everything is stripped away—what still protects you?”

— from the flame-lit mirror of Hellènic Muse