Letter 4 — Cleverly Evil
She didn’t call me bad. She called me cleverly evil. The distinction mattered. Bad can be forgiven. Clever evil is chosen.
The shaman wasn’t only dismantling me. She was simultaneously building something else — a mythology around my ex that made leaving me feel not just reasonable but destined.
The Mountain Chooses Its Hero
She told my ex: “The mountain chooses a person to be a hero every decade. I helped one over the last decade. Now I know who the successor is. It’s you. I’m going to tell you how much you will earn monthly over the next few years, and where you should proceed.”
Then she paused. “Do you know why the mountain chose you?”
My ex said: “Because... I’m a good person?”
The shaman laughed. “You know the answer.”
She didn’t confirm it. She laughed and let my ex confirm it herself. My ex supplied the conclusion. The shaman just built the room where that conclusion felt inevitable.
Once you believe you have been chosen by a mountain — once you believe you are the hero of the next decade — the person questioning that narrative isn’t a concerned partner. She’s an obstacle. She’s the thing the hero has to move past to reach her destiny.
Good was the shaman’s primary weapon. She used it constantly, deliberately, like currency. She praised my ex for being a good person in every session. She told her the mountain chose her because of her fundamental goodness. She made my ex feel that her moral quality was visible to the spiritual world in ways ordinary people couldn’t perceive.
And the more that currency accumulated — the more my ex collected those confirmations of her exceptional goodness — the more my ordinary human complexity looked like corruption by comparison.
Cleverly Evil
The shaman had a specific framing for me. Not bad. Not evil. Something more precise.
The word she used was 영악하다. In the region where I had lived — the same region as the shaman — that word is used as a compliment. A kind of sharpness. Not being easily pushed over. When she said it, I thought: oh, they must have meant something good, but it came out wrong.
At the time, I was still enough of myself to give the benefit of the doubt. Not yet completely inside the system.
The fuller meaning arrived later.
She said: over normal people, you’d be seen as an okay, normally acceptable good person. But with your ex and her family — because they are fundamentally better in moral quality — you are spotted for what you really are.
What this framing does: everyone who thought well of you is simply not elevated enough to detect what they detected. The reliable witnesses to your true nature were only the people inside the system.
And when the readings contradicted each other — when something she had said before didn’t match what she was saying now — we asked. Her answer: “That was not meant to be told at that time. I was waiting for the right moment.”
She always found it funny when people discovered her quotation marks and got angry. She said: have you seen the look on their faces? I was sometimes her trophy. My ex was her trophy more often. When someone became proud of something they had, she wanted to demolish it. The performance was always in service of her authority, not our well-being.
And underneath it all: a hierarchy of moral worth. My ex and her family at the top — chosen by mountains, spiritually elevated. Me at the bottom. The sorting itself was the problem. But neither of us could see that from inside it.
The Purity Frame
There is a specific logic to the contamination charge that I want to name precisely, because it did more damage than the charge itself.
The shaman’s argument was not simply that I had done bad things. It was that my ex was pure and naive, and I — cleverly evil, fraudulent by family — had used that purity against her. My ex hadn’t chosen a way of living that wasn’t from the heart. I had installed it in her. She hadn’t grown in directions the system couldn’t sanction. She had been corrupted. She hadn’t made her own decisions inside the relationship. She had been manipulated into them by someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
My family was part of the charge. We were fraudulent — not me alone, but the household I came from. That fraudulence was structural, inherited, constitutional. It ran in how we spoke, how we presented, how we moved through rooms. And because it was in me from the beginning, everything I had ever given my ex — the confidence, the expanded imagination, the three years of real work — was contaminated at the source. Not gifts. Infections.
My ex, by contrast, was naive. Pure. Someone who needed to be protected rather than held accountable.
I want to hold that word for a moment. Naive.
Calling someone naive is not neutral. It is not a compliment dressed as concern. It is a removal of agency. If my ex was naive, then she could not have chosen anything inside our relationship. Everything that happened to her happened to her. Her growth was not her becoming: it was my corruption of her. Her choices were not her decisions: they were evidence of her innocence being exploited.
The naivety framing accomplished two things simultaneously. It protected my ex from responsibility for what she chose, including what she chose to do to me. And it made my own good faith impossible: every kind thing I had done became proof of the cleverness of the evil. The more genuinely I loved her, the more sophisticated the contamination.
There is no version of this framing where I can be innocent. Cleverly evil means the cleverness is the evil. The more carefully I behaved, the more calculated it looked. The more I gave, the more I had taken.
It also meant that the people best positioned to assess me — the ones who had known me for years, who had watched me across different circumstances, who didn’t see what the shaman saw — were simply not elevated enough to detect it. My friends, my colleagues, everyone outside the system: lacking the spiritual sight to see what was actually there. The witnesses who might have contradicted the verdict were pre-discredited as morally insufficient to see clearly.
The ones elevated enough to see the truth? Her family. The shaman. The system.
What She Told Us About Herself
At some point, the shaman said this: “When stubborn people come for fortunetelling, I say random things. Because they won’t listen anyway.”
She said this out loud. In front of us.
Once you understand that, every reading becomes suspect. Every verdict, every ceremony, every “this is what you are thinking” — you cannot know which ones were real and which were random. You were never meant to know. Certainty was the product. Questioning was the problem.
She also told us a story about a client. The woman had come to ask why her husband was cheating on her. The shaman’s response: “Have you seen yourself in the mirror? You’ve gained weight. That’s why.”
She told us this story as though it were ordinary. The husband’s choice, the husband’s action, the husband’s responsibility — none of these is relevant. Only the woman’s body. I said nothing. By that point, the room had been established as one in which objecting proved your stubbornness. But I remember thinking: this is messed up. That thought existed. I filed it somewhere and kept quiet.
I’m taking it out of the file now.
She also told me I ranked people. That I graded them. That this was a character flaw.
She said this while calling people low caste. While telling me my ancestors didn’t match my ex’s rank. While running the most elaborate hierarchy in the room — herself and her chosen ones at the top, fundamentally better, humble and ungreedy and destined for Buddhist nunhood, they hadn’t yet reached. She graded everyone in every session.
I sat there absorbing the accusation and turning it inward. She’s probably right. I do judge people for their earnestness.
It took me a long time to see that the person accusing me of grading people was the one holding the grade book.
I want to be honest about what the sisters were actually responding to — and what I was actually doing in those conversations.
The shaman’s teaching about true intentions was universal: everyone’s surface statements conceal deeper meaning underneath. What you say is never quite what you mean. The real meaning requires reading beneath — inferring, interpreting. Which sounds like emotional intelligence. Which is also, when applied systematically, a framework that makes every direct statement illegitimate. Nothing can be taken at face value.
My therapist had taught us something different: when we talk to each other, put what you need into 온유한 그릇 — a meek container. The smallest, most receivable form possible. Not suppression. Not concealment. Structure. So the content can actually land.
When the sisters told me I was pretending to be a good person, I was using that skill. I was trying to be the therapy-trained, considered version of myself — using the gentlest containers I could find.
But they remembered a different version. The one from before — when I was suffering through illness, grabbing whatever container was closest, putting my needs into whatever vessel was available and throwing it toward the nearest person. Not cruelty. Not character. The behaviour of someone whose resources had been stripped to almost nothing, reaching for whatever was left.
I can say honestly: that version was ungrateful. Not as a permanent verdict — as a description of what chronic illness and isolation and fear produce in a person who has run out of care.
The sisters had seen that version. They had fixed it as the portrait.
The version using gentle containers — the one trying to communicate carefully — they read as performance. As the clever concealment the shaman had already named. The considered version arrived and was read as proof of the uncivilised version they already knew.
I wasn’t pretending to be good. I was trying to become the version of myself that had always existed underneath the illness. But the order of those two things — which version they saw first — meant that the trying looked like acting.
From a temple where I’m learning that the hierarchy was the system, and I was not at the bottom of it — I was outside it entirely,
Emotionally yours,
Suinny
Next week: What it looks like when someone tells you that you are a seed that needs to be replanted — and you believe them.