Letter 6 — What the Five Couldn't Account For
The shaman kept outside voices out for a reason. Not because they would have said nothing. Because they would have said exactly this.
The five-against-one system had a flaw. It couldn’t account for the people who had known me before any of this existed
What My Oldest Friends Said
When I finally told my middle school friends what had happened — the accusations, the verdict, the specific charge that I was two-faced, that I had a double personality, that I was cleverly driving wedges between people — they didn’t comfort me. They didn’t say of course that’s not true, you’re wonderful. They said something more useful than that.
they said: bullshit.
And then they were precise about it. They said: you are brutally honest, Suin. Didn’t you know? Everything shows on your face. You say things out loud all the time — before you’ve finished thinking them, usually. You are too honest. You are self-centred. You want to be the main character of the show — yes, we know, that’s you. But two-faced? Driving wedges? We have known you for fifteen years. We have never seen that. Not once. That is a bad character reading.
They didn’t say I was good. They named my actual flaws — the real ones, the ones that have always been there. Brutally honest. Self-centred. Everything on my face. Too much of a main character. They called those out clearly, without softening them.
And then they said: but the specific thing she said you were? That one we have never seen.
Clever evil requires concealment. It requires strategy. It requires a hidden interior running counter to the visible surface. Brutally honest means there is no hidden interior. What you see is what there is. The face and the self are the same thing.
You cannot be both. The shaman built her case on the assumption of a dangerous underneath. My friends, who have watched me for fifteen years and seen me at my worst, are saying: there is no underneath. There is just Suin, saying it out loud, wanting to be the main character, self-centred in the particular way of someone who doesn’t know how to hide it.
That is not a profile for clever manipulation. That is a profile for someone the shaman could read at a glance — because everything was already on the table — and use.
The five voices had one thing in common: they were all inside the system. My friends were outside it. They had been kept outside deliberately, systematically, because the shaman knew that outside voices were the one thing the room with no door couldn’t survive.
She was right about that.
There is one more outside witness from within the system’s orbit — or rather, from its attempted orbit.
Another group of my friends visited as a group of three, at some point during this period. One of them told me about it later, after everything had ended.
She said she had felt uncomfortable immediately. While her two friends received warm readings — praise, encouragement, spiritual elevation — she felt singled out in the opposite direction. Her character was being pulled apart, in front of her friends, while they were being built up. She couldn’t name it at the time. It felt like being made the crazy one while everyone around her was reasonable.
The shaman offered one of them an amulet. She refused.
The shaman praised the friend who earned the most among the three. The one who earned less she demolished — not privately, but in front of the group.
There is more to say about the friend she praised.
She had been with us — with me and my ex — the very first time when she visited the shaman. We came along that day. She was in a relationship with a woman at the time.
The shaman told her she was not destined to date women. She would marry a man and have two children.
She became one of the shaman’s regulars.
I have thought about this for a long time. What it takes to hear something like that — a verdict that contradicts your current life, your current love, your current understanding of yourself — and return for more. My friend has avoidant tendencies. The kind of avoidance that makes decisive external verdicts feel like relief rather than intrusion. If the future is already decided, the difficulty of choosing disappears. You don’t have to figure out whether this relationship is right, whether this person is right, whether you are right. The shaman has already read it. The uncertainty — which is where avoidant anxiety lives — is removed.
Later, the shaman told my ex that this friend was worth keeping close. She told her to maintain the contact. My other friends who went with her for their own readings told me she was visibly flattered, already returning, already inside the system.
The shaman praised her in the group session. She had already identified her as useful — the highest earner, a friend of my ex’s, someone with her own avoidant longing for certainty. Someone who would come back. Someone worth cultivating.
She also said, at some point in that session: I think dating women is better than dating men nowadays.
The three of them were all lesbians. One of them had just been told she was destined to marry a man. The comment landed in a room where that verdict was already sitting. It was not a neutral observation about modern relationships. It was a mirror held at exactly the right angle — I see you, I am on your side, this is a safe room — said to women who had spent their lives in a world that did not routinely offer them that. The flattery was targeted. The alignment was constructed. The contradiction between you will marry a man and dating women is better was not addressed. The room received both.
They hadn’t known what they were inside when they were inside it. They understood it better once they knew how it had ended for me.
The Realtor Wife
There was one more outside witness.
We had a realtor couple — practical people, not spiritual, not therapists. They read Four Pillars of Destiny, the Chinese horoscope system based on birth data and pattern analysis. They had known my parents for years through property work. My ex and I visited them every year.
The last visit, the middle sister came too. I was exhausted from hours of driving, tearful, barely present. The husband — blunt by nature, given to cynical remarks — said something casual to my ex: I heard your parents sold the land that was giving them hard time from the listing.
My ex said: I bought it.
The husband went quiet. Uncomfortable. I didn’t register the exchange — I was too far gone.
When I got home, I accused my mother. The shaman had spent months building the case: your parents are frauds, the unfinished fence is evidence, they agreed to a contract and didn’t deliver. The framework was already in place. My mother’s explanation landed as excuse, not truth.
Then she told me about a phone call she had received.
The realtor wife had called after the visit. Not during — after. She had gone home, thought about what she had seen, and picked up the phone. She told my mother: Suin looked like a rat surrounded by cats. She looked like she was on the verge of a cliff. She looked concerning.
This woman had no context for the shaman. She didn’t know about the ceremonies or the 3am mountain or the hierarchy of the dead. She just saw me in a room and saw: cornered. On the edge.
She called my mother out of concern for someone she barely knew.
I didn’t receive it. Instead I redirected: then why did the husband say the land was giving you hard time?
My mother explained: a property on a long listing is hard work. They wanted to liquidise. His discomfort after my ex’s announcement wasn’t the discomfort of someone caught — it was the discomfort of someone who had just understood what he was looking at. He had watched me in that room. His wife had already noted the rat and the cliff. And then my ex announced she had purchased my family’s property, in front of me, while I sat unconscious and tearful.
He went quiet because he had just seen clearly. Not because there was anything to hide.
I was too inside the system to receive what either of them were offering. My mother trying to hand me the exit. The realtor wife having already called to flag what she saw. Both of them pointing at the same thing from different directions.
For months I thought the criticism was love. I thought being told what I was thinking was someone caring enough to see me clearly. I was grateful for the correction. That’s the part that’s hardest to explain to people who weren’t inside it.
It wasn’t that I was forced to believe I was the problem. It’s that believing I was the problem felt, for a long time, like finally being honest.
No one else gets to tell me what I’m thinking. I know that now. But learning it means unlearning the idea that being corrected is the same as being cared for.
I’m still working on the difference.
The thing I keep returning to: the shaman built a world where goodness was scarce and hierarchical and hers to distribute. My ex was good. Her family was good. They had been chosen by mountains, confirmed by ceremonies, elevated beyond ordinary people. And the more that goodness accumulated — the more my ex collected those confirmations — the more my ordinary human complexity looked like corruption by comparison.
The grey human — the one who is neither villain nor hero, neither fundamentally good nor cleverly evil, just a person made of the usual complicated mixture — had no place in the shaman’s world.
That’s the thing I’m reclaiming now. Not the verdict that I was good all along. Not the counter-argument that my ex was bad. Just the insistence that sorting was always the wrong frame. That the mountain doesn’t choose heroes. That no one is fundamentally better in moral quality than anyone else.
The shaman built a world where goodness was scarce.
I’m building a different one.
From a temple where I’m learning that the people who knew me longest saw the clearest — and that keeping them out was a strategy, not an accident,
Emotionally yours,
Suinny
P.S. The hardest part of recovery isn’t learning to trust others again. It’s learning to be on your own side. When you’ve spent months as one of five people telling yourself you’re crazy — how do you become your own advocate instead of your own prosecutor? It starts with this: no one else gets to tell me what I’m thinking.
Next week: A fortuneteller told us the truth about 2025. I said: fuck destiny. Then I asked him for the moving-in date anyway.