Truth + Being Complete
We carry incompletions through our lives in ways that are often almost impossible to see. We overcome them, bury them, transcend them, make peace with them, or simply learn to live around them. Eventually, we become so accustomed to their presence that we convince ourselves they no longer matter.
We say we’ve moved on. We’re over it. We’re better for it. Maybe it even “made me who I am.”
But being accustomed to something isn’t the same as being complete with it.
In this episode of Truth + Conversation, Gary approaches completion as an ontological inquiry—not a psychological or spiritual one. Returning to the idea introduced in the first episode that you are a conversation, he examines how incompletion becomes embedded in the conversations through which we experience ourselves, other people, and life itself.
Think of completion as a circle. When the two ends meet, there’s nothing more required. The circle simply is. In human affairs, however, those ends often remain apart. There’s a gap.
And human beings are extraordinarily good at learning how to live with the gap.
We accommodate it. We make room for it. We organize relationships around it. We stop discussing certain things. We stop expecting certain things. We withdraw in certain places and learn which subjects are best left alone. Eventually, what began as an incompletion simply becomes part of the scenery of our lives.
That’s why people often struggle to identify what’s actually incomplete. Ask someone and they’ll tell you what happened: they were betrayed, cheated on, abandoned, mistreated, overlooked.
But what happened isn’t necessarily the incompletion.
The circumstances point toward it. The emotions tell us something is there. But neither necessarily identifies what continues to keep the circle open.
And those incompletions don’t remain conveniently located in the past. We bring them with us—into relationships, marriages, work, parenting, and every other area of life. When something happens today, the emotional experience can feel remarkably familiar. We listen for our incompletions. We look for them. We become sensitive to them. Sometimes we even participate in manufacturing evidence for them.
One of the clearest places to look is in our persistent upsets.
Those upsets aren’t always dramatic. They don’t necessarily involve shouting, anger, tears, or confrontation. They can look like withdrawal, silence, suppression, disconnection, or covering everything with positivity. The expression changes. The persistent familiarity doesn’t.
So what actually keeps the circle open?
The shoulds and shouldn’ts. The coulds and couldn’ts. The what-ifs. What should have happened. What somebody should have done. What would have been fair. What would have been justified. What they got away with. What it did to you.
And underneath all of it is something far more confronting:
Your rightness about it.
You may be completely right about what happened. Right about what somebody did. Right that it shouldn’t have happened. Right that it wasn’t fair.
But that rightness can become a possession—the ache you carry, the burden you accommodate, the unseen baggage around which you gradually organize a life.
Eventually, you stop experiencing yourself as distinct from it. It becomes who I am, what relationships are like for me, what my life is like.
That’s where the inquiry into being complete becomes uncomfortable. Things happen to us. Sometimes terrible things. Completion doesn’t deny any of that.
The question is what happens when those things continue to live through us long after the event itself is over.
At some point, there’s a choice:
Your rightness or your freedom.
Your rightness or your peace of mind.
Your rightness or your self-expression, joy, and possibility.
Being complete doesn’t require rewriting the past. It begins with confronting your own participation in keeping it alive, allowing what happened to have gone the way it went, and turning your attention toward what’s next.
Because whatever happened, whoever did what, and however justified you may be in everything you think about it, one thing remains yours:
You are always on the hook for the possibility of your life.