Truth and the Teeth That Chew It

Recently, a long-distance friend from Egypt reached across time zones with a question that lingered longer than I expected.

“Do personal perspectives change the truth?”

My immediate reaction remains: no.

Personal perspective does not change the truth.

Objective truth is untouched, unmoved by opinion, unbent by wish.

Existence holds timeless principles: pain, death, breath.

These are truths that go beyond any argument.

They do not ask for belief. They simply are.

But experience is not truth; it is digestion.

We consume reality through different mouths.

Some chew slowly, tasting every implication.

Others swallow whole, hoping not to feel.

Some truths need bile before they can be broken down.

What nourishes one may poison another.

What sits well with me might churn in you.

We all have meals we dread but must eat.

Truths we’d rather skip, but they arrive anyway.

Helpings on porcelain plates, in hospital rooms, in quiet moments when memory stirs the gut.

Perspective doesn’t alter the meal.

It alters how it’s absorbed.

The enzymes of upbringing, trauma, and hope break truth down differently in each of us.

So no, truth doesn’t change.

But our relationship to it does.

And that relationship is where meaning lives.

Truth doesn’t ask to be liked. It asks to be known.

But knowing is a negotiation. A tug of war between what is and what we’re willing to see.

We metabolize reality through story,

through silence, through resistance.

Some truths we reject until they ache.

Just as our modern era has food that is hardly classifiable as food, we also have ‘truth’ that’s artificial.

Chemical, processed, full of additives we mistake for truth. Just as we so often choose comfort as opposed to clarity.

Even denial has an aftertaste.

And silence often has texture.

The hardest truths are altar stones, cold, immovable, and meant to be knelt before.

Not all truths are knowable; some are buried forever in the sands of time.

Truths that matter most are the hardest chew, and chosen by very few.

So when my friend asked if perspective changes truth, I still say no.

But it does change the eater.

And that, is also worth knowing.