TESO Letters: Open Letters to the World – The Empathic Social Observer

THE FUSS ABOUT UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

**Photo credit:** Omar:. Lopez-Rincon
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Dear Men Who Think Unconditional Love Isn’t for Them,

First, let me offer you a warm, honest hug -for carrying such a heavy weight. And a lie.
A lie from the pit of hell.

Unconditional love exists. It’s everywhere. It begins with your Creator-God- whose love is infinite and unwavering. It flows through mothers, siblings, children. Yes, the world is messy. The comments I read on X prove that many of you have been dealt the short end of the stick. Or perhaps it’s simply the nature of men to absorb pain so deeply that instead of feeling it and healing, you build walls around it- until the hurt calcifies into hardness. Into pride. Into distance.

Call it bravado, call it ego- but pain is pain. Humans are frail, and resistance can sometimes be the enemy. For every story of betrayal, there are a thousand quiet stories that challenge it. Beneath all the noise, unconditional love still exists. It always has.

Some of you might be shaking your heads: “We’re talking about love from a woman- a partner, a wife.” Even there, unconditional love can be found.

Have you ever considered how our role-filled view of relationships distorts the very essence of love? Men forget, too. A woman’s worth becomes reduced to the children she bears, the meals she prepares, the way she keeps the home together. Yet in those quiet, unseen moments- when a woman stays, against all odds, even when she has the means to leave- what would you call that? Or when she toils beside you, fingers worn and heart stretched thin, still choosing love- shouldn’t those count as hallmarks of something unconditional?

And yet, the lie persists: that men are not loved unconditionally. Many of us-men and women alike- swallow it like shawarma on a bad day. Maybe because it feeds a deep, unspoken fear. Or worse, because it excuses us from the vulnerability that true love requires.

This world is imperfect. It holds as much ugliness as it does beauty. But I urge you- seek the beauty. Hold onto it. Let it remind you that while conditions exist, so does grace. So does love that stays. Love that chooses. Love that sees you even when you’re not performing.

Don’t let the noise of a broken world drown out the quiet truth:
You are loved.
And you are worthy of love that asks for nothing but your presence.

With love,
Meestique
The Empathic Social Observer

LETTER TO MY FUTURE DAUGHTER

Dear Daughter,

I write this to you even before meeting you, knowing that if you are like me, your heart will be open—bleeding sometimes for justice, to see and be seen, aching to love.

It is not out of vanity that I compare you to me, or that I want you to live in my shadow. It is because with every letter I write, I want to share myself with you—fully and honestly—so that you will see me as human, flawed and learning, just like you will be. My words come from experience, both pleasant and painful.

You will come to understand, however, that we all succumb to vanity sometimes. Knowing this—recognizing it in yourself and others—will be useful in the years to come. But that is a letter for another day.

Today, I want to speak to you about something simpler, yet harder to master:
Actions are more powerful than words.

Because you are a woman, words may carry great weight in your life. Compliments will thrill you. Apologies might disarm you. Promises could make your heart swell. And yet—none of them are the truth. Not on their own, anyway. And that’s a lot coming from me who loves words and knows how powerful they can be.
But you must train your mind to become more perceptive to actions—your own, and those of others.

Let your words be few, and always rooted in intention. Speak to shape the world, not to decorate it.
And when others speak—pause, and watch.
The person who says they care but never shows up for you,
The friend who always talks about being honest but tells white lies to everyone else,
The man who writes you poetry but flinches at the idea of sacrifice—
These are your lessons.

People will be watching you too, even when they don’t realize it.
They’ll watch to see if you bluff. If you fold under pressure. If your actions betray insecurity.
Let them watch. But more importantly, let yourself watch. Let your own actions be the evidence of your values.

If you ever feel lost between what someone says and what they do,
Always choose to believe what they do.

That is where truth lives.

With love,
Your Mother

To the One Who Still Believes in Books

“We need people who can imagine. Fiction builds empathy. It puts you inside someone else’s head. It lets you understand things you don’t get told directly.”
—Neil Gaiman

Dear You,

You’re the one they call idealistic.
Head in the clouds. Too sentimental. Too slow.
You read too much, they say. You feel too much.
You’re the kind of person who gets goosebumps from a well-placed semicolon.
The kind who lingers on a sentence long after the world has moved on.

They call you dreamy—like it’s an insult.
Like dreaming hasn’t been the birthplace of every real thing we now live inside.

But you know better.

You know that stories build bridges where silence once lived.
That a novel can shift your moral compass faster than a debate.
That fiction sharpens the imagination—and imagination is the beginning of everything: innovation, empathy, resistance, design, hope.

You know that someone else’s fantasy often becomes tomorrow’s fact.

So when the world tells you to grow up, to be “practical,”
when it dismisses your softness as weakness,
when it looks at your stack of books and sees only indulgence—
remember this:
Your reading is not retreat. It’s rehearsal.

You are training your mind to stretch, to leap, to sit with nuance, to hold contradiction.
You are learning how to inhabit the lives of others without losing your own.

And that is no small thing.
That is how revolutions start quietly.

So keep reading.
Keep imagining.
Keep being exactly the kind of “unserious” person who might one day rewrite everything.

With admiration,
Meestique

P.S. They laughed at dreamers until they needed one to fix their algorithm. Stay soft. Stay radical.