The Cleanup Crew’s Field Guide to Clarity: Refined Taxonomy of Truth-Telling in the Relational Field

You’re sitting across from someone. A friend. A lover. A room full of people who believe they know you.

You say something simple and true. True in the way the body knows before the mind can argue.

And something shifts.

The air tightens. Someone laughs too quickly. Someone looks away. Someone begins explaining what you really meant. Someone changes the subject. Someone leans in, eyes bright. Someone goes very, very still.

You spoke from clarity.

And clarity, it turns out, rearranges the room.

It reveals who can stay.

It reveals who needs you to soften.

It reveals who hears you as a threat, and who hears you as an invitation.

It reveals where contact is possible and where it never was.

If you live this way long enough, you begin to see patterns as your nervous system learns what’s real.

You learn to read the field the way the ancients read the stars, the weather, the currents.

And then you begin to understand what Jung meant when he wrote:

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

This is the loneliness of clarity.

The subtle exile that occurs when what feels most real to you cannot land.

This is where a map becomes mercy.

A way to orient to reality.

To understand why some conversations leave you nourished and others leave you hollowed out.

And a way to stop expecting figs from thistles.

Because without language for what you’re encountering, you can spend years performing a quiet, exhausting labor: translating what you see into something safer, softening what you know so the room stays comfortable, carrying the weight of other people’s unexamined defenses as if they were your responsibility.

You disappear a little each time.

You call it compassion.

You call it patience.

You call it love.

But your body calls it something else.

This field guide is for the moment you decide to stop disappearing.

It is also for those who have never had to notice the cost — so you can see what clarity asks of the people who carry it.

1. Truth as Threat

You speak from lived reality.They feel attacked, exposed, or destabilized.They shut down, leave, retaliate, or collapse.

Capacity: low tolerance for self-confrontation.

Relational outcome: rupture or avoidance.

Cost: high.

Relational potential: minimal without their own work.

2. Truth Within Their Limits

They engage but only from within their existing map.They present their truth as complete, without questioning its edges.They do not consciously consider expansion.

Capacity: self-referential coherence.

Relational outcome: contact without movement.

Cost to you: moderate if you try to widen it.

Potential: contextual — depends on your expectations and how much translation you’re willing to do.

3. Truth Met with Curiosity

They begin within their limits — but notice them.They ask questions.They risk being changed.They lean toward expansion.

Capacity: emerging self-reflection.

Relational outcome: growth and mutual discovery.

Cost to you: generative.

Potential: growth, mutuality.

4. Intellectual Depth Without Embodied Risk

They can meet you at depth — but that depth is largely cognitive.They see patterns. They speak frameworks. They extend the conversation.

They may even appear radically aware.

But when reality presses — conflict, vulnerability, loss, relational rupture —they retreat into analysis rather than presence.

They tell you what they know.

Not how they live.

Examples:

• speaking about gender as a construct without living outside its norms

• discussing decolonization without decolonizing one’s own life

• advocating collectivism while acting individualistically

Capacity: high cognitive integration; partial or inconsistent embodiment.

Relational outcome: heady connection, eventual fracture in the field.

Cost to you: subtle dissonance — your body feels the mismatch even when your mind is impressed.

Potential: stimulating but not regulating.

5. Partial Embodiment (The Murky Middle)

Some truths are lived. Others remain conceptual. They may take risks in certain domains while maintaining comfort in others. They can feel like home — until the moment embodiment is required. This is where belonging can feel real, then suddenly collapse.

Capacity: uneven embodiment.

Relational outcome: intermittent resonance, intermittent dissonance.

Cost to you: the whiplash — the hope of being met, followed by the familiar drop into translation, containment, or self-editing.

Potential: authentic connection in specific domains; a relationship that can work if it stays honest about its edges and doesn’t pretend to be more integrated than it is.

6. Embodied Coherence (Rare)

They speak from how they live. They allow life to change them. They relinquish privilege, certainty, and belonging when necessary for freedom. They remain present in rupture. They challenge what they think they know. They are oriented toward liberation — not as theory, but as practice. They will not stay intertwined with systems, relationships, or identities that require self-betrayal. With them, there is no performance. No translation. No headiness.

Capacity: high self-reflection; high cognitive integration; highly embodied.

Relational outcome: home.

Cost to you: restorative.

Potential: belonging.

The Fracture Between Intellectual and Embodied Depth

The distinction between categories 4/5 and 6 is subtle and decisive.

Intellectual depth can feel like belonging.

Embodied depth is belonging.

Intellectual resonance lifts you out of your body.

Embodied resonance settles you into it.

In intellectual connection, there is brilliance.

In embodied connection, there is gravity.

The fracture appears when:

• conflict requires presence, not analysis

• vulnerability requires risk, not theory

• relationship requires change, not explanation

A Note from the Cleanup Crew

Some of us are wired — or forged — to clarify the field.

We name what others avoid.

We detect incoherence.

We refuse anesthetics.

We midwife awareness.

And most potently, we teach through how we live, how we love, and how we embody freedom.

A friend once called us the cleanup crew on planet Earth.

But we are also human.

We long:

• to be held without explaining ourselves

• to be loved without performing clarity

• to be met without translating our experience

• to rest from being the one who sees

Instead, we are often welcomed for our insight and abandoned for our impact.

The cost is excruciating.

And that’s why boundaries belong in this field guide — because without them, clarity becomes extractive.

What the Cleanup Crew Does Not Owe

Those of us oriented toward freedom — toward clarifying the field — do not owe the labor of clarification simply because we exist.

We do not owe education because we have done the work.

We do not owe translation because we can see the patterns.

We do not owe access to our clarity on demand.

None of us were shepherded into expansiveness.

We were forged.

Forged through suffering.Forged through loss.Forged through letting go of what once kept us comfortable.Forged through the unbearable recognition that we could no longer live inside cages that were culturally normalized.

We expanded because confinement became impossible and the familiar became self-betrayal.

Please understand,

We do not care if our voice upends your sense of self or reality.

We do not need to soften to protect your nervous system.

We do not need to play nice just because we arrived first.

We can clarify and we can refuse the role of teacher in spaces that only want extraction.

Freedom means the freedom not to explain ourselves, as well as the freedom to cut through your self-deception, especially when it’s causing us harm.

Why Embodied Coherence Feels Like Home

Because the relationship is not organized around extraction.

Because there is no unpaid labor.

No scaffolding.

No dragging the conversation into the body.

No translating lived reality into acceptable language.

They are already there.

And when you meet them, your nervous system knows before your mind does.

For Those Living at the Edges

If you live at the edges of yourself — where comfort gives way to honesty, you already know the cost.

You know what it is to feel the room rearrange when open your mouth.

You know the quiet alienation of refusing to collude with what everyone else agrees not to see.

You know how often clarity is mistaken for aggression, distance, or superiority.

And still, you remain.

Because returning to the cage is no longer possible and freedom is the air you breath.

You are not looking for perfection.

You are not looking for people who never defend.

You are looking for those who can stay —

those who do not disappear when reality enters the room,

those who do not require your silence in order to feel safe,

those who are willing to be changed by what is true.

They exist as moments of contact where no one has to disappear.

When you find them, your body will know.

Until then — and even after — refuse to be used for your clarity.

Demand to be held.

Often.

Fiercely.

And, for the love of all that is good and beautiful and holy,

demand that it be tender.

I know how harsh and unkind the world has been to you.

For Those Who Recognize Themselves Elsewhere on the Map

It is okay to be wherever you are.

This map is not a ranking.

It is not a measure of worth.

It is not a verdict.

It is a tool for locating ourselves in the process of becoming.

All of us live in multiple places on this map at different times, in different relationships, under different pressures. Capacity is not fixed. Readiness is not permanent. Embodiment is not a destination.

The point is not to judge where you are.

The point is to notice.

Because when we can locate ourselves honestly, we gain the possibility of expansion — not as self-improvement, but as liberation.

Expansion is about becoming more free.

More liberated:

• liberated from reflexive defenses

• liberated from the need to be right

• liberated from the safety of analysis without risk

• liberated to remain present when truth asks something of us

• liberated to no longer be held in familiar prisons

If you find yourself in the threat response, there is nothing shameful in that.

If you recognize a closed map, that map once protected you.

If you live in curiosity, you are already moving.

If you recognize the pull toward intellectual refuge, you are not alone.

We are all, in different ways, learning how to stay.

And for those who speak from clarity: the invitation is not to stand apart, but to remain human — to remember that expansion is a shared path, not a private achievement.

No one is outside the field.

No one is finished.All of us are becoming.

While this taxonomy is not directly connected to or about the origins of the phrase “cleanup crew”.   The phrase “cleanup crew” comes from a conversation with my friend Chrissy Core of Chrissy Core Love Hammer Inquiry @ https://lovehammer.ca.