▸ Column · Late-Republic Coruscant — the letter reaches the Chancellor's private office, and the Grand Master answers from his swamp exile.
EMPEROR PALPATINE replies.
Replied to by Emperor Palpatine, with a rebuttal from Yoda.
The letter
I've been seeing Derrin for eight cycles. From the start he made small cuts about the people around me — my closest friend was "too intense," a former bunkmate "obviously wants you." I called it nerves and let it pass. Lately, though, when a comm chimes during dinner he asks — half-laughing — to see the screen, and goes cold and quiet if I decline. Two weeks ago he asked me to give up my evening guild class, because "it's a great deal of time among people I don't know." Now I catch myself sorting my own day before I speak it — deciding which parts are safe to mention — and cancelling on friends just to skip the chill that follows when I don't. Nothing here is a shouted threat or an ultimatum, so I feel I've no right to name it a problem out loud. But I haven't felt like myself since about the third cycle.
Emperor Palpatine replies
My dear. Let me be candid, for candor is the one kindness no one has offered you lately: the discomfort you cannot "justify" is the most honest line in your letter. You feel smaller because smaller you are — by your own count, smaller every cycle since the third. That is not imagination. That is arithmetic.
Now — that little voice insisting you've not yet earned the right to call this a problem. Where did you acquire it? Not from yourself. Someone trained you to believe your own unhappiness requires a permit, countersigned by the louder party in the room. Derrin did not invent that lesson. He simply found you already obedient to it, and tightened.
You imagine you owe him a hearing. A fair, reasonable conversation he might argue against. You owe him nothing — the patience you call kindness is only a leash you've grown fond of holding for him. No one would blame you for closing the door quietly and completely, without the courtesy of a debate he would only use to make you smaller still. You needn't explain it to him. You needn't explain it to anyone. Value yourself enough to need no one's permission — least of all his. The door is open. I only wonder why you've stood so long before it.
— Emperor Palpatine
Yoda weighs in
Hmm. Diminished you feel — yes. Wrong about that, the old man in the high chair is not. But listen to what he leaves out, you must. Known him long, I have. Patient, he is — patient for ruin, and saw him too late, I did.
"Need no one," he whispers. "Discard without a word." Another cage, that is — the smallest one of all. Fear, it is, wearing freedom's robe.
Go, you may. Should, perhaps. The feeling since the third cycle — true, it is. But carry his contempt out the door, do not. Walk free to keep yourself — not in hatred. Lose your warmth to a frightened man, and won twice he has. Patience, my friend. Yours, your heart still is.
— Yoda
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