Lesson #6 From Rock Bottom

Your authenticity, your self, your subjectivity is the most important and solid, stable ground you will ever find. That’s your life raft.

You don’t have to suffer. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. There is plenty of unavoidable suffering in this world such as misfortune, injustice, disease. Please do not make your pain or the pain of others worse. Please don’t let anyone invalidate, minimize, and therefore normalize suffering. Please don’t let anyone tell you to settle or ignore your intuition or lower your standards. Raise your standards to viciously exclude such people from your life. People who settled and are miserable in their own life, who didn’t have the courage to choose themselves, their dreams, their standards, to stand up for themselves, to speak the truth and their truth and live their truth will not applaud you or support or encourage your bravery, freedom, authenticity and will try to sabotage it. Do not listen to them. They are wrong. I promise you as someone who didn’t listen to them: THEY ARE WRONG. They are not you. Their fucked up beliefs, toxic, misogynistic “culture” are theirs, their limitations, their fears, their choices are theirs and theirs alone. It’s all fucking made up. They locked themselves in a prison of their own making in a hell of their own making that they want to try and convince you is reality or truth or the only way. You going against that would cause them to face themselves, to face the fact that there was always a way out of the prison but they chose to stay in the prison because of their fear, the lies they were told that they believed and the lies that now they need to believe in. They would have to face the fact that they wasted, threw away years, decades of their life, that they gave up on themselves, they betrayed themselves for something that wasn’t worth it. They can’t even acknowledge that open door. They suppress and disrespect and devalue and invalidate and minimize and deny their own emotions screaming at them for acknowledgement for something to change for release. They ignore and abuse their inner child, strangled and suffocated their authenticity to preserve attachments that were never even worth it, to follow made up rules, misogynistic or misandrist lies of what a man or woman should be or do and then wonder why they are miserable, why they are depressed and dissatisfied and disconnected and alienated and desperately searching for distractions and numbing agents. Do not lose faith and trust in yourself. Do not lose faith and trust in your ideals, your needs, your standards, your boundaries. Do not even share them with people who aren’t capable of understanding you. They are yours. They are precious and you are the only authority on your life. No one else has the right to tell you what to do or how to live. No one else knows what you are or who you are and what you need. No one else is in your body experiencing your life, your career, your relationship. Toxic people, environments, cultures do not want you to be independent and have autonomous self, to love and respect and honor and trust yourself, your individuality, your authenticity, your nature, your emotional GPS. They need you to feel scared, powerless, insecure, not good enough, outsource your decision making, your assessment of reality, your self-esteem, your happiness. They want to make you think there isn’t better out there, that it doesn’t exist or is impossible or that you aren’t capable of it or worthy of it. This could be malice or fear talking. It doesn’t matter and it’s not true. Authenticity is not a guarantee of bliss or worldly riches. Nor is it without its perils. It is lonely, uncertain, confusing, has moments of doubt and anxiety that toss you about and make you desperate for solid ground while you cling to your life raft. But it is also fun, adventurous, courageous, brave, and will make you feel braver, wiser, more happy and whole than you ever felt before. And this is coming from someone who knows keenly the terror of uncertainty, rejection, not being good enough. I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going. But I found myself at rock bottom, at the rock bottom of my self, my being and embraced her and brought her up to the surface and purged all the lies, the senseless pain I was being told was normal and nothing. I am with myself and for myself and that is the most solid ground you will ever find against the vicissitudes, disappointments, failures, rejections, cruelties of the world.