To get off default autopilot, you have to accept that you’re on it. Make time to stop multitasking and find the time and space to get to the root of your problems.

If you don’t have the time, that’s exactly when you need to make the time. Knowing that “if it’s to be, it’s up to me” gives you the way forward.

Becoming enlightened means working to prevent irrational behavior. You learn how to spot red flags because you’ve seen through your patterns. You can predict your irrationality and prevent it because, as humans, we can always find a better way.  With frameworks and practices, you live life on purpose, even if you haven’t yet noticed the gap or opportunity.

What will start for you as a journey through a specific issue will end with more self-awareness than you anticipated, more self-compassion than you can imagine, and more far-reaching results than you might expect.  Get started on your journey to achieve your full potential today by ending autopilot.

To get off default autopilot, you have to accept that you have one, make time to stop multitasking, and find the time and space to get to the root of your problems.

If you don’t have the time, that’s exactly when you need to make the time. Knowing that “if it’s to be, it’s up to me” gives you the way forward instead of the constant spin in which you now find yourself.

Cramming yourself into a life defined by society or anyone else hurts you. You don’t have to have a universal health care system to know that when you are hurt, we all hurt. When you thrive, you lift up others with you.

Perfectly Unique

We each have a uniqueness, in our skills, interests, and values, among any dimension of being a human that you can pick. It’s something you will be good at, sooner or later, because you want to work harder and longer at it.

Becoming enlightened is recognizing that we are not special; no one is more important or better, but we are different.

You’ll have lucky breaks that aren’t luck, but finely tuned talent and intuition. You may not find this sweet spot at a young age when it might yield the greatest benefit, but do not stop searching until you do. This is your purpose, and even if you don’t find it until you retire, it will rejuvenate you, and you will feel the passion and energy of a young person, even if you never felt it then.

One of the saddest statements I hear women make is when they declare that they have reached the age at which women come into themselves. I shudder and ask, “Who were you doing before?” But I know the answer: daughter, sister, mother, wife, and doing their earnest best to do a good job of that. Crisis when they clash, such as when a husband wants one thing, and the father demands something different. Which relationship wins? The woman who comes into herself often does so as a result of an empty nest, an empty home, an empty space where obligation once lived.

For me, there was the daughter who knew what it took to make my father happy. And there was the daughter, adamant that she wouldn’t be like her and would never call herself a mother, a divorcee, or a writer.

The Upside of Taunting

Just like those two people who didn’t get along, neither did these two parts of myself. When I wanted to kill myself, becoming enlightened was the realization that made me ask which self it was that I wanted to kill, and the answer was, everyone that is not authentically me. Yes, kill that self, and have the courage to live through it to begin anew, as the self that belongs to you: yourself.

Perhaps the most liberating thing to have happened to me was being taunted for having a lesbian mother. In those days, it was rare, and sure, it made me learn what a lesbian was, and at an age when I hadn’t fully considered sex as an activity, let alone who people might be doing it with. I frankly didn’t care and didn’t want to know. Instead, I learned that judgment can be harsh and has absolutely nothing to do with you. Young enough to shrug it off and get on with life, I was freed from years of caring what my peers thought, and the choices they pressured each other into making.

I did not choose my mother, nor what she chooses to do with her time. Maybe if that choice hadn’t been so rare, the whole situation could have been avoided for everyone, and there wouldn’t be a weird little kid like me wondering about personal choice and optimizing freedom.

My dad, on the contrary, was someone everyone always described as “nice.” As I learned, there is a huge gulf between nice and kind, and slim experiences are easy to control a reputation. You can’t be constantly kind to everyone, because you don’t have enough time or money, so the question is, to whom are you the most kind?

The Downside of Buffing

Becoming enlightened is to be able to say not nice things in kind ways if you can, but always in truthful ways – if only to yourself.

Most of the things you believe may not be anything close to the truth. I paid dearly to discover that my dad was not nice, but a narcissist. Only then did the pieces of confusion fall into a clear and complete picture. It’s not a nice thing to say, but avoiding the “not nice” leads us into misery and suffering far worse than a few uncomfortable words.

Women hear and pass forward the advice, “If you want anyone to care about you, then you have to…”

Breathe. That’s how I would like to end the sentence. Any other way implies a deal, an offer you make with another person and expect them to uphold their end, while no actual communication is made, let alone put to paper and signed.

However, I’ve met mothers who have asked me, “But who will take care of you when you are older?” I hope they are prepared for realities, regardless of their expectations.

When people protest about how you have to be to get what you want, they are revealing the grand deal in which they believe. It may be true in their world, but it doesn’t make it universal.

Sons just breathe, and the self-declared feminist immediately puts him on a pedestal. He laughs when Grandma tells him to go play while the girls do the dishes.

Beautiful women do it, just breathe, and that’s all you ask of them, and indeed feel annoyed should they have anything to say. Still, we all primp, wax, color, file, sand, smooth, and otherwise work to become more beautiful, and hope you’ll listen, too.

I invested my youth in activities my parents enjoyed, but they didn’t endure anything for my enjoyment. I spent a lot of time and money visiting my sister during a difficult time in her life, and instead of seeing what I was doing for her, she said she was doing me a favor by providing me with a cottage lifestyle. Complete with the favor of what it’s like to cut and split wood for the winter.

Becoming enlightened is to recognize that people are capable of seeing things the complete opposite way in which you do. Instead of fighting over who is correct, you know that no one is, so why argue?

Becoming enlightened is to live and let live, or rather, think and let them do whatever they want with their brains. You refuse to be different to make their lives easier. You don’t act because you’re making a choice based on an expected reaction from others.

Do it because you want to, because you are compelled to, but don’t do it because you expect or need the other person to be grateful.

Today, everyone throws around the word narcissist like it’s an insult rather than a diagnosis. As a diagnosis, it means someone who looks back at a disaster they created and says, “No one could have done it better than me.” As an insult, you sound like a self-indulgent fool who goes on to treat people horribly to hold onto your far-fetched stories and self-analysis. In some ways, we all have this tendency, or this streak. It’s one of the most helpful things you can do for yourself: listen to it and stamp it out like a spark that could start a wildfire. You deserve the truth about reality, yourself, and other people.

The Fantasyland

Living in fantasyland is a need for the ego. If you look at the future vision you hold, and the past you know to be true, can you draw a line between the three with a ruler? Or is that future way out of line? Are you making reasons for why things may suddenly be different? Sudden change is possible, but rare.

In my world, it’s the bathroom. Eighteen years ago, it won the award for worst bathroom in Canada. It stood unchanged, for another fifteen years, until the toilet failed, and finally, the carpet was ripped out. Another year saw the double-layer wallpapered walls get ripped out. The mirror sat in another room for a year before I gave up hope that improvement was coming, and hung it back on the wall again. Will it be another twenty years before the bathroom isn’t cringe-worthy? That’s all I wanted, not perfection, just not embarrassing, disgusting, and so easily fixed.

No one deserves perfection, which should be a relief, because it doesn’t exist. The pursuit of it is futile. Perhaps the question is not how to do it perfectly, but rather, how to do it repeatedly. Don’t think of a bathroom renovation as a lifetime event, but of maybe, once a decade? Your taste change, trends change, change your bathroom.

Whatever your version of the bathroom is, get on with it, and let go of all the ideas of what you think you deserve or don’t. Becoming enlightened is to aim for progress instead, because if you learn anything after buying your first house, it’s that you had no idea what you wanted or needed in a house. Experience is the wisdom that those who seek perfection will never attain.

The Wisdom

Life is pain, and mistakes will happen, experience is the roller coaster through it all. Yet, in the end, you will reflect and recall, and as you peel away why things went as they did, both for the best and for not so much so, you eliminate the pain and ingest the lesson. This is wisdom.

Wisdom is for the warriors in life because it takes time, distance, and scars to earn it. You deserve those experiences; you deserve to earn the wisdom within.

You aren’t here to live someone else’s life, even if that’s been the tradition in your family. The only thing you own is your life. It’s yours. Becoming enlightened is to do with what you will.

You deserve to be treated as you treat others. Hopefully, you respect people’s space and rights, and seek to listen with compassion, and lead with an open heart. When you are around people who make you feel like you have to protect yourself, your opinion or your heart, get up and go.

You cannot thrive when you are trying to survive, and those instincts you have to protect yourself are instinctual for a reason. Survival is utmost important, so be sure to run, not walk, away from people around whom you cannot lay down your weapon, whether it’s your voice or your silence.

You deserve to be raised. To be protected and trained by people who have your best interests in mind. Many of my generation claim to have raised themselves, with two working parents, and an empty house after school. Yetwe can’t raise ourselves because the whole point is that support comes from external sources above us. Lifting you up. Without a helping hand, it’s not getting raised; it’s learning to survive.

The Promise

You deserve to thrive. What help do you need to get there? You cannot thrive on handouts. Give a man a fish, and he has a meal; teach a man to fish, and he has a life. Seek the lessons, take the experiences, and when it looks easy, know it’s short-term relief, and use that relief to regroup.

The only point is not make the same mistake twice, while seeing that life is a series of doing the same thing over and over again. See the progress? Becoming enlightened is to leap out of the loop of survival and choose to thrive, like you always knew you deserved. You deserve as many chances as you are willing to take.

Today, I am baffled by how easy it is to learn something, anything, from someone else’s first-hand experience. When I was growing up, it was so much more difficult to try anything new. However, in my day, you could simply move away and start fresh somewhere else, where no one knows anything about anything that might shame you. I’m not sure which is more preferable: the uneducated leap into the unknown, or the overeducated yet indelible leap for perfection?

As an old schooler with a bachelor’s degree in learn-it-yourself, I’ve taught myself much, and the best lesson is to never make the same mistake twice.

When you start over, and surely you will, make sure you’ve learned as much as possible about what went right last time, but also what you would like to do differently this time. When you dwell on the things that didn’t go as well as you’d hoped without judgment, shame, or blame, you realize that there are many things that you would change for something else this next time around.