A Resilient Character: Finding Authenticity

My tour of hell started in my dreams with the words, “Since you like hot tubs, let me show you what we have.”

Indeed, the first one I saw looked like a straight-single-girls paradise. There was every kind of man you could imagine. However, as I was about to jump in to see if I could finally find the one for me, the cat-calling and jeers started.

“No thanks,” I said, and just as I rejected them, they reached out to take me with force. Just then, I noticed the guards who poked them back into what now looked like a boiling cauldron.

One of the guards said, “Yep, that’s the hell for those out to fuck somebody and not always sexually.”

The next option was full of women—only women. “Absolutely not,” I said, and as the women were also rejected, the claws came out, and the water turned red with all the backstabbing. They couldn’t reach me, and I was grateful for the guards again.

The third option was for all women again. I looked first for the guards, not seeing any to protect me from their retaliation should I also reject them. They weren’t needed, I heard. “These are the wives and mothers. If any of them tries to escape, the others pull her back down.”

I shook my head. “Never,” I said. “I’m a spinster and proud of it.” Such is how you fail your recruitment into hell.

The costs are paid when we try to manage what other people think of us or care how they label us. It is as if a thought in someone’s head is more important than your entire existence, all the things you feel and think. It’s hell. I hope you saved your wings if you wind up there, too.

The Ready-Made Answers

Once, I spent an hour listening to another woman complain about her kids and husband. Then, she asked me, “So, do you think you’ll ever get married?”
Before she finished her sentence, she realized she wished I’d join her hell so we could have more to talk about and more in common. I wouldn’t seem so self-righteously independent.

I explained to her that I didn’t know which fifty percent I’d give up. Fifty/fifty, everyone says, but I do 100%. Now, what would I drop? And for what gain? Such an old-fashioned concept seems no longer required in today’s society. Security? Fickle people and legal divorce ruin that idea. The only sure way to avoid divorce is never to get married.

Anyone who wants the institution of marriage should be able to have it, and once it’s no longer denied to you, you may realize you didn’t like it either – you didn’t want to be rejected.

When you file for divorce, no one will deny that from you or your spouse. Unfortunately for the children, you have pure freedom over who you spend time with and how long you spend with them. Liberty protects the innocent from other people’s use of their freedom.

What Gets Relinquished

Choose wisely, or choose frivolously – it’s your life, and I hope you’ll do with it what you please and not anyone else would have you do. Indeed, I’m no guru. I’m merely attempting to get men to integrate feelings and women to integrate rebellion while both learn they are far more capable than their thoughts about either.

“The greatest problem that modern man faces is that the mind is trained too much and the heart is completely neglected – not only neglected but condemned too. Feelings are not allowed; feelings are repressed. The man of feeling is thought to be weak; the man of feeling is thought to be childish, immature,” says Osho.

For someone like me who believes in the potential of every human being, it’s too much waste to witness, too many problems that need solving, and too much genius that remains untapped.

Fooled by Appearances

How can a man marry for love and not for all the historical reasons, like a consolidation of power, capital, and land, if he cannot feel? How can a woman not be enslaved if she is not allowed her anger and hardness?

I hope the days of gender expectations are over, but as long as people change their bodies to match what they feel inside, it’s my feeling that we are farther, not closer, to a resolution.

One day on the radio, I heard a transgender man talk about how he wanted to stay home and raise his kids without it being a big deal. Dude, I said to the radio, if you’d kept your gender of origin, it would be such a nonissue; the feminists would wonder why you are on the air.

As I wonder why you are on the air, I believe it’s because the radio station wanted you to sound dumb. You got the air time, but they sent the message – why did you change your body? Of course, do what you want. It’s your money, time and body, and the surgeons must work. It just looks so painful on so many levels.

Marilyn Monroe said, “Boys think girls are like books. If the cover doesn’t catch their eye, they won’t read what’s inside.” These days, I do not believe you can limit that sentiment to boys. Mark Zuckerberg discovered that people love to judge and rate the covers, and he built that desire into a global empire.

Monroe also said, “A woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. She is measured by how her body curves or doesn’t curve, by where she is flat, straight, or round. She is measured by 36-24-36 inches and ages and numbers, by all the outside things that don’t ever add up to who she is on the inside. And so if a woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by who she is and who she is trying to become. Because as every woman knows, measurements are only statistics… and STATISTICS LIE.”

Darn right, they lie, but that’s another story of corporate greed, desperate leaders, and well-trained bullies.

The question is, to kill the hell on earth that judges people by their covers, how do we take an externally oriented world and get everyone looking inward? Can an outgoing person choose to go inward often enough and for long enough?

Locking them down and forcing them to stay home and to themselves was a surprising, sudden start. Unfortunately, too few recognized the opportunity. Fewer still found the resources they needed. Many are still working away at meeting themselves. One day, we may start a new world with different behaviours, values, and stigmas.

If one can dream of hell, one can also dream of heaven.

Standing Alone

Osho says, “The moment you feel you are no longer dependent on anyone, a deep coolness and a deep silence settle inside, a relaxed let-go.” I used to study heavy metal music; today, my life is so quiet that it’s the opposite. There is an inner calm and nothing to drown out.

“Only those people, very few people, who have stood alone in their being, in their clarity, in their light, who have found their light, who have found their flowering, who have found their own space they can call their home, their eternal home – those few people are the emperors. This whole universe is their empire. They don’t need to conquer it; it is already conquered. By knowing yourself, you have conquered it,” Osho says.

Can you stand alone, or is it your hell on earth? Must you distract yourself constantly or fill your time so entirely that you have an excuse? “Only a man who loves himself can meditate; otherwise, you always escape from yourself, avoiding yourself.” What you will find is that you cannot do it. Wherever you go, there you are.

Once, I bought a collar with a bell for my kitty. As soon as I put it on her, she ran. The more she ran, the louder it rang and the harder she was to catch. I was so sorry, but I also could not stop laughing. One day, she tried to remove my eyeball with her claw, and I called us even. You cannot outrun yourself, and you cannot outrun consequences. You can, however, leave the people who mistreat you behind.

Undoing the Damage

You can sit with yourself and turn sadness into anger or sorrow. You can see responses and reactions instead of out-of-the-blue actions. It’s up to you to decide what to do about it, including nothing, if that’s your choice. You can wake up and become aware of who you are and what to trust in yourself, your relationships and your world. Ultimately, you conquer simply by being awake, aware, and noticing.

“The intelligent person behaves according to the situation, and the stupid behaves according to the ready-made answers,” Osho says.

Life is full of ready-made answers, but life has never met you. Your answers might be different. Your world might be all your own. You won’t know until you peek inside, settle yourself down, and take a good, hard look at who you are and who you want to be.

Take all the time you need – efficiency and intelligence never go together. You might need the same amount of time to undo the damage. As Osho says, “Twenty-five years are wasted – one-third of your life – in making you a machine! And then it becomes difficult to unwind you again, to make you a human being again.”

I hope you get to know yourself before you leave this place. I hope you also find your heaven on Earth and can spot hell from miles away.

Finding Authenticity

I am writing from the television show Designated Survivor’s White House Political Director’s chair. If television appearances are a claim to fame, my chair is more famous than I am.

If I bought my chair at an auction, I bought my degree at the University of Waterloo. For two decades, I worked as an engineer in various companies and industries, reading and learning everything I could about people. I wanted to know why they do the alarming, strange, and wonderful things they do. I was passionate about doing better—individually and collectively.

Like you, I am a product of my life, the people who raised me, and the situations that framed them. Feel free to read and learn more, but you won’t find a LinkedIn profile to make the naming and finger-pointing easy. Names have been hidden or changed to protect the guilty and the innocent, for everyone is a little of both.

Along the way, I started to see how we might all be social products of improvable systems. Now, as much as for the next generation and the perseverance of humankind, it’s time to improve those systems and help the people out of their suffering, just as I suffered with unauthentic choices and a life of force, willpower, and exhaustion.

If I can dream it, I know we can do it. For me, the feeling is enough, knowing. For you, the proof shall follow in my free download, Rare and Remarkable Authenticity.