Will You Accept These Gifts?
My willingness to deny reality is what helps me unleash my superpowers. By seeing beyond what’s there, beyond what currently exists — I am able to evaluate, with unrelenting focus, what ought to be. My gift is possessing an inexplicable intuition for observing, identifying and translating multiple layers of intention, constraint, and rewards within a system.
I swear the older I get the more I learn and the less I know.
How Is that even possible? Because with every new thing I learn, I am furthered in my ability to question the nature and design of reality.
By “reality,” I am referring to the dominant systems and institutions governing our behavior and the way it shapes how we feel, and therefore how we operate. Also known as the mainstream cultural and social norms, or arbitrary expectations we project upon others, or have projected upon ourselves as dictated by our roles in multidimensional, concentric systems.
Those very expectations, the ones that most people are wired with motivation to meet, I find myself cosmically compelled to greet with skepticism and doubt. Those expectations are straw man distractions to me. They provocatively invite me to investigate further and ponder deeply about what they are obscuring. With each new decision (or opinion) I encounter, or am subject to the consequences of, I acquire a new data point with which I can plot. It is my unconscious goal to seek to understand all perspectives or criteria evaluated in the making of a decision, and as a result, through the process of doing this research, I gather insights about the motives, priorities, goals, and bias of the decision maker(s), and those of the system in which we are actors.
I do this all subconsciously. It’s not something I control or navigate, it is my default functioning mode, my automatic behavior. I am mysteriously, and beautifully programmed this way.
This is all to say, this is the very foundation of my personal bias.
I am biased to gather more info.
I am biased to the existence of multiple variables.
I am biased to expanding possibility.
I am biased to potential.
I am biased to neutrality.
I am biased toward indecision.
I am biased to seek intent.
I am biased to curiosity.
I am biased to skepticism.
These biases are a reflection of the tome of my personal values. They are my compass. They are evidence of my motives, priorities and goals. They are evidence of what makes me tick. They are uniquely and unapologetically me.
All my life, it has felt as though no matter where I turn I encounter people insisting there are things I need to know, or need to learn, or need to be deferential to, but they can never communicate why. Apparently, I am not entitled to knowing that, just that I obediently must do as obliged. This was, and remains to be profoundly perplexing to me.
Not knowing what else to do, I played along as best I could. I mustered the motivation to learn the rules of the game. The thought of not — of social outcast and misfittery — was too terrifying to me. I wanted to belong. I wanted to please others. I wanted to engage. I wanted to connect. I wanted to understand. I wanted to make sense.
To meet these visceral needs within me, I conceded to memorizing all of the silly things required of me to know, and tried not to think too much about how little sense any of it made to me. Sometimes, I’d get so overwhelmed with information I was incapable of making sense of that my brain would give up on me, and I’d become increasingly susceptible to ideologies, self-validating reflections of reality, and all forms of neatly externalized frameworks designed to abate the abyss.
It wasn’t until I was into my twenties that I finally started waking up to the personal cost and magnitude of the trade-off I made between myself and my social contract. I had exchanged being authentic to my nature — to who I am — with being accepted and rewarded by my family, peers, and society in general. I had been forfeiting my abilities to make good decisions and think critically the only way I know how. I had flogged my intellect viciously into submission. To this day, and every day beyond it is and will be in active recovery.
What started waking me up was having to rely on my own personal motivation to reduce the scope of my curiosity and exploration with a topic of interest. Surviving grad school was a personally perilous journey, rife with the fight to straddle a chasm that was determined to crack wide-open and swallow me whole. Prior to my twenties, I was so heavily involved in athletics that it consumed the majority of my time and created an artificial degree of structure with the time that remained. I barely had enough time to do what was required to achieve social acceptance, never mind satisfy my innate desires or explore my unique gifts.
In absence of the imposed structure and constraints, deadlines became blurrier, they suddenly felt arbitrary. It became clear that the constraints imposed on me were designed for upholding goals that were not aligned with my own. I became increasingly skeptical of the authority of the perspectives I was encountering. I possess a deep respect for scientific research, and am moved by strongly argued beliefs supported by evidence. For that reason, I consider it as a sign of respect that I am actively engaging with a thesis by seeking out alternative perspectives.
It’s important for me to be able to plot where any given perspective sits across a spectrum. This is how I construct reality. This is the pulsating heart of my sense-making process. This is my gift.
Please accept my shine.
