At the age of 3, I knew something was wrong. I was too young to know what it was, but I felt it.
Unless you fit certain pre-defined criteria, blessed by circumstance and "look" a certain way, there is something wrong with you and there's nothing you can ever do about it. Natural selection, they say. Some lives are worth more than others, some variables more than others, some cultures... etc.
I was too young to ignore it. I didn't know how to suppress the obvious. I didn't know how to lie to myself yet. I was vulnerable. Everyone around me was telling me this was a beautiful world, and I certainly agreed and was excited to explore. But the way they elevated certain people, cultures, society and corruption above the wonder, light and expanse of nature... it never made sense to me.
To me, the adults looked like giant terrifying decaying parasites, sucking the life out of each other and us. Each of them suffering, struggling with the loss of the brightness that I felt encompassed inside me, that I recognized within the young open minds around me. The discomfort I felt when surrounded by people who lost their imagination was utterly terrifying. The darkness inside them.
I couldn't help but notice that the elders saw children as nothing but their pawns, devices to give meaning to their lives because they lacked meaning within themselves. But everyone else seemed ok with ignoring it.. so it must be something wrong with me I began to deduce. Maybe this world just wasn't meant for people like me? History burns and crucifies people like me.
I began to pay more attention, I began to ask questions to better understand the unnatural environment I would have to face. The conditions that were imposed, defined and declared. Some questions they would answer, most questions they would dismiss. As well as me, for asking them.
At the core of it all, seemed to be each ignorant person's delusion of genetic entitlement.
While my class would share their hopes and dreams, all the toys they wanted and jobs they wanted to waste their lives pursuing, all I wished for was that people would, for one moment be able to see the world and themselves through my eyes. Someone who looks and is treated differently, less-than, born without most of the "blessings" they are openly thankful for having.
The calendar littered with "holidays" for them to celebrate and flaunt their blessings, which just stood as consistent reminders to those without a reason to celebrate that the world doesn't care.
If suffering doesn't apply to those born with entitlements, then the suffering doesn't matter.
Every birthday, every Christmas, every opportunity. I dreamt of people waking up to the suffering and corruption that diminishes the conditions of nature below their artificial and self-centred list of entitlements. It was toxic and suffocating.
The righteousness of people who have hoarded and corrupted life-sustaining resources and vital industries for the sake of their own self-esteem and empowerment. The subjective religions and governments that burnt more literature and silenced more voices expressing each of societies' hypocrisies than can ever be quantified, until awakened to the depths they don't want you to see.
The reality they refuse to face, so they impose a false reality of kindness and gratitude. Faith and psychological conditioning, not to mention the dire consequences for challenging them.
I grew up in the same time and the same place as my peers, but I faced much different conditions and impositions. I didn't look like them, and my entire life was a balancing act between having to portray caricatures of how they think people with my skin colour should act and think, while trying to stay true to myself and the person I knew was buried deeper than their capability to perceive.
Entitlements start with the superficial and end with the superficial. Life is not a far journey for those who settle for what has already been handed to them, but notice how those given everything spend their entire lives trying to maintain the artificial structures and shallow superficial points of view, less they be revealed as truly powerless and naked with nothing to show for their life, other than the gravity of insecurity and the misfortune of entitlement without foundation. Of course, I was far too young to know this as a child, being told the way the world "works" because other people determined it is in their best interest to draw the line above me.
One of the first existential questions I asked myself, before I knew what I was trying to process, was: Is it worse to be "not white," or a woman? Because if you are one or both, "the world of men" will never take you seriously enough for you to elevate above their own sense of dark entitlement.
Case in point: The entirety of mankind, at the expense of humanity. The only reason I believed the lies is because I had no other choice. Until I realized I do have the choice, now.
For every time my mind and my soul was treated or valued as equal, I was called a nigger or looked down upon and devalued for my lack of entitlement, conservatively 1 time for every 1000. This entire world is based on what each person has, and to be thankful for. But what about those who are born without, are they less blessed? Is being different a death sentence? It felt like it from my point of view, and everything I learned in school.. both in class and outside of it reflected the same.
But within lies my greatest fortune, my greatest asset and the sense of self-esteem I have been searching for my whole entire life without realizing. This common ignorance of life, of the effects of entitlement on every single person's thought process, their point of view, their experience. This commonality and my perspective of it, my unique insight into it is what I always dreamed of grasping. My life was in search of an answer, my own answer and not anyone else's. I wasn't searching for the Holy Grail, The Arc of the Covenant, Mount Olympus, Atlantis, Pandora's box, Enlightenment, transcendence, quantum tunnelling or discovering Heaven. I wasn't special or predestined for anything other than an open mind, which is the meaning of life in the first place.
Security is hard to describe to anyone who is convinced it means in this life, but securing your insight into the next is something beyond imagination that I look forward to expressing and inspiring others to achieve, despite the pressure of the system that they found comfort in. And the reality of the consequences for not reevaluating before their thought process reaches the inevitable "dead end." Heaven isn't for the entitled, or the shallow or the dark. And if you are convinced it exists in the after-life, then you will never make it before your time runs out. Because the other side isn't a reward after you die, it is a consequence of an evolutionary process of life.
Natural selection at it's finest. You either evolve or become the very dark nature you feared.
More to come.