"There are two kinds of people in this world, givers and takers. Your father is a taker and I give and give and get nothing in return except suffering!"
- My Mother
This sentiment was one I heard all my life from my Mother. And I believed her. Why? Because she believed it, with every fibre of her being.
"He's selfish."
"He's ungrateful."
"He doesn't respect me."
"We'd have money if it weren't for him wasting it."
"I work so hard and nothing ever goes my way."
"I have to suffer so my kids can have a better life."
"I work hard for you."
"I didn't want this life."
I've spent the past few years trying to unwind all of the messed up beliefs that have been stored in my head thanks to my awesome yet fucked up parents. I am a product of them and my own individuality got lost in their personal struggles.
My Dad, who grew up in a very strict religious environment, was full of sayings. One of his favourites was, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways." I realize now he may have been talking about me as I spent my life up until they both died trying to please two Masters and forgetting about myself.
My Dad died in 2007 and I never really loved him when he was alive except when I was a kid. My Mother spent so much of her time openly and silently blaming him for her misery that I did what any child of an unaware narcissistic Mother would do, I came to despise him and judged him ruthlessly in my own mind while smiling to his face.
It took a lot of inner forgiveness and prayer and meditation for me to make peace with him in my own heart while trying to manage the rage I was starting to feel against my Mother for putting her judgements of him onto me.
This self-reflection didn't come to me until they were both gone from this world. In a way, it made the recovery easier because they were gone. Controlling how they responded to my "awakening" was a choice no longer on the table so I was free to be who I wanted to be.
Except that I didn't know who I wanted to be. I barely knew who I was.
All of the negative emotional baggage that I absorbed from my Mother was suffocating me: guilt, shame, regret, doubt, remorse, anger, frustration. She was a powerful woman.
When I finally chose to take the time to review my own actions in life, I couldn't reconcile how I felt. My observations about my own accomplishments didn't align with how I felt about them. I have more letters after my name than in my name. I've "accomplished" a lot in my life. So why would I feel guilty or ashamed of that?
It made no sense.
But in my mind, the thoughts kept bashing me.
"Don't be selfish, not everyone is as fortunate as you."
"You're not really that smart, you just got lucky."
"People don't really like you, they're just pretending."
"Keep your fun secret so you don't get judged."
"What they don't know can't hurt you."
I thought I had only absorbed my Mother's vibes but that last batch of phrases came from none other than my Dad, who was beaten in an emotional sense (and likely a physical sense as a child) his entire life. And I too was one of his abusers. And after they were gone, the only one left to abuse was myself.
I had no idea what I was doing to myself.
I am finally starting to turn that corner.
I've worked through blame which is actually the easiest culprit to spot.
I've worked through guilt which is a very tricky beast that teaches self-forgiveness and acceptance of what is and what's already done.
I've worked through sadness by offering love to myself and accepting that I'm worthy of it.
I've worked through shame by observing that nobody else is even paying attention to me, except me.
Now I'm faced with the dichotomy of the push/pull of give/take. And it's a monster...
Here's a truth I've recently acknowledged:
You can't take something that is given to you. You can, however, choose not to receive it.
Receiving is not the same as taking and the term "selfishness" gets all caught up in the personal discernment of the two concepts. When the concepts are confabulated in one's own mind, often the subconscious mind rules the observations being made and you wind up accusing yourself of being selfish and ungrateful if something good happens to you because you're unwilling to receive it based on a lifelong belief that people who are "lucky" didn't earn it and must therefore be takers.
And the cycle repeats. Until you take the risk to revisit the definitions in your own mind of what these words really mean.
Let me address the notion of "giving' first.
I am a giver. A great example of this was my foray four years ago into the crypto SolarCoin. I spent months pushing this coin. I amassed a HUGE quantity of the stuff. I bought it, I mined it, I helped with moving to PoS, paid to get it on exchanges, paid to get it on a better blockchain, gave hundreds of thousands of it away to friends and family, bought some for whoever wanted to take a chance on $20-$100 worth of the stuff. I even put together a type of scholarship and gave SLR to the entire graduating class of my local High School in 2014.
By the end of 2015, nothing happened. I watched and waited. And I was still broke. And regret set in. I was wrong. Wrong about the founders and their intentions. Wrong about saving the world from itself. The only saving grace I had was that those who did buy some certainly didn't give away their life-savings, I made certain that I wouldn't invest other people's money that they couldn't afford to lose. I was no charlatan, I really did believe in that coin.
I had amassed 440,000 coins of my own at the peak of my involvement and a few months later, in early 2016, I sold all of them. I stopped believing in it. And I don't regret that.
Fast forward to today.
As you can plainly see, had I not sold those coins I'd be a millionaire today. Oh well. 🙄
I had a dream that prompted me to sell too. My Mother visited me in the dream and told me, in no uncertain terms, to sell them all. I'd already been feeling like I wanted to get out. I no longer trusted the intentions of the Founders. I didn't like that the pre-mine was only accessed by two people unwilling to change that functionality for the benefit of the project.
In my mind at the time, they were takers. And I wanted no part of it any longer. So, when I had the dream, even though it pissed me off that my Mother was rising from the dead to tell me what to do, yet again, this time I actually agreed with her.
Based on the chart above and going purely by price, I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
I watched that price start moving up right after I sold and today I sit here imagining how different my life would be if I hadn't sold them all.
This past year, I've had countless friends and family express gratitude for the gifts I had offered them in 2014. I've also had some who chose to sell a few months ago then proceed to blame me because they "could have made more" as the price kept going up. I never told any of them to sell, that was their choice, I merely facilitated the process. They enjoyed their big fat returns at the time. Opportunity loss is a strong vibe for people focused so intently on money being the sole gauge of self-worth.
For me, this is all one big personal lesson. I look back on 2014 and 2015 and my sole focus was to make sure everyone around me had a shot at "winning big" while I shot myself. I am genuinely very excited for them while keeping my own feelings of regret separate. I had most of 2016 and 2017 to work out the personal feeling of regret and beating myself up over it. It's gone. It's not ever coming back. I fucked up and I own that. And it's OK to feel excitement for their wins.
But how do I learn from it?
I'm learning by not trying to convince anyone else of anything. I've moved on. I've begun to amass a new store of wealth with investments in Ether and a number of other coins. I'm almost to six figures in fiat value in the past 6 months and I've shared some tips with a handful of people but I've stopped trying to convince others of what I think is a good use for their hard-earned dollars.
I'm confident in my ability to see a good idea. Now I'm working on how to capitalize on that intuition for myself without getting approval or recognition from those around me. I've had multiple epiphanies in the past couple of years that have nothing to do with money and I've shouted my realizations and excitement from the rooftops only to witness that nobody actually hears me.
The only validation of my experiences that I've had are in my own mind. And I finally feel pretty good about that. It's never been about everybody else, it's always just been about me. In my own mind, in my own space. Those are the things I can control and how I feel about them is also fully under my control. I'm mastering the art of allowance and slowly but surely teaching myself how to accept the blessings that have always been there that I've resisted and refused to receive.
It's a profound perspective shift to acknowledge that receiving abundance is not the same as taking it. It's never been a zero-sum game even though I was taught to believe that it was. So now I get to sit back and enjoy seeing the people I love and respect enjoying abundance that I gifted to them three years ago while not feeling left out that I chose to leave myself behind. Because I have not been left behind. The revolution is just getting started and I have a front row seat. The investments I'm making now are for me because I've earned it and I no longer feel the need to "prove it" to anyone. There's nothing selfish about that at all and I am already grateful for what I am about to receive.
May we all be blessed with the courage to accept our own self worth. We wouldn't exist if we weren't worthy to be here. Accepting that truth is the real challenge for many of us and it's easy to get caught up in self-sabotage but it's a vibe that leads nowhere but right back to yourself.
It is indeed an art and the Universe is conspiring to help us all create a masterpiece.
The image at the top is taken from the video "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlysle (Carlisle now apparently...), released 1987, the year I graduated from High School. Enjoy!
