I learned to check my assumptions, and it saved my life - Find your authenticity!

The Internet is “the Prover” from “the Thinker and the Prover” on overdrive. If you think that you are totally helpless, oppressed, and persecuted, your internal prover is going to link up with the technological prover called the Internet and deliver a world that perfectly matches your thinker’s paradigm. As a transgender woman, I’ve had to work hard to get out from under the torrent of “proof” that my life is going to be miserable and fraught with disaster because I’m a persecuted minority. Of course I am a persecuted minority, but that in no way means that I will suffer because of it. Often now I can’t even talk to people in my community because their prover has so convinced them that their life will be one long sad march of woe. There appears to be a tendency to malign the optimists within minority groups in my culture (the US).

However, real systemic injustices do exist, and we need to see them remediated, but as individual actors, I believe that in order to have a sound psychological mechanism within our consciousness, we need to be aware of how insidious the Prover can be and constantly check our assumptions in order to see if they are appropriate. Often just by challenging the narrative that says I am an ant under a boulder of persecution by privileged tyrants, I am called some sort of reactionary right-winger. I just want to live a middle pillar life where I balance my persecution against the real agency I do have in my day to day life. 

I lived for decades with the notion that my life was meaningless and riddled with terror, and unsurprisingly it ended with me repeatedly trying to kill myself. Then I reached the realization that I had personal, spiritual power that could be grown through intentional, sometimes described as magickal, action. When I woke up from that I realized that I had merely been carrying water for people who wished to see me weak and dispirited. This water goes back to the medieval church and even further of course. I realized in a near death experience that I was being played, and I don’t really know all of the mechanics of what went on, but I believe I became spiritually integrated with my higher self who had no time for self-loathing. 

I’m not trying to prescribe a specific path other than to say that one should question her principles and thoughts. See where they come from. They might not be your own, and they might be poisoning you. And with the advent of the Internet, they can poison you very quickly.