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Generally speaking, I royally fucked up.
I’ve grown immensely over these last twelve years. I’ve gone from being silly old Raymond, scared to leave for work in the morning in case his female colleagues started to mouth off to him again, to owning my own Magazine, leading my very own community, and very soon, having my own cryptocurrency. Yet over these last few years, I haven’t written much about what I’ve learned on my own, without my parents, away from the influence of my family back home, and the mistakes I’ve made on my own.
Perhaps it’s time I start.
Every year I seem to fall head-first into the path of abundance on a level that I haven’t previously experienced. It’s a good thing, this means that I’m learning as I grow. This year it’s dawned on me how insignificant my personal experience is in comparison to the world at large; the amount of people, ethnicity, and cultures in the world that render my entire viewpoint on life like a pinprick in a giant forest. My experiences, whilst valid to many, are outweighed by the sheer amount of experiences shared amongst other people. I can’t tell you what it’s like to sit amongst friends and smoke a Hookah pipe in Morocco or sit amongst brothers and sisters in arms and fight the good fight for basic civil liberties in Palestine.
My favorite quote is this:
I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates
I know very little. I’m beginning to accept this now. I know very little about the world at large, the people around me, and the vast majority of ethnicity, culture, and diversity that the world holds.
I started of my writing career very arrogantly. Unknowingly arrogant of course, if you knew me to talk to in person you’d know that I was a very open and understanding man that absorbs everything that he comes into contact with. I love to have experiences and anything new is like a gold mine to me. But the internet has brought with it some challenges that I hadn’t come to accept until recently. And that is that I know fuck all.
Most people know next to nothing, they are just too insecure to admit it. Unless you’re a world-traveling billionaire that spends their life soaking up new experiences and learning new things, and even then, I’d question the extent of their knowledge, then I doubt you have a look in. I began writing with the idea that my viewpoint was the gold standard on most things; I’d often use sweeping statements like “men are..” and “women are..” when in reality this wasn’t the case at all. My favorite past time has been thinking that “if x is true, then it must equal y” when in actual fact there are no rules, and if there are then I promise you no-one has figured them out yet or we’d be living in a better world.
The internet was like a new world to me. I had previously sat in my job and mentored, trained and listened to people with low economic status to empower them to do better. I had built friendships with other people that had forged paths through barricaded parts of their lives. I had won, I conquered, I lost, I cried, I felt joy; I was very proud of what I had become, the path I had taken and the devastation I had navigated through to get where I was today. In terms of 38-year-olds, I’m fairly wise for all that I have seen. Yet all of this was completely insignificant when I began to write for myself and other people. My life is but a mere pinprick in the Pacific Ocean in terms of what’s out there. Every time I think I have it nailed down something else bats my perception out of the ballpark – hits it for six.
Yeah, so I screwed up. I’m unsure if it’s human nature or my autism that has made me think in terms of blanket statements and stereotypes but writing and navigating social media has been an experience and a half. Even the most well-meaning, safely worded, walking on eggshells piece of writing will offend someone somewhere. And that’s been half the battle, accepting that there will be people that disagree with me, sometimes to the point of trying to shut me down, but that’s part of having an audience. Some people will like what I say, others won’t.
So, I’ve taken my new-found abundant viewpoint on the world and applied it to my writing. No longer will I make sweeping statements about the genders; a habit I tend to do when writing, because I’ve always thought that men acted one way and women another, particularly in dating — when I’m slowly realising that there is no standard, there is no typical thing that women do, or that men do, and similarly with cultures, ethnicity and diversity. We are all unique, as my last manager liked to quote. And the only way I’ll understand it is if I talk to real people about it. And I totally assume that the more people I talk to the more diverse and understanding person I’ll become.
Here’s to progress in 2018 and beyond!
Cheers.
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Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash