there are two ways to be made whole: connection is the horizontal integration, and Integrity & Authenticity is the vertical integration.
the sad fact of a human life is this:
you can have one without the other, you can have either vertical integration without the latter or vice versa,
and when pressed, one really should choose the latter, even if it brings with it utter loneliness, because Integrity is holding the line, even though it might cost you everything, because to not, would cost you you.
We have to choose our authenticity, but in a better world, we wouldn’t have to.
The highest goal and most sublime pleasure we are wired to pursue is to Belong, indelibly, to the exact place where one wishes to belong, and specifically in a way of belonging, where our belonging cannot be taken away, and if it is somehow lost through a mistake of ours or someone else’s, we are missed, our place is held, and we are offered a fair way back.
It is the kind of belonging for which we have to sacrifice only that which is small and selfish within us, which we cling to or which clings to us, and which gets in the way of loving and being loved.
It is a membership whose only requirements are that we truly value the membership greater than we value our victim story, and that we embody a prerequisite and earnest need to belong to one’s self, where both proof and wage are reckoned by a resolute refusal to sacrifice that which is great within you, an unwavering devotion to the principle which says:
“I refuse to compromise on my Truth, in my quest for Meaning and Acceptance.”
We are living through a crisis of Meaning, and in our desperation to belong we are enshrining a world so shallow, ailing from such a failing of humanity that some people wake into their mornings, and go, to their sleep again each night despite their most earnest efforts to love, cradling the truth, that they do not belong.
