Kate 2.0

Well, here we are. It's the end of 2016, or near enough anyway, and potentially the end of the world as we know it.

So I'm a little annoyed that the end of the world, I finally got a chance to get to a place I'm calling "Kate 2.0".

Let me explain as best I can:

We've all got areas in our lives where we are the "frog in the pot." We're going along, as best we can, and things look fine and suddenly--BAM. Looking back, we can see where the heat had been slowly rising, but it went slowly, and we ignored it.

I had a frog in the pot moment last Saturday.

I could go into the details, but I already tried to write that once here and it got incredibly bogged down. So I'm going to sum up and make my life-changing revelation boil down, in part, to one phrase:

People don't know jack.

I'm not talking specific people, or specific knowledge, but here's where I was the frog: I've looked to society-at-large, aka "other people", to tell me what's "normal", because when I was a kid and had to deal with the big bad world, it was terrifying. I was not well understood by my peers, so I looked to them for what a social norm construct should be.

And maybe I didn't know as a kid. But I do know now. Yet, I've still looked beyond my own knowledge, thinking it was inadequate.

Understanding that society as a whole has less of an idea than I thought they did about...well, anything, really makes me understand that I can be done with looking to a heterogenous mix of genii and morons alike to find out what I should be doing in order to be socially acceptable.

Because people don't know jack.

And it is this life-changing statement that, along with some other very specific, very personal revelations, that has led me to a moment in my life in which I genuinely am not the same person I was on Veteran's Day.

It's pretty darn wonderful.

I also came to an understanding about self-love that makes me wonder if most of my culture of origin ever read the book they tout. God said, "Read 1 John." So I did. And it has to be one of the most repetitive books in the Bible. Love. Love. Love. 51 times in the agape form. But it says some things about love that made me go...huh. For one thing, if you say you love God but do not love your brother, you are a liar. I would state that we as a greater culture could use more of this idea in our world, one that the fundamental movement gets so concerned with, because they are concerned with being right.

That's not why I'm writing this. That's for another blog.

Anyway, if I do not love my brother--in other words, my fellow man, even if he shuns me, hurts me, disagrees with me--then I do not love God. So I brought it to a conclusion: if I don't love me--if I don't follow what love is outlined to be in this book toward myself, I probably can't say I love God either.

And I love God.

Therefore I must also love myself. I'm not saying I exalt myself. I'm not saying I'm getting prideful. I'm not saying all the things that were dogmatically pressed into the grooves of my skull for more than 20 years.

I'm saying that it's okay to love yourself, because at the end of the day, it might just be you and God who practice being loving toward you. And so I must do this as well, and it's not sin.

Flee from those who would make you believe it is.

So, let's start adding:
1. People don't know jack
2. I gotta love me.

This whole thing combined, with those personal things I mentioned, into an almost alchemical process by which I ended up at a place that I believe is the top of Maslow's hierarchy--self-actualization.

I highly recommend it.

I always thought that people couldn't get to the top of that pyramid. I'm quite pleased that I was wrong. And I wish I could say that there is a formula for this journey, for getting here. There isn't. All those self-help books I've bought...none had the answer.

There are tools. I've used a lot of them. But at the end of the day, to get here is a corridor that is precisely wide enough for one human, and each corridor is bespoke.

So I pray that the country can keep itself together long enough for me to enjoy being Kate 2.0.

I really rather like it here.