There is one thing I respect above almost all else. It is right up there with treating people fair and square and with authentic kindness and compassion... but if I am honest, I think it sits even higher than that.
I respect ruthless courage.
Especially the courage to be yourself... the good, the bad, and the mother fucking ugly.
Ruthless courage is not the absence of fear. It is the refusal to trade yourself away for approval.
I don't care if you're white, or black, or gay, or trans, or Asian, or Mexican, or Jew, or gentile, or a lady or a dude or whatever else you want to classify yourself as.
None of those labels tell me a single thing worth knowing about you. That is the packaging. I want to know what is actually in the box, and more than that, I want to know whether you have the guts to open it in front of me.
I greatly respect all the people that stand up for themselves and are willing to be exactly what and who they actually are, for better or worse.
Here is the practical part, because respect without practice is just a warm feeling and warm feelings never built anything.
Being yourself is not a personality trait. It is a daily discipline, and it costs something real every single day. It costs the relationships that were built on your performance. It costs the rooms you got into by shrinking. It costs the identity you have been renting from people who never once paid you back.
The practice itself is simple and brutal. Say the true thing in the room, not in the parking lot afterwards. Let people be disappointed in you on purpose. Stop auditioning for anyone who would not show up at your funeral. And when you catch yourself editing who you are down to fit a room, understand that the room is too small, and go find a bigger one.
You do not lose yourself in one big betrayal. You lose yourself in a thousand small agreements.
Understand the cost going in, because there is always a cost. You will lose people. Some of them will be people you love. But the ones who walk were in a relationship with your performance, not with you, and that contract was always going to come due. Better it comes due now, while you still have the years to build something real on the other side of it.
The alternative is far worse. A man spends thirty years being whatever everyone else needed him to be, and then wakes up one morning a total stranger inside his own life. He cannot even name what went wrong, because nothing dramatic ever happened to him. He simply gave himself away, one agreeable little piece at a time, until there was nothing left to give.
So I will always be in your corner, no matter what.
And don't let any other mother fucker try to tear you down, or tell you what you are, or tell you how it is.
Nobody gets to hand you your own definition. Not your family, not your church, not your industry, not the mob online, and not the comfortable version of you that everybody got used to ten years ago. That job is yours alone, and it is the only job in your entire life that no one else can ever do for you.
Be ruthlessly you and let the cards fall where they may.
The cards are going to fall regardless. They fall whether you were honest or not. The only variable you actually control is whether the hand you are playing is your own.
As above, so below
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