5.2 Wanted but unwanted
The upgrade journey will set you apart. The further you go with it, the more different you become.
And maybe you want to hide the difference, so you decide to keep your journey secret and you keep your heart hidden.
But maybe, you want to be seen for who you are, so you decide to be open and honest about this mission you’re on, how hard it is, and how dark the dark side of it is.
And if so…
People are going to react to you.
And we can put their reactions into three categories.
1. Unwanted
The great, great majority of people, if they even get a whiff or a hint of what you’re up to with your upgrade mission, will want nothing to do with you. They’ll be gone.
This might include people you’ve known for years. They’ll stop returning your calls, they won’t respond to your emails…
They’ll ghost you.
Not because they don’t care about you anymore, but…
Because they can’t handle who you’ve become.
When you talk about yourself and your mission, they get so anxious they don’t know what to do with themselves. And they find it so much easier to do a fade than to work through their anxiety.
The self–help gurus praise authenticity and how being true to yourself will draw people to you and you will be loved.
But that’s not true in the case of the upgrade mission. Most people won’t want you to be this upgrade version of authentic.
2. Wanted
The further you go with your upgrade journey…
The more blessings you’ll be able to give.
And happily there will be people who will see how special your blessings are and they’ll be thankful to know you and will want to spend time with you and count you as a friend.
What do I mean by “special blessings”? Look back through the chapters you’ve just read. The more you upgrade your love, the more you will be able to help people with…
Claiming their fight bio, taking a stand for what’s deepest in their hearts, holding themselves with the deepest compassion, replacing hope with fight, taking delight in their fight, freeing their love from the restrictions of allegiance, stripping out pretenses, disarming shame, breaking up with their Inner Critic, remaking togetherness, becoming a trans-tribal Second Revolutionary, and more.
In this chapter, though, I’m focusing on how you’ll be able to help people with…
Making dilemmic moral decisions.
You’ll be able to offer help that conventional self–help gurus can’t begin to match. You’ll attract people who want better than the typical easy–step offerings.
On the one hand, there’s a loneliness that comes when people turning away from you. At the same time, though, the relationships you have with the people who stay in your life or new people who come into your life, will go deeper, much deeper. So…
You’ll be trading quantity for quality.
3. Wanted but unwanted
Then, in the third category, there will be people who will want the blessings you can give them, but…
They won’t want you.
They’ll want the blessings, but…
They won’t want to hear what it took for you to be able to give them those blessings.
They won’t want to hear your story about the upgrade journey you’ve been on and what it’s asked of you and the hard parts you had to go through to get to the rewards.
These folks will be conflicted about you. And you’ll find that for them…
You have become a dilemma.
And, by the way, there couldn’t be a more interesting way to learn about dilemma than to become one yourself.
But this can be disorienting at first. Suppose you have a friend, Jeannette, and you help her work through a dilemmic decision that was more than she could handle on her own. She gives you a big hug and a heartfelt thank you, then hurries back into her life.
Next time she’s facing a dilemmic decision, she calls you and comes over to get your help and, again, she’s so thankful.
You tell her that you could be even more helpful if you explained to her the dilemmic nature of us humans and how our OS works, so she could start resolving dilemmas on her own. But you see her eyes glaze over, and she mumbles an excuse and says a quick goodbye and she’s out of there.
There’s a line she definitely does not want to cross…
She’s wants the benefits but not the journey that brings those benefits.
She doesn’t want to take even a peek behind the scenes. And this is very human of her, and very understandable.
And it leaves you with some questions…
How much helping do I want to do?
Who do I want to help?
When do I need to say no?
Personally, I love helping. I love helping people make their lives better. But…
I don’t love co-dependency.
I’ve had to work very hard to get over the co–dependency that once ran my life, and the compulsive approval seeking that used to drive me. I’m done with that kind of acting out.
I won’t go back to it for anything.
So I don’t want to solve people’s problems for them, but I’m eager to help them do the work they need to do to find their own true resolution to their dilemma.
And I’m not doing this as charity or selfless sacrifice, because every time I help someone through a dilemma, I get better at it myself. And I like getting better.
I do set priorities, though. If I have time, I’m glad to help anyone who asks. Still, time is limited and precious, and I have my preference.
My priority is people who want to take the journey. I will always put them first, because I believe in upgrading love and I take a moral stand for it and for anyone engaging in this work.
But on a more personal level, I put journey–people first because they’re kindred spirits and…
I want company.
The kind of company they are for me.
Now let’s take a deeper look at people who are conflicted about you. They want your help, they know you can help…
But they’re scared.
They’re scared that in the process of working through their issue they might happen to see too much about the human OS.
I want to show you what it might be like to help someone deal with…
A complex decision tucked into a web of dilemmas each one complicating the others.
And to do this, I’ve made up Beth, a single mom, an acquaintance of several years. Her son Nick is living at home while attending the local state college as a freshman.
“Hi Beth, what’s up?”
“I want to ask for your help with something.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“Yesterday, Nick said to me, ‘I don’t get to have a future.’ I said, ‘Why would you think that?’ And he explained, ‘Things are so bad and getting worse. It’s over for us. Your generation got to have its turn, but my generation doesn’t get a turn. There’s no hope for us.’ ”
“Oh, that must have been hard for you.”
“It was so hard. I’m such a hope person. I mean, I run a nonprofit that’s all about organizing and inspiring people to take action and we use hope to get them to do that. And suddenly here’s my son, no longer a believer. It’s like a minister having a son who doesn’t believe in God.”
“How did you respond?”
“Not well. I’m not proud of what I said. I freaked, actually. I told him, ‘Please don’t say such things. Please don’t give up on hope.’ Only I didn’t say that as a request. It was more like a demand.”
“And Nick?”
“He looked down at the floor and sighed and turned away and said, ‘Let’s talk about this later.’ He was the grown–up in this conversation.”
“So now what?”
“I’m in over my head, but I can’t be. I need to be his mom.”
“Which means what?”
“I need to be there for him because I’m scared for him because it’s such a terrible thing to lose hope. Drug addiction would be easier for me to deal with. When you talk about dilemmic decisions, this is what you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I hate dilemmas.”
“I get that. And this is worse than just a dilemmic issue.”
“What do you mean? I don’t want to hear it, but tell me quick.”
“How do you feel about me right now, about talking to me about you and Nick?”
“I really need to talk to you, but I want to be somewhere else, anywhere else.”
“So notice that not just issues, but people can become dilemmic.”
“Oh, god.”
“Right now, I’m betting that I’m dilemmic for you.”
“That’s true! Sorry.”
“No, this is the kind of thing that can happen when you’re wrestling with a dilemma.”
“But I don’t want to be conflicted about you.”
“I appreciate that, and please, just keep being true to what you’re feeling, and feel free to tell me when you’re feeling conflicted.”
“I might feel conflicted all the way through our conversation.”
“That’s okay with me. But now another question. In this present situation, has Nick become dilemmic for you?”
“Oh my god, yes. Yes, he has. I don’t want to see that.”
“What does it give you, though, to be able to see that?”
“I get to be real. Ugh. Okay, this is a way of me being with him, to see the truth of our relationship as it stands right now. I want to be there for him and I want to be anywhere else. Could you go have a talk with him and fix him for me?”
“I’d be glad to talk with him somewhere down the road. I’m a post–hope guy and maybe I could help him start to put together a post–hope life, but now, today, that won’t help you with the kind of transformation your relationship with him is going through.”
“Yes, I see this is big. Okay, help!”
“I’m dilemmic for you, and Nick is dilemmic for you, but what about you? Who are you to Nick right now?”
“I’m his cowardly chicken o mom who let him walk away.”
“Think about how he felt telling you that he no longer believes in hope.”
“Oh, I totally missed that. He knows how important hope is to me. It must have been very hard for him to tell me that. And suddenly I can see his dilemma. If he doesn’t tell me the truth how can we have a good relationship? At the same time, how can he tell me that what matters to me so much doesn’t matter to him anymore?”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“No, it matters very much. You know, Nick and I have had a very solid relationship. He knows I love him, and I know he loves me. There have been some ups and downs, of course, especially during his early teen years. There were times when he would say stuff to me to get a reaction. Yesterday for a moment, I thought maybe this was that kind of thing.”
“But…”
“But that’s not true. It was so obvious that he was sincere and that he was in pain. To have to say such things to me, given who he knows me to be.”
“And that means…”
“That I’m dilemmic for him! What a mess!”
“But what does it give you to know this?”
“It means that if he’s dilemmic for me and I’m dilemmic for him that we have common ground. That we have a kind of shared pain. And if we handle that right we can be allies instead of adversaries.”
“And…”
“Now I’m feeling dilemmic about this dilemma. I want to run from it, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let it hurt my relationship with Nick.”
“So now what do you want to say to him?”
“I want to apologize first for pulling back from him.”
“And then?”
“I want to talk to him about the challenge we are for each other right now, but I want us to join forces and work through this issue together. And see, what I’m doing there? I’m starting not with the dilemmic issue, but the dilemmic relationship.”
“I see that.”
“And I don’t know what to do about the issue, but I’m sure we can work our way through the present challenge of our relationship and be there for each other, me for him and him for me, as we take on the issue of him losing hope. And this issue of me having a son who has lost hope.”
“How do you want to acknowledge yourself for where you’ve gotten to in just these few minutes.”
“Oh, I feel so much better about myself. The minute I’m done here, I’m going to call Nick and tell him I’m sorry and I’m ready to come hear him tell me the whole story of how he’s doing. I’m sure he hasn’t told me the half of what he’s going through.”
“And…”
“Then I can stop beating myself up because now I’m stepping back into being the kind of mom I want to be.”
“Think about how many hope–based people would be able to listen to Nick, to his whole story.”
“I’d guess not many. But I’m going to do that, and I’m going to get whatever help I need to keep doing that.”
“So this will ask a lot of you?”
“It will. But so be it.”
“What does it mean that you’re going to have to push through some hard stuff to give Nick the love you want to give him?”
“It makes that love more precious. I want an easy answer. But I really don’t, I want a real answer. If I love my son, which I do, I absolutely do—there’s no dilemma about that—then I want a real answer, I want a real relationship with him.”
“And what are you noticing about your relationship to hope right now?”
“It’s not as deep as I want it to be. I want it to have deeper roots.”
“And how will you work on that?”
“Oh, I can feel that I’m a little scared to work on it. Which says I don’t entirely trust in hope. Now there’s a revelation! And something I need to tell Nick about.”
“And where might you be a year from now?”
“I might work my way to a much deeper relationship with hope. And I might still be running my nonprofit and giving inspirational talks in the community, but I will, because of Nick, have deeper sympathy for people struggling to hold onto hope.
But it’s possible, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, that I might lose hope myself. I mean, Nick is right, things are getting worse. And way too fast.”
“So you can really imagine losing hope?”
“Yes I can.”
“And what’s good about that?”
“It means that I’ll have a much more immediate sense of empathy for Nick, and I think, I hope, he’ll feel that.”
“So what’s next?”
“Like I said, I’m calling Nick right away. But then once we get on solid ground together, can I come back to you for ideas about how I could help him make a post–hope life?”
“Of course. I’d be glad to talk with you about that.”
“Like what’s the first thing I’d talk with him about?”
“How’s this sound? First help him feel for himself, so he can then fight for himself.”
“I like that. I can do that. And do it with myself, too.”
“What I know about Nick is that he’s a fighter.”
“Yes he is. He got into activism when he was 13. I thought at first it was my influence on him, but really that was all Nick.”
“One thing you could do if you want is to find out if he’d be willing to work with you on developing his fight bio, which is a collection of stories about when he’s taken a stand for himself and what he believes in.”
“I’d love to do that with him. I’m so scared about him getting lost in despair.”
“That’s a very real and immediate danger when hope disappears.”
“Suddenly, I understand that him finding his fight is way more important to me than anything about him holding onto hope.”
“Yes, fight can actually replace hope.”
“I’m going to tell him, ‘You are more important to me than any of my feelings about hope.’ And I’m going to make sure he knows I really mean it.”
“And what else?”
“I’m going to tell him that he doesn’t need to take care of me around this issue, that I’m going to be doing my own work.”
“So something good might come out of all this?”
“Yes, a deeper relationship with Nick.”
“So dilemmas are not all bad?”
“No, but I still reserve my right to hate them.”
“For sure.”
“And thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
