“…And despite the fundamental differences in ideals and virtues, I love others just as they are. I only hope that through my story people become more comfortable to shed their conscious and unconscious biases as we look to build a kinder and more sustainable future, together.”

“From the depths of my soul, I wish we could stop using our differences as some big negative. Maybe I’m just unique, but when I meet someone who’s different than me, I find it exciting and almost can’t wait to learn their story. I enjoy identifying our differences and then finding that despite all of them, we still have so much in common. Perhaps moving to Orlando for work at Disney World after college in 2008 spoiled me.

You know how our experiences during youth define our perspective and set innocent expectations of the future? Well, Disney seemed like a whole new world had opened up welcomed me in. It felt exciting, inclusive, creative, healthy, and full of opportunity. And for a newly “out” gay boy, it was the perfect place to start over and find myself. It was even relatively insulated from the market crash that same year, since we all made too little to invest, so we stayed a community and the difficulties of the world seemed to pass us by with an unexpected ease. At least for a while.

After the newness wore off and the harshness of the world eventually crept in, as it always does, things started to change. Our low incomes combined with the strict management hierarchy and competitive nature of Entertainment became too prevalent and started dominating our shared experiences. Suddenly it wasn’t about making magic and YOLO’ing anymore. It was about getting ahead and we all felt our world was becoming harsher and duller.

And so, I left the world of Disney and decided to “grow up” and leave my peers behind to start a new professional journey. I didn’t graduate college in 3 years for nothing, and I wasn’t going to let my parents funding my education become a burden anymore.

I went on to make more money than anyone I met in Orlando, have more responsibility, and went back to Houston to be closer to family… something I explicitly said I would never do. But it felt right at the time and I realized how much opportunity there was to be in a familiar environment that was familiar but in which I could stand on my own two feet. But no matter how independent I felt, something seemed to be missing.

Try as I might, 15 years later, I still have this same feeling - something is always missing. It’s like the technicolor of life faded, never returned, and we’ve accepted that would is gray. And I swear, I look at pictures from the 90’s and compare the same landscape today and it’s really like someone turned down the color saturation dial and made everything appear rmore gray. But that can’t be real, can it?

Well that grayness has seeped into everything and now people are angrier, less present in the moment, and more disconnected with everyone, including themselves. And it’s no wonder, given that we lived through a life-changing global Pandemic, multiple recession constraints, and have endured terrible and corrupt government leadership at every turn. We have so much to be angry about, and without the beauty and color of a diverse planet, there’s no reprieve from the stresses we face. It’s causes us to repeat awful history on an almost daily basis, especially since 2015. It’s gotten so bad that we’re more divided than I ever remember in my lifetime and we’ve started to wake up and realize that those in power and with money want to keep us down and now we’re too tired to organize to demand change. We’re at the point where the best thing we have to look forward to is a 90’s sitcom reboot that only lasts for 3 seasons because we get bored and say, “well it isn’t as good as it used to be.”

Of course it isn’t! It’s not new anymore. And they actors are older, different, and have had to change with the times. It’s naive to have ever expected different. And instead of seeing how those people have returned for our entertainment and appreciating what it is for what it is, the grayness continues to dominate our perspective and we react accordingly.

It seems like there’s no running from it. Hate filled arguments, discrimination and violence are consuming our society at an alarming rate, but maybe it needs to be consumed. Maybe only once we’ve completely crashed and burned, can we rise up, better stronger? Because all I see now is those who aren’t in pain overlooking those who are, and those that enjoy their born-freedom shun those born into shackles. You’re either born with an abundance of privilege or you spend your entire life fighting the injustices that keeps you from ascending.

The most ridiculous part to me is how “normal” it’s become to hate others for simply existing. And when you ask those angry people, “What’s my lifestyle/existence doing to you, personally?”, their answers never seem to justify their actions.

I often hear the arguments, “I wasn’t raised that way,” and, “Well that’s just not what I believe.” And despite the word “BELIEVE” being overwhelmingly used in their justification, they almost always assert their opinion as not only superior, but as fact.

Sometimes I even hear, “Those darn [insert political party affiliation] are always [insert some gross and overdramatic generalization]!” To which I always respond, “I don’t think it’s ever fair to overgeneralize anything. Can you see it from their side? Not do you, but can you?”

Listen, we’re human. We’re highly fallible, often focused on what WE need/want, and we’re incredibly ironic. Our own ability to understand the reality of a thing ranges so vastly because we aren’t taught how to bridge what we think we know and what we don’t yet understand. Our cognitive dissonance kicks in while we scorn people for being their authentic self but demand sovereignty as we push ours.

I see this because my mind is always focused on trying to understand everything, all at once. My Myers-Briggs personality type, ENTP-T, is nicknamed, “The Debator” or “Devil’s Advocate.” It basically means that my natural way to think critically is to see through every conceivable lens as I try to understand every facet of the truth before deciding my actions. Sure, I get it wrong sometimes… who doesn’t?

Having this brain can sometimes be as much of a curse as it is a blessing. I say this genuinely, it’s exhausting being me. I spend WAY too much time trying to think critically about each thing, which usually leads to over-thinking EVERYTHING. And after 30 years of practice, what I know now is that I don’t know anything. At least until I’ve actually taken the time to learn it. Not just to observe what’s on the surface or what others say it is, but to personally learn what something actually is. It keeps me grounded, and while I’m no stranger to making mistakes (in fact I make them hourly), everyone always knows that they’re safe and welcome around me. Just as they are.

Being this way certainly has its upsides. It’s given me the ability to see beyond myself which is why I’ve committed my life’s work to sharing the benefits over this over-active, yet highly empathetic perspective. It’s taught me that people aren’t always as bad as their actions portray them to be; sometimes they’re just lost and ignorant about something… and they just need a little acceptance, patience, help and support to get to the next stop in their journey. I hope that one day we evolve to no longer punish ignorance, but to accept and warmly correct it.

Ignorant - Now there’s a word often weaponized. Of course, I can see the appeal. After all, the people weaponizing it are the ones saying, “I could care less,” when trying to say, “I couldn’t care less.” (As a personal aside - I like to thank people when they tell me they could less… because that must mean they care more about the topic than the bear minimum level. But somehow they never quite get the joke… Point, set and match!).

Their minds are so accustomed to what has been (like saying a phrase they just know by heart) that they never take the time to question things, like asking, “Am I saying this right? Does it even make sense this way?”

Words have more power than any of us truly give them credit for. When we saying something erroneous, we expect others to just know what we meant. And we get so frustrated when they don’t.

When we use Ignorant as an insult, we turn the very basics of the educational process into a negative - oh, how ironic it all is. If education is fundamental to enlightenment, then without it we’ll never get better, or smarter, and we’ll lose sight of a higher sense of life and purpose. Education is the reason our life expectancies are no longer 30 years. It’s something to celebrate, not to use to cut others down.

Somewhere along the way, we lost ours. We forgot that it’s innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. We forgot that people have real, non-socially constructed problems to overcome and some desperately need our help. And we’ve allowed archaic beliefs that existed before modern education to once again dictate what’s right and wrong. Our relationships, both external and within, have been polluted, just like what we’re doing to our planet.

So, what can be done about it?

Well, it’s not going to be easy, and we’ll have to do it together. We have to challenge the status quo, of everything. We have to learn to love others and love ourselves. And we have to agree that education is a perpetual action for which we must always remain open; we can never stop learning. This book will help you understand how to identify when your relationships become unhealthy, and what we can do about them if and when they do. Don’t worry, you’re already on the right track to a better life. Now, turn the page and let’s begin.”