You want rewiring done right, you have to do it yourself.

I have more feelings to share and it's one of these things that fill in some small part of your heart/soul and it's not a huge stride but it is a shuffle forward. This piece will one day be fleshed out into the most revolutionary of all political compendiums, but here is the first draft.

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Learning to deal with new/current/old things using a new approach means you're literally rewiring your brain. The older you are, the harder it gets, not just because certain pathways have become very strong, but also because you don't necessarily have the means to hijack an existing network to link new thoughts and habits together to your core and growing new branches towards other dendrites takes ages. But you'll get there.

Learning to stay calm - to suppress and redirect the aspects of your flight/fight/freeze of your stress response - that's really tough and so, so, SO hard. But you can do it, because the next time you ask a older privileged white man about how to find a mentor and he immediately tells you that he understands what you're going through and that he has a a good friend who is Indian, you are able to actually say with polite words that 'yeah that's awesome, thank you for your business card, will totes come to you for career/life advice'. And you will do this without crying, or breaking the pen your holding, or literally slamming your head into a brick wall.

You will do this because this person's ignorance is not your fault or your enemy. Yeah, the three-year-old wants to shout NO, the teenager wants to roll her eyes, the young adult wants scream with the injustice of his misconception,. But you have disconnected the reactionary driver, and you deal with the situation with the default politeness you've been working on, and send a few thoughts down to the big processing centre to file away as 'brownie points for self-restraint'.

You are exposing old networks of anxiety and frustration to a pacifist's approach, teaching those high-strung neurones to reach for this new piece of golden nugget with soft hands and a softer heart.

Peace and love,

S.