Rhythm Rebel Dana

I’ve been thinking a lot about The Truman Show lately after watching it again on a recent flight. And The Matrix. And the older I get, the more I understand why those movies hit such a nerve.

If you’ve never seen The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a man who slowly discovers that the world he has lived in his entire life isn’t what he thought it was. His town is a set. The people around him are actors. His reality has been carefully constructed for him, and everyone seems perfectly happy to keep him believing it.

Until he starts noticing things. Little inconsistencies. Things that don’t add up. Questions nobody seems to want him asking.

And then there’s The Matrix, with its famous red pill. Once you choose to really look at something, it can be pretty damn hard to go back to accepting it simply because that’s what you’ve always believed.

I feel like the last few years have been my own strange version of that.

I’m questioning things I once accepted without much thought. Institutions. Systems. Experts. Leaders. Media. Communities I’ve belonged to. Things I was taught. Things I taught. Even some of my own deeply held beliefs.

And perhaps most importantly, I’m questioning myself.

Why do I believe this? Where did I learn it? Have I actually looked at the other side? What if I’m wrong? Who benefits if I believe this? Am I thinking for myself, or repeating something I’ve heard enough times that it now feels like my own thought?

That last one is a bitch.

Because the more I question, the less interested I am in declaring that I know THE TRUTH about everything. I’m actually becoming much more comfortable saying, I don’t know, but you bet your ass I will investigate it.... sometimes for many hours.

I’m noticing how quickly we humans defend the version of reality that makes us feel secure, and how uncomfortable we can become when someone we love starts questioning the things we’ve collectively agreed are true.

That’s where Truman keeps coming back to me.

At the end of the movie, he sails toward what he believes is the horizon and his boat literally crashes into it.
Because the sky is a wall.

Think about that. Something he had looked at his entire life and understood to be endless suddenly had an edge. A boundary. A door.

And then I have to ask, "How many of our own walls have been painted to look like sky?"

I don’t know.
But I sure as hell want to find out.

And I think that requires something much harder than simply distrusting authority or deciding that we’ve figured it all out and everyone else hasn’t. We have to be willing to question perspectives we have held forever. Our favorite people. Our favorite sources. Our own conclusions. Especially the ones we desperately want to be true. Especially the ones that make us feel better, smarter, more virtuous.

We have to stay curious longer than is comfortable. Read the thing instead of the headline. Follow the money. Look for the missing context. Listen to people we disagree with without immediately deciding they’re idiots. And when something doesn’t add up, keep asking questions.

As for the people who would rather we stop asking?

We don’t have to fight them or convince them. And we certainly don’t have to climb back inside a belief we’ve outgrown just to make everyone comfortable.

We can love people and still disagree with them. We can change our minds. We can say, “I used to believe that. I don’t anymore.” And we can discover we were completely wrong about something and change our minds again and again.

Maybe that’s the whole point.
Not trading one unquestioned certainty for another.
Not replacing one script with a shinier new script.
Just becoming a little harder to program and a lot more willing to ask, “Wait... is that actually true?”

So these days, I’m paying a lot more attention to the walls.
Especially the ones painted like sky.
And if my boat bumps into one?
Well...

You can find me looking for the fu***ng door.

Did you hear? KINVOKE now has a YouTube page. We will have dance drops with choreography break downs and so much more! Check it out!

Have you ever been told you're "too much?"

Too loud.
Too passionate.
Too emotional.
Too opinionated.
Too honest.
Too direct.
Too excited.
Too sensitive.

So... what did you do? Did you get quieter? Question yourself? Start apologizing for your personality? Read the room before you spoke? Replay conversations on the drive home? Become really good at making everyone else comfortable at the expense of being truthful?

How's that working out?

Here's what I've learned the hard way...

No matter how much you shrink yourself, you'll still be too much for the wrong people. And if you're constantly editing yourself so no one feels uncomfortable...

Who's left being you?

Maybe "too much" isn't the insult you've been taught it is. Maybe it's what people say when you're no longer willing to fit inside the version of you that makes them comfortable.

Your too-much-ness may not be the problem. The problem is believing you have to make yourself smaller to please those who will never get you anyway!

If someone needs you to become more palatable so they can feel better...
that's their work.
Not yours.