Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

Self-Sufficiency

When looking for approval, you first notice that the “approvers” aren’t in agreement, keep contradicting themselves and shifting their own goalposts.

This is enough to make a warrior out of anybody.

How to choose your standards? How to design our path and feel confident about it?

As a child, I was a sunflower, looking for nourishment I could turn my face towards. People who dampened and depressed, who structured and suffocated, were to be avoided.

My parents claimed to be interested in physical health (and I wasn’t even completely convinced of that) but mum on the subject of mental health, which seemed to be the purview of adults who’d mastered the wherewithal to “step out of the rat race.”

As an elementary school student, I was certainly in a rat race. And it looked like a long haul. When we moved to Morocco and I was sent to a school where I didn’t speak the language, life got downright dangerous.

Luckily there were books. Agatha Christie in specific, who turned out to be the favored reading of travelers passing through Dar El Baraka, where we had been installed.

Agatha Christie is excellent training in the Art of Being a Warrior. Life in her books is dangerous, but since everyone is lying and pretending to be someone they’re not (“Society”) it’s difficult to tell where the threat is coming from. The Detective uses Clues and a knowledge of Human Nature to figure out The Truth.

This is riveting stuff for an eleven year old. These skills of judgment, analysis, research and truth-telling are essential for the Warrior.

Clue Gathering

Don’t take people at face value

Check their stories –

Question values

Motives,

Duplicitous

Suspects

Hoodwink

Bamboozle

Beguile

Ignorant

Dupes like

You.