Realization Inundation #1

For months I have been chanting nam myoho renge kyo to change some painful aspects of my past into sources of benefit.  This morning when I woke up, I was reminded of something that TV personality, author, life coach, New Age spiritual leader Iyanla Vanzant said in her speech "Peace from Broken Pieces": When you live beyond what you think you can, should, or need to, you will blow your life up.  She recalled the time when she was fired from her talk show job with Buena Vista in 2001, and how 15 years earlier she was on welfare in the Projects.  After her termination from her job, Iyanla Vanzant realized that the woman that she was in the Projects did not believe that she deserved to be on TV, because that woman was  "friends with the voices from her past".  (For those who do not know, Iyanla had a troubled childhood plagued with abuse and denigration.  So the voices from the past are the words of the people who had abused and belittled her).
In relation to my own life, I realize that I was the same way.  The 21-year-old me at Norfolk State did not think that he deserved a choral scholarship, because that was going against his mother's urging that he stuck to playing the piano.  And because he did not think that he deserved it, he began to do things that he normally would not do like be late for a call time, and miss the final and salient performance of the school year due to bad communication.  The 23-year-old me did not think that he deserved to be at college #2 because he was openly gay, which flew right in the face of an expectation that he had in his teenage years to not be a black male stereotype (miscreant, unreliable, in a relationship with someone of another race, or a homosexual), and did not have a bachelor's like the rest of his former classmates.  I felt that I deserved nothing.  And because of this, that college  was a bust.  The voices that those two gentlemen were listening to were the voices of their parents' shaming and homophobic rhetoric.  Homophobia is a very detrimental and deleterious fundamental darkness.