Stone Quarter Fortify begins this week.
The framework I run my whole year on splits into four 13-week quarters: Forge, Fortify, Execute, Reflect. Fortify is the season where you find out what is actually load-bearing in your life — and what has just been pretending to be.
I learned about load-bearing from a chain.
I was a freshman in high school. My stepfather Mike — the man my mother brought home after she finally left my biological father — accused me of running a chain through the lawnmower repeatedly. I had not done it. He did not care.
He picked up the chain. He hit me with it. Full power. It wrapped around my left side and left me bleeding wet — welts in my flesh in the exact shape of the chain links.
I did not give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
I walked to my bedroom. I lay down on my bed. My mother came in and rubbed my shoulder. I let her.
Here is what I learned that day.
Nobody was going to come save me. Nobody had ever come to save me. I was loyal to my mother. I was loyal to the family. And the loyalty had a cost — the cost was that I had to absorb violence that was not mine, from people who did not deserve loyalty, and I had to do it without complaining because the alternative was making my mother's life harder.
Loyalty without truth is a leash.
Truth without loyalty is exile.
I lived in the leash for years. I covered for the family. I took hits for the family. Until eventually I had to choose between staying loyal to the people who hurt me and being honest about what they did.
I chose truth.
It cost me relationships. It cost me the version of myself who was easy to love. It cost me belonging in a system that was never safe to begin with.
But the chain does not wrap around me anymore.
Stone Quarter Fortify is the season where you find out which loyalties are leashes and which ones are loads worth carrying. Pick one this week. Test it.
When did the people closest to you get you wrong? Tell me below. I'll read every one before Coffee Hour at 3:30.
— Shaun
