How to Reinvent Yourself - original poem

Step 1: Have multiple conversations with different people from different perspectives and backgrounds.
Ask open-ended questions and throw away the answer that’s already prepared in your mind.
Listen more thoroughly than you would any other time. Listen to scripture with your heart open the same way you listen to rhyme.

Step 2: Make lists
Of all the bad things about that way and all the good things about this. Then flip the script.
Remember that the grass is usually just as brown on that side of the fence.
Assess your motives. Jealousy isn’t a very good reason to reinvent.

Step 3: Test it out.
Stop eating meat for a week or two, then treat yourself to a big steak cooked just the way you like it.
See which way feels more valid.

Step 4: Remember the deep conversations from step 1? You don’t need them anymore. That was just a way to introduce yourself to the questions.
Take everyone else’s answers, kiss them lovingly and kick them out the door. You’re trying to create a new self, not a new friend. Do what YOU think so that if you succeed you can pat yourself on the back. And if, or when, you fail, the blame is on you not them. That way there’s no resentment.

Step 5: Get rid of all your perceptions. Walk in the shoes of the new you. Break them in. Give yourself blisters and sing freedom songs while you massage them.

Step 6: Realize that all of this is bullshit. Time is relative and when it comes to reinvention, what the Universe wants it will get.
A whole year spent growing out your naps just to throw it away with one sentence? It doesn’t matter. You’re still young, and the best stuff is what comes after the mistakes.

Step 7:

This should be the last step because seven is the number of perfection, but it’s not. Just like I didn’t stop after three which is the number of completion, or five because it’s nice and round. I’m just getting to the good stuff now.
You are never complete, nor perfect. You should be contemplating one or more of these steps every day you live because the Universe is always fluctuating and you’ll never be happy if you can’t move with it.

So, step 7: Don’t try to give this meaning. Don’t try to make it a cause that everyone should rally around.
You admire vegetarians because they’re skinnier and you want to be able to choose to run with “the in crowd.”
You’re raising your Black Power fist so you’ll feel more powerful, and because you always feel less like a sore thumb in the midst of your own people.
You don’t have to prove to yourself or to anyone else that this matters. Everyone is entitled to their feelings and what you want is always what you should go after.

Step 8: Remain autonomous.
That’s means self-governing.
Never let your paltry desires enslave you like the system did. Everything you have you should be willing to give to someone who needs it, or else your soul, not your hair or your eating habits, is what needs to be reinvented.

Step 9: Last step.
Engage your mind. Make sure it’s as much a part of the process as your heart is – that is balance. Reorder the steps on this list. Make them fit your specific successes and limitations. Analyze. Passion without reason is anarchy. And regardless of what you say you believe, there must at least be some semblance of order to things.
Decide on a path and then follow it wherever it leads. Fear nothing. No mistake is too great for the Universe to iron beauty out of it. You’ve been reinvented.
Now remember these steps, because I promise you’ll be using them again.