What No One Tells You About Unlearning Everything

What happens when you stop carrying other people's beliefs about who deserves to belong

I was raised to believe some fucked up shit about people.

I'm talking weapons-grade programming here. The kind that gets drilled into your skull before you're old enough to know it's happening. I was taught that certain humans were broken. Wrong. Damned to burn for eternity. I learned exactly who deserved love and who deserved punishment. Which lives mattered and which ones were disposable. All according to other people’s interpretation of a 2000 year old book.

And I swallowed every goddamn word. Because when you're seven years old, you don't question the adults. You absorb their truth like gospel.

But here's what nobody warns you about when you start dismantling everything you were taught: it's like performing surgery on yourself without anesthesia. Terrifying. Liberating. And it never stops bleeding.

The Virus We All Carry

Listen up—we all inherited someone else's poison.

Maybe yours came wrapped in Sunday sermons like mine did. Maybe it was family dinner conversations, political rants, economic anxiety, geographical tribalism. Maybe trauma taught you that survival meant knowing exactly which humans to avoid and which ones to trust.

Doesn't matter where it came from. What matters is this: Most of what we believe about other people isn't actually ours. It's borrowed poison we've been carrying around like it's medicine.

This programming runs deeper than conscious thought. It's embedded in our nervous system. It shapes who triggers our fight-or-flight, who we dismiss before they even speak, who we think deserves our time and who can fuck right off.

I spent decades carrying beliefs that weren't mine about people who were living authentically while I was still pretending to be whoever I thought would keep me safe.

How absolutely fucking backwards is that?

The Day My Foundation Cracked

The unlearning started when I realized something that broke my brain wide open:

Some of the most genuine, heart-centered, authentic humans I knew were people I'd been programmed to see as "abominations."

Meanwhile, some of the most toxic, manipulative, soul-crushing people I'd encountered were the ones wearing the "righteous" labels I'd been taught to respect.

That cognitive dissonance didn't just challenge my beliefs—it detonated them.

If I was that catastrophically wrong about something so fundamental, what else was I carrying that was complete bullshit?

Spoiler alert: Almost everything.

Here's What Survival Taught Me

Every single person reading this—every fucking one of you—is walking around with someone else's voice in your head.

Someone else's fears. Someone else's judgments. Someone else's limitations masquerading as your moral compass.

But here's the truth that cuts through all the programming: Every human being deserves to take up space on this planet. Period. Full stop. No exceptions.

Gay, straight, bi, trans, and everything in between and outside those boxes. Conservative, liberal, politically homeless. Rich, broke, somewhere in the middle. Different gods, no gods, making it up as they go. Different skin, different cultures, different ways of moving through the world. Neurodiverse minds, bodies that work differently, struggles you can't see from the outside.

We're all human. That's the only foundation that matters. Everything else is just details we've been taught to weaponize against each other.

And that stops here. Today. With us.

Replacing Judgment with Curiosity

I had to rewire my entire operating system. Instead of my automatic response—"What's wrong with this person?"—I started asking different questions:

"What's their story? What shaped them into who they are? What are they trying to protect or heal? What would I understand if I lived their experience?"

This isn't about becoming a pushover or accepting abuse. Boundaries are non-negotiable. But it's about recognizing that someone can be completely different from you—politically, spiritually, culturally, sexually—and still deserve basic human dignity.

Revolutionary concept, right?

Why Our Differences Are Our Fucking Superpower

Here's the thing about gravitating toward familiarity: it feels safer, but it makes us weaker.

Surrounding yourself only with people who think like you, look like you, vote like you, worship like you? That's not community—that's an echo chamber. And echo chambers don't build resilience. They build fragility.

Diversity isn't some corporate buzzword designed to make executives feel progressive. It's literally what keeps our species alive. Different perspectives solve different problems. Different approaches create different solutions. Different ways of being human expand what's possible for all of us.

When we appreciate people who are nothing like us, we don't just grow—we become unstoppable.

The Community We're Building

I'm building something where you can show up exactly as you are. Where your story matters, your struggle counts, your perspective adds value—even if it's completely different from mine.

I don't give a single fuck who you vote for. I don't care who you love or how you identify or what you believe about God or money or what makes life worth living.

Here's what I do care about: Are you committed to being authentic instead of performing? Are you working to heal your shit instead of weaponizing it against others? Are you willing to question your programming and do the brutal work of becoming who you actually are instead of who you were conditioned to be?

If you answered yes to any of that, you're already part of this shift.

What This Actually Looks Like

This means the Trump supporter healing from religious trauma and the Bernie supporter deconstructing family dysfunction can both find tools here without debating politics.

This means the straight person learning boundaries and the queer person learning self-worth can both discover emotional resilience without arguing about identity.

This means the Christian questioning their faith and the atheist who never had any can both explore what authentic community looks like.

This means the CEO struggling with imposter syndrome and the single parent working multiple jobs can both understand what it feels like to perform competence while drowning internally.

We don't have to be identical to support each other. We don't have to agree on everything to learn from each other.

This is what happens when we stop trying to convert people and start trying to connect with them.

The Work That Changes Everything

The real work isn't converting other people to your way of thinking. The real work is examining your own inherited programming and asking: "Is this actually true? Is this actually mine? Is this helping me connect with humans or keeping me isolated in fear?"

The real work is practicing curiosity instead of judgment. Connection instead of division. Appreciation instead of mere tolerance.

The real work is remembering that every person you encounter is fighting battles you know nothing about, carrying wounds you can't see, trying to make sense of a world that's often brutal and confusing.

Just like you are.

And when we remember that—when we really fucking remember that—everything changes.

This Is Your Permission Slip

You have permission to question everything you were taught about other people. All of it. Especially the shit that feels obviously true—that's usually the deepest programming.

You have permission to get genuinely curious about people who are nothing like you. What's their story? What shaped them? What are they trying to heal or protect? How does their different way of being human expand what you thought was possible?

You have permission to practice appreciation for differences instead of just tolerating them. To ask yourself: "What can this person teach me that someone exactly like me never could?"

And you have permission to show up as who you actually are instead of who you think you're supposed to be.

Because the world needs your specific perspective, your unique experience, your particular way of navigating this shit show we call existence.

The Truth About What We're Really Doing Here

We're not going to hate each other into conforming. That approach has been failing spectacularly for centuries.

We're not going to shame people into being more like us. That's just trauma masquerading as righteousness.

We're not going to build walls and call it safety. That's just fear masquerading as wisdom.

What we're going to do is something that terrifies the people who profit from our division: We're going to appreciate each other's humanity while honoring our differences.

We're going to build a community where being authentic is more valuable than being right. Where curiosity trumps judgment. Where your story matters, regardless of how different it is from mine.

We're going to prove that humans can learn from each other without having to become each other.

And we're going to do it with such fierce love and radical acceptance that it becomes contagious.

This Is Just the Beginning

What you're reading right now? This isn't just an article. This is a declaration of war against the programming that keeps us isolated and afraid of each other.

This is a love letter to every person who's ever felt like they didn't belong anywhere because they refused to pretend to be someone they're not.

This is a battle cry for everyone who's tired of choosing between authenticity and acceptance.

This is the beginning of something that changes everything.

Because when people like us—people who are willing to question everything, heal our shit, and show up authentically—when we come together and appreciate our differences instead of weaponizing them?

We become unstoppable.

We become the community we've been searching for our entire lives.

We become the change we've been waiting for the world to make.

And that starts right here. Right now. With you reading this and recognizing yourself in these words.

Welcome to Kill The Silence. You've been part of this longer than you know.

—Cody Taymore

Kill The Silence