The Amethyst Pentacle models identity as five states of human experience connected by five processes in an unbroken cycle of discovery and growth. The last article described the state of Desire resolving into community by studying the stigma we uncovered.

Realizing we cannot fulfill certain social norms, we strive for knowledge and understanding of our failure. But knowledge brings Integration as we find others who share our Desire to experience truth. Again, we face a choice: to live silently in a social environment that reviles us, or to reject that our stigma was ever failure.

Awakening is the state in which we discover "substantive differences" depends upon our social environment. Could we leave behind the people who proscribed our Desire? Do we deserve to live honestly, as who we are? Are social norms ever anything other than suggestions?

For now, we do not answer these questions. The precipice upon which we stand is precarious. We must judge our social environment as it judges us. We must learn to trust that what we know about ourselves is true and right. Integration into one community implies separation from another.

We learned the labels, and now we must see how they apply to real people in real situations. We are equipped to abandon our former Innocence for something better: a sense of belonging and release from stigma.

From Integration, we specify our ownership.

The Hard Labor of Wisdom

Gathering knowledge about our perceived stigma is greater than a high school book report. Desire spurs us to understand what the label truly means. More importantly, we need to know what the stigma means to us. We need to know if the label could be applied to us.

Awakening to the possibilities of stigma is exciting. We can analyze the stigma pedagogically. We can talk to others with the stigma about their experiences. We can observe lives lived bearing the stigma proudly, yet still surviving.

But the moment of Awakening occurs when we realize knowledge is useful only when applied. The fragile shell separating our experience from observations of another person's stigma strains under the load of cognitive dissonance. Was it their experience? Or our experience?

In the gender-diverse community, the cognitive dissonance resolves when we discover there never was a fragile shell between us and them. Transgender people refer to this moment as the "egg cracking." It is both beautiful and terrible.

We cry out with joy as unfinished sentences, unexamined curiosity, unacknowledged pain finally bloom into Wisdom from the seed of Desire. Yet we scream with anguish as the heavy blanket of stigma settles upon us, crushing the fragments of a shell never to be reassembled.

It is a hard labor to birth oneself from the egg of stigma. On shaky legs, we lift our eyes to survey the damage around us.

The Moment of Choice

To be clear, we don't have to answer the question "What comes next?" We could stop here. Acknowledging a label applies to us is not the same as applying the label ourselves.

We could fall prey to our former social environment's prejudice. We could accept their stigmatization as valid and moral. We could turn away from our shattered fragments as immoral indulgence, the path to an unjust society.

Alternatively, we could turn away from ourselves, believing accepting stigma publicly may be acceptable for some, but certainly not for us. We don't deserve to bear the label. Instead, our job is to protect others from our stigma, leaving our lives unlived that others may breathe more freely.

Or we could observe the happiness to be found in those who choose not to hide any longer. We may consider setting down our burdens to walk upright for the first time since Innocence fell to stigma.

But now our judgment is made final. It requires a ruthless sense of justice to commute our sentence to the dark night of the soul. It requires that we stand up for ourselves and fight for what we know is true and right about ourselves.

It requires the process of Realization.

Realizing Peace in Social Norms

As Erving Goffman writes in Stigma, not all social norms are equal in the social environment. There are three possible actions when presented with a social norm.

The first action is to understand. What does the social norm prescribe and proscribe? How important is the norm to peaceful interaction within the social environment?

The second action is to support. Does the social norm appeal to you in particular? Are the consequences of failing to fulfill the norm worth the risk?

The last action is to realize. If the social norm applies to you, will you accept it and fulfill it? Or will you reject it and become susceptible to stigma?

Supporting a social norm is not the same as realizing it. Men who crave a tradwife support women wearing dresses, aprons, and high heels, but do not realize those norms themselves. (Publicly, anyway - and no judgment if you do in private, girls!)

As we shift away from our previous social environment, shedding the stigma they thrust upon us, Integration with a new social environment implies new social norms.

The process of Realization aligns our social environment with our identity. Now we can understand the social norms, support them, and possibly see our way clear to realize them as well.

Assembling the Pieces of Oneness

No person realizes every social norm in a social environment. Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma - or just call it fashion - what you find attractive is going to differ from what other people find attractive.

But having accepted the stigma of old, we step forward with a new task: Realizing stigma as identity. All the forbidden characteristics are fair game now, and our job is to choose which appeal to us the most.

Yes, we recognize in some circles we will still be stigmatized: marginalized for being who are in a world unprepared to contain us. But now we will own our stigma, at least in private. Maybe it starts off messy, maybe we have skills to learn, maybe we need more time to study.

But having felt the Isolation of stigma, then finding Integration in common beliefs and experiences of others, now we focus inward again. The shattered facade of "normal" Innocence can be re-assembled.

The parts of who we are - once held at arm's length - have become wisdom and settle into the new normal. At long last, we feel peace, we feel whole, we feel cohesion.

We enter the next state of human experience. We coalesce into the state of Oneness.