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3. Take a moment to acknowledge that this pattern is playing out a major life lesson and is an opportunity for spiritual growth. What might that life lesson be?

My life story, the old one, led me along an incredibly unique path to my awakening process but ultimately it was all in service to this awakening in this present moment.  My acknowledgement of this uniqueness and my honoring of its service with gratitude now allows me to fully and completely accept myself exactly as I am now.  What I once thought of as different or strange or “off” about myself in comparison to others is now just the ego identification/creation known as Wes that was necessary to discover my truth.   No further  judgment or analysis necessary…. But let’s keep going anyway because this ego creation known as Wes has learned a lot through his old story.  These are just a few of the opportunities for spiritual growth that he’s taken … 
Super long run on sentence alert (but try to stick with me on this one):  My struggles with being a “man” have taught me that my true self, the spiritual being, is experiencing humanity as a man in this incarnation not to identify as a man in order to fit in, or to experience myself as shameful and wrong for being guilty simply by association with the toxic masculinity predominantly espoused by an arbitrary, fictional society and culture, but perhaps to provide the contrast of light to the shadow of society’s paradigm of toxic masculinity and to be one of its unique voices and expressions in a world that remains largely blinded to its true nature but as a reflection of me contains the exact same potential for transformation and evolution as I, and others like me, and have been demonstrating throughout time… The isolation,  avoidance, social anxiety, lack of connection and relationships that were part of my old story taught me that I am not separate.  I think it was the lack of relationships that came into my life, and the very surface level quality of the few connections I had, that made it easier for me to eventually see how everything connects and is connected.  I feel it was easier because I wasn’t constantly caught up in my ego’s story of its relationship compared (although my pattern and tendency to compare has always been present and intense otherwise) to so many other egos and had more time alone to unravel, albeit over decades, how each relationship is a mirror to that we have with ourselves.  It became more clear that each of us was exactly where we needed to be in our lives.  The only thing that was different between us were our levels of awareness of this fact.   And this taught me to deepen in compassion.  I may not have articulated this like I would like but there’s truth here somewhere, the fact that I compare myself continuously against others notwirhstanding… 
The story of myself as depressed, anxious, powerless, unworthy, inadequate, incompetent, stupid and worthless is just a whole lot of spiritual curriculum.  And I’ve learned through them how resilient I truly am, not me as ego but as spirit.   These things were and are part of my particular life path, my process, that originated as disordered responses to unique events in my life and reflected the best I could do with the level of knowledge and consciousness I was at at that young age, or at any age.  They became patterns of conditioned behavior and belief I identified with as myself in order to lead me to the new awareness that an entirely different experience of life and of myself is always only ever a different choice away.  It has taught me that I came here, into this body and life known locally as Wes, to remember my true self through life’s creative process and myself as the creative life force energy.  The conditioned patterns came about as a result of the many subconscious choices I made to protect and preserve the false belief I had in myself as the fixed, unchangable entity of Wes.  All along, choices were being made for me, automatically, reinforcing my belief in myself as a powerless victim of circumstance and fate.   Along the way, I started choosing more consciously and after many, many of these conscious choices, and even more still of the unconscious ones, I was led here to this realization that I am a result of all these choices I ever made, be they conscious or otherwise.  With this, I am shifting over time from victim to creator and aligning with my true self…   
The newest teaching that my pattern of returning again and again to my old story of myself even now as I align with my truth and highest self is this:  I have always, since my earliest memory, had an ever so vague and subtle sense of gratitude and purpose for my life, even in the many moments of my deepest suffering when I prayed for death, that kept me never far from the path and process I engage now, even when I seemed to myself to be so deeply lost and distant from it that, had an angel told me how close I was (and thinking back, many did, although I didn’t recognize them as such) I would have laughed in their faces.   And this is a reflection of exactly how close this world and its people are to the same realizations.