Grey-rocking is this: someone antagonizes you and so you stay instinctually, defensively quiet, keeping your body language protectively flat. This has proven to be ineffectual politically. Your heart may race and sweat may flow from all your pores, but you give the antagonist no further reason to harm you.
You go grey in the hope that they go away.
The concept of grey-rocking, giving and absorbing seemingly nothing in emotionally or physically dangerous situations to prevent the escalation of emotional or physical violence, is one that anybody who has ever been bullied, tortured, or otherwise harmed is sadly familiar with. The less of a response you give, the less abuse you think you’ll get.
Unfortunately, gray rocks are still porous. They can still be eroded, diminished, made smaller. Grey-rocking, while often helpful, is nonetheless painful, because you never leave the gross situation fully intact. A rock in a river of cruelty will eventually be worn down to nothing.
And most assholes don’t even notice grey-rocking. Because they rarely notice—and if they do, they don’t care—how other people feel. The assholes just keep on assholing.
But what if you were stronger than stone? What if you were so precious as to be impervious to any dissolution or minimization? Then you would be gold itself: an inert element that no decent person would even think to try to destroy.
I propose to you an emotional alchemy. When in danger, when in the presence of wicked energy: take on the mental form of pure, precious gold instead of the disposable and unremarkable form of a cheap, grey rock.
That assertion of your own inherent and magnificent value, even if silent, even if never acknowledged by anyone else, is magical, powerful alchemy.
Do not compose yourself as a grey rock. Feel instead that you are as valuable and sturdy as a brick of pure gold. Gold can be beaten and melted, but never corroded or shattered. Gold has innate value and obvious beauty. Grey rocks are invisible and disposable. Gold is eye-catching and coveted.
Gold is the material you must feel yourself to be. Be inert in the strongest way the periodic table allows. Give nothing and embody everything. You are a treasure, after all.
In the images in this newsletter, the grey rock and the gold nugget are the same person: simply telling their truths at different volumes of self-assertion. The gold is aways there, even when it’s scared to speak.
Respond to hostility in the way that helps you best survive.