Words fascinate me. Not only are stories made from words but every word has a story all its own. And sometimes a certain word—or the idea behind a word—will captivate me to the point where I find myself rolling it over in my head again and again trying to deconstruct it, not unlike how I deconstruct the architecture of a home in order to reveal its true nature.

Integrity is such a word. One that I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to digest. When we say someone has integrity it means we can count on them to behave consistently. It means they can be trusted, and who doesn’t want to be trustworthy? But here’s the problem with integrity, everyone wants you to have it but rarely does anyone tell you how to get it. With all due respect to well-meaning parents, commanding a child to “just be trustworthy,” is not a road map.

Why is it, for instance, that I could be sailing along in life, a “good boy,” and then all of a sudden do something monumentally stupid and out of character? And then came the scolding from my parents, “What possessed you to do such a thing?”

What possessed you? That’s what we say when someone acts out of character, as if there was another entity inside them that unexpectedly grabbed the wheel and drove the bus off the road. What I didn’t realize at the time was, despite my parents not offering an explanation, how close to the truth it really was. Sometimes something did grab the wheel. Something unfamiliar to me. But it wasn’t a demon, it was just me. A part of me that was frustrated and stifled and that didn’t always want to just follow the crowd.

In architecture, we say a building has design integrity when all the individual style elements, some of which are very different from each other, share a common thread which ties them together as one. And one day, I don’t know when, I finally realized that integrity is just another form of the word “integrate,” and that having integrity wasn’t about gritting my teeth and fighting myself to do the right thing. It was about knowing myself well enough to bring all the pieces of me together. To let all the voices in my head—even the embarrassingly contradictory ones—feel safe to express themselves around the council fire of my heart.

The day I allowed what at first seemed like the disenfranchised sides of me to speak is the day I realized those voices had meaningful things to say about who I really was, and if they didn’t get the respect they deserved, if they were suppressed and ignored and I pretended they didn’t exist, then they—like prisoners looking for any chance of escape—would unexpectedly hijack the bus and grab the wheel. The day I invited them to the table is the day I began to become a truly integrated person.

It’s not all hugs and kisses. Sometimes around the council fire of my heart there are serious arguments, serious disagreements about how I feel and how I should express it and what to do next. But at least now everyone is there, and everyone gets a voice, and every voice is respected. What that means is on my best days all the energies inside me have come to an agreement on how to proceed. And on my worst days, when I’ve yet to reconcile the opposites and the arguments, at least no one is so frustrated that they feel like they need to grab the wheel and drive the bus off the road just to get everyone else’s attention.

The result in me has been a life that can be, I think, trusted. That’s what I call integrity. And just like the art of bringing together sometimes very different design elements to build a beautifully layered house, I’m learning how to bring together all the voices in my head to build myself a beautiful life.