Showing up while the world is falling apart
It has never been so important to recognize our privileges.
Right now, it feels like whatever we do is simply the wrong thing to do.
It feels wrong to show up for work.
It feels wrong to not show up for work.
It feels wrong to want anything.
It feels wrong to deprive ourselves.
Everything feels wrong.
Here’s the show stopping question I keep coming back to: What if I trusted every single one of my decisions?
Let me tell you a bit about how I have been existing over the past few weeks.
Outside family and alone time, my calendar and inbox consist of the following:
Meal time and snack time and tea time with my local and faraway poly besties
Time with peer support clients who teach me as much as I teach them
Group and 1:1 gatherings with classmates from my teacher James-Olivia Chu Hillman’s program “Regard,” where we learn how to regard ourselves and one another with the highest level of care
Israeli and Palestinian friends I hold space for and who hold space for me
Dates and chats with the sexiest men who adore me beyond what I’ve ever fathomed
All kinds of healthcare: acupuncture, chiropractics, therapy
What I care about right now are: war, sex, and relationships. The reason I care about these things is that I think they are all connected.
Here is my argument: When you are aware of what you want, and when you are aware of your privileges, you will use your privilege and resources to get what you want. And when you get what you want, you will be able to show up for what you care about.
This is why I advocate for, in the strongest terms possible, being aware of our privileges.
The biggest privilege that I have is that I was born into generational privilege, which means that I don’t have to worry about putting food on the table. Which means that I can do whatever I want to do with my time, including taking care of myself and spending time on things that I care about.
I care about creating what I am not seeing in the world. So I spend my time building a little corner for those things. Examples:
A book about reclaiming your own sense of agency (the book is called The Sovereign Professional’s Almanac)
Multiple platforms where I talk about whatever I want to talk about, including decolonizing love, the workplace, parenthood, and the culture at large
Reclaiming my sluthood as a nerdy looking Korean girl as a form of freedom so that more of us feel less shame around wanting sex and whatever else we want
Facilitating human conversations around difficult topics
Acknowledging my privileges and resources
And it becomes a cycle. When I show up for the things I care about, people who care about similar things show up in my life, and that is how communities are born and built. And they take care of me. We build an ecosystem of care and support for one another so that we can each hear our own heartbeat.
Our own aliveness.
Unfortunately, it is more common for people to ignore their privileges because so many of us have adopted this culture of putting individualistic achievement on a pedestal that it feels sinful to admit that we cannot do anything without support and resources.
Which is why it is very common that people celebrate most publicly things like social status, promotions, and more resources. Yes, these milestones are absolutely worth celebrating because they are part of our life experiences as human beings. But it becomes problematic when we start using these individualistic achievements to turn a blind eye to everything that is going around us and what we really care about.
We are so caught up in everything that we have achieved and need to achieve to make sure that we get the individual approval that we’ve been craving our whole lives.
Not only does this make us blind to what we care about; it also is a futile pursuit. The truest form of approval comes from those who see past all of that and make the effort to see who you are behind all those fancy and glitzy decorations around who you ought to be in the world.
This is why so many people end up in a place where they have done everything they could to be “successful” only to find that they feel helplessly alone in the world.
They have been looking for attention and validation in all the wrong places.
When you find yourself in places filled with people who are willing to see you as a human being, you will find all that attention and validation even without asking for it because they are already coming in with that desire to see you. The real you.
Here is how I have found myself in such places: declare the truth.
Wherever I find myself in, I declare that I am obsessed with attention and validation because that is the truth. Then I share everything that people need to know about me so that they can decide whether they want to give this to me. I talk about whatever I want to talk about. One second, I am talking about humanitarian aid. Another second, I am talking about how hard I climaxed this past weekend.
The first reason this is challenging is that we have been taught to shame our privileges and our desires. We have been taught to feel shame for having so much, and we have been taught to be shamed for wanting more.
Once we evict shame out of that process, we get to become aware of our privileges and declare what we want. Whatever judgment that comes our way becomes irrelevant because there is no shame to transfer that judgment into my system.
[I highly recommend David Bedrick for the work of unshaming. That is where I learned this process. I also talk about unshaming quite a lot in my work in general, and here is what I boil unshaming down to: Whatever I am shamed of tells me about a rule that I was never supposed to follow in the first place.]
I was never supposed to follow the rule that I should be ashamed of my privilege and my desires. So then I started honoring my privileges and my desires.
Examples:
“I should ignore all this money I have and make my own living so that I can find approval in society at large.” → “Look at all this money I have and can use so that I can find people who cannot help but give me the kind of attention and validation I want.”
“Wanting attention and validation is stupid.” → “Attention and validation are golden resources as interdependent human beings.”
“Attention and validation must come from certain people, like my parents and my family, so that I can feel whole.” → “Attention and validation can come from anyone, and that keeps things exciting.”
I admitted to wanting attention and validation for myself, but I did not make anyone responsible for giving it to me. I do not require any one person to give me any particular form of attention and validation to me.
Nobody is responsible for giving me what I want from them. It is my responsibility to know what I want and get after it.
We constantly search for validation and attention in the wrong places from the wrong people because we have this idea that there is a more superior, a correct source from which we can get that validation and attention.
So instead of finding themselves in places where people want to give them all the love, they stress over doing more and being more so that they can be enough for the people who were never going to give them what they wanted in the first place.
Some examples that apply to some but not all people:
We think that once we get the ultimate approval from our parents, we will be happy.
We think that once we get that promotion and earn more money than our peers, we will find approval from our spouse.
We think that once we are funny enough or cool enough, we’ll get the approval we want from our peers.
These are not places where we can get the attention and validation we are looking for. Because these are places where we are not really being our true selves.
Where is a place you can declare your own truth?
That could be at a local tennis meetup. Or your social media. Or your bestie at work. Let’s start there. See that it is a possibility.
Then ask: How can I use my privilege to find more spaces where I can declare my truth?
I use my privileges to find my community and humans and hot ass men to give me what I want so that I can feel nourished even when I’m supposed to feel depleted from showing up for the things I care about.
I mean, that is the ultimate privilege. Having everything you need to build what you want to see in the world. And in turn, that ultimate privilege allows you to keep showing up.
Here are some questions:
What if I really did have a mountain of privilege? What does that do for me?
If it didn’t make me a bad person to have privilege and desires, what are my privileges and desires?
What am I willing to feel uncomfortable for so that I can show up for what I care about?
How do I take care of myself so that I can build capacity to feel uncomfortable?
Do I give myself permission to feel any human emotion, whether that’s disappointment, anger, or frustration, in the pursuit of expressing my truth?
It’s okay to feel wrong. That is only natural as compassionate human beings.
It’s also okay to feel powerless, too.
This is all evidence that we are willing to feel like shit so that we can hold space for the things we care about.
Incidentally, that is how we exercise our power.
If next steps are not quite clear, what if we gave our thoughts and feelings some time and space to sprout into a tree of ideas on how we want to show up for those things that we want to see in the world?
No matter what is going on in the world, no matter how much privilege you have, you will always remain a whole human being.
Which is why we will refuse to dehumanize ourselves in the name of shame and guilt for the aliveness we get to feel as human beings.
When we honor our own aliveness and our own heartbeat, we become even more serious about honoring the aliveness and the heartbeat of others.
What do you really want, and how will you get after it?
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You can find more of me at angela-han.com.