As I’ve been watching the story of humanity unfold as of late, I am not at all shocked at the response or lack of response from people…

I understand why people fall in love with fantasies or AI boyfriends or prefer pornography— or whatever it is over a relationship with others. I get it. Getting close is uncomfortable. It’s scary. Its vulnerable. It’s the threat of losing your perceived freedoms, changing your way of life. But what the former is, is cold and mechanical. The heart has been ripped right out of the experience. It’s only a simulation of the things you want.

It’s easier to keep people at an arm’s length than it is to embrace them because it’s too close. I don’t care how many people say that’s not why. It IS why; it’s at an unconscious level. How do I know? Because I’ve made much of what was at a subconscious level, conscious so I could understand why I did the things I did.

Betrayal hurts man. It hurts so damn bad because everything feels like it was a lie! If it was a bad enough betrayal, it destroys your sense of identity and what reality is. I get it. I’ve been there several times. It was the absolute worst shit I have ever been through. I cried for a year straight when I realized how badly I had been betrayed; it was a whole group effort. I lost not just one person but several and all the value those memories had, along with any kind of positive meaning I had assigned to those relationships. Gone! Completely gone. But I wasn’t going to lose myself by becoming bitter. I knew I couldn’t allow it to cause me to close down my heart entirely.

Letting people in after betrayal is the hardest because you have a desire there for connection but you’re also cautious. And hopefully you’ve healed enough to not project your past hurts and experiences onto someone new. It takes a great deal of presence to listen and watch with great attention to what the other person is saying and doing and who they’re showing up as— rather than who you want them to be or seeing them as who your past was.

It’s so much easier to live in our own little bubble, our own little fantasy where the population is 1. But that isn’t reality, is it? There’s a whole world out there of individuals with their own stories, stories that we do NOT know but often assume we do. How fucking painful is that? How awful that is to be the recipient of someone’s cruel and inaccurate assumptions. How awful. And yet we do it every day.

We rationalize why bad things happen to certain people or certain regions of the world. We turn the other way because to face it would mean that we have identified, actually identified that there is another human being out there hurting, a human much like us and they’re broken, sad, hurting or lost. We would have to see them as someone not separate from ourselves but a part of us, a part of the collective that we are in. The human race.

The first thing I search for in a person is empathy. Can you hold the space for others while they’re in pain or are they just acting out, in your opinion? Can you sit with someone during their challenging times? Can you just be there for them? To check in with them, to make sure they’re getting through it. A lot of life is an individual journey but at least we have one another to share it with. We don’t have to walk alone. It is a damn lonely place to have trials come and no one comes to your aid; it is especially hurtful when it’s the ones you love the most… and you thought they loved you too.

More on this tomorrow.

Blessings xx