Allow Vulnerability to Create Better

To be human is to be vulnerable. 

Feeling is vulnerable– and that is why so many of us avoid it, even if we are the lone witnesses to our vulnerability, let alone letting another person see us unravel. Being "emotional" and allowing your emotions to be expressed are vulnerable. When something matters to us and we commit to something bigger than ourselves, that engages our emotions and thus also makes us vulnerable. Being self aware while assessing our emotions is vulnerable. And being vulnerable makes us human, and gives us the potential to be powerful if done from a place of self respect, self honor and of course self awareness. 

Yet, we often cringe at the parts of our humanness that engage our emotions and longing. In turn, we cringe at the vulnerability of other people, too. And for those whose vulnerability we enjoy and feel moved by, some of us feel inspired to tap into our own and some of us feel a double standard when it comes to valuing our own vulnerability. And as individuals we experience the pendulum swinging between feeling inspired to create and feeling stunted by shame.

So many of us have creative dreams or at the very least, desire for a more authentic way of life where we spend more time doing and immersing ourselves with things we are genuinely passionate about. Yet, we get so used to performing for society that we also shun the parts of ourselves that are "being" rather than performing. We start to convince ourselves that our purpose is to prove ourselves rather than to "be" ourselves.

We start to see our self expression in and of itself as a waste of time, only giving value to it if it brings in some monetary outcome or if it acquires external validation. We feel pressured to use our creativity and self expression as a means of proving our worthiness, moving from a place of self-rejecting desperation instead of from a place of having peace and ease with ourselves. 

We’re conditioned by capitalist society to infantilize ourselves for our creativity and self expression, which require some sort of emotional manifestation beyond what is strictly practical and which distinguishes our humanness from being mere robots designed to function for a production goal. This infantilization can be somewhat alleviated when that self expression becomes a means for earning money– yet, capitalist society tells us that creating in and of itself is not enough. We’re taught that self expression in and of itself is not enough. “Being” is not enough if it is not serving a purpose of earning external validation. And at the root, we are taught that we are not enough, in our individually existence and expansive manifestation of ourselves.

To find purpose beyond what brings in monetary capital is deemed “childish” and less worthy in society’s eyes.

As someone who deeply values self expression, I personally intend to monetize on my ideas whether they be intellectual, creative or spiritual. My main goal is to bring out more of my soul– which I define as the ultimate potential of who I am. I want to monetize on my creativity and ideas not to seek external validation to prove that they matter, but so that I can spend more of my time manifesting myself through them and in living my purpose through them. This of course requires a strong foundation of internal validation and connection to my creative spirit and multifaceted soul, where I do not get swayed by the pressures to measure my worth including my creative worth through measurements of external success.

My purpose entails promoting human connection, using my privilege to advocate for marginalized people while fighting systems of oppression, inspiring contentment in "being" for both myself and others, promoting more moral and ethical consciousness in this world, encouraging lifelong learning beyond the classroom, facilitating individual growth in myself and others, supporting others in their self expression and more. In other words, my “being” does not depend on external validation or monetary success as the primary means of valuing my purpose– even if I still desire financial success and the accomplishment of making a full time career out of my self expression. Achieving this will definitely be something to be proud of, but the absolute guarantee of it shouldn’t be what makes it matter in the first place. 

When you show that something matters to you and that there is a part of you that cannot live without it, that is vulnerable. Going after your dreams, especially putting yourself out publicly before you are successful, is vulnerable. Confronting your limits even as you push them is vulnerable, as is accepting that there are limits you may never excel past in this lifetime. 

Caring about something, especially when that something highlights your uniqueness and individual existence, even as you commit to something bigger than yourself, is vulnerable. 

Prioritizing creativity and self expression in cultures of capitalism where honor is emphasized in conformity is vulnerable– it is an act of resistance to value what is unpopular in courageous embodiment of authenticity. 

And prioritizing your values and embodying them through what you create and how you express yourself, while bringing you contentment long term, is not about feeling happy all the time. Constant bursts of happiness is not the priority-- existential contentment and meaning are. Of course, happiness can be a natural outcome of that. It’s about welcoming the full spectrum of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, because of the existential satisfaction tied to prioritizing commitment to what matters most beyond the convenience of rejecting your authenticity to be accepted. Where it is more important to you to unleash your soul for freedom than it is to cage it in attachment to comfort and safety that makes you suppressed and miserable. 

In capitalist societies and anywhere where external measurements of accomplishments such as monetary profit are more valued than the very people making them happen, there is an encouragement of distancing yourself from your soul in order to prove yourself of your worthiness. Your ability to produce for profit, which is used as a measurement of the value you bring, determines your worthiness of taking up space and being seen and heard. Funnily enough, your worthiness of being perceived and positively perceived specifically are contingent upon how well you can erase yourself– how well you can suppress your authentic, multifaceted, human self expression– to become a symbol for someone else’s dreams. Where you put on a costume of someone else's expectations and continue wearing it long enough to forget you have been performing in the first place, while wondering why you struggle to feel content and at peace with yourself despite working so hard.

How well can you scoff at the impracticality of going after your own creative dreams of being a writer, video creator, photographer, painter, etc to prove your worthiness of being an adult who is worthy and capable of making a stable income through a “real” job? How good are you at rejecting your self expression to accommodate to the standards of professionalism in your workplace that require your conformity for you to prove your prioritization of the company over your own well being, through which you earn honor and respectability? How well can you be conditioned to accept a definition of professionalism that requires you to reject your humanity and avoid
“being political” and calling out lack of ethical and moral practices, and one where you are required to impress people over connecting with them, even if the means that impressing them is done through manipulation?

How well can you reject your humanity and your humanness to be worthy of being mere number who serves as an asset to a company that reduces you to a commodity of skills and doesn’t care about your wellbeing or contentment as long as you’re bringing in the money? How much of your self worth must you sacrifice internally in order to show people that you are willing to chase it externally, so that they can see you will allow them to have power over you and rule over you?

In creating, we must remove the restrictions around our "being". We must tap into our desires and connect with them in order to manifest them through our self expressive mediums, whether that be intellectually or creatively, both or beyond. 

When we create, it is inevitable that we will feel. Finding meaning is not void of emotion. It is where we perceive great excitement and great dread, and long for love and grieve injustices. Creating requires connection within ourselves and to others, with the types of connections ranging from intimate personal ones to ecological ones where we care about indirect impacts we have on the world and people we will never personally know. 

In tapping into ourselves and whether that is done easily or with resistance, in expressing what we have and who we are, we are faced with our own existentialism. We uncover our longings and confront both our power and our powerlessness. We become aware of our need and desire for connection both with ourselves and with other people, and that awareness in addition to pleasure, begets pangs of loneliness. 

Story writers manifest characters, their plots and lessons from their own human longings hunan experiences and of course, values. This requires tapping into various emotions, like anger derived from injustice, sadness sourced from loss which also is a product of love, warmth from finding belonging in relationships that wane away shame, happiness honed from emotionally and physically taxing trials, etc. 

Visual artists connect with their feelings and express them through various shapes and colors, through faces, places and landscapes, and more to communicate internal human experiences. 

Humanists and passionate lifelong learners dedicated to academia let their dissatisfaction with humanity move them to instill faith in humanity, making use of their righteous anger towards injustice to conduct lengthy research projects that they transform into powerful literature inspiring people to become more socially conscious and do more good for the world (and for their souls). 

And employees in healthy corporate cultures who genuinely enjoy their jobs and find purpose and meaning through it tap into their authenticities and humanness to create opportunities for connection and individual and collective growth that feed off of each other both inside and outside of the workplace, challenging traditional and popular norms still enforced in most profit-hungry corporate workplaces.

What purpose is there in embarking on the things that we are passionate about, in the things that make us feel alive and give us meaning and purpose, if we reject our personal connection to that meaning and purpose in the first place? If we close ourselves off from the passion that are required for us to be in touch with it in the first place, whether or not we are feeling joy at any given moment as we welcome the pleasure and pain and faith and fear as our souls continue to vibrate with being unleashing?

When you block yourself off from being vulnerable while expressing yourself, you close yourself off to various sides of yourself and deeper levels of yourself and thus, your potential. You end up gatekeeping yourself from both yourself, people in your life and from the world as you let shame keep you from your soul, prohibiting your human vessels of expression from accessing meaning and transcendence with and beyond your human form and existence. When you don’t let yourself go deeper within yourself, you cannot expect to manifest depth or diveristy through what you create. When you avoid your vulnerability, you stay swimming on the surface while rejecting the priceless beauty and opportunities for genuine connection. This tragedy happens as you let only a very small part of your soul, of your potential, come to fruition. You reject the value of the "multifacetedness" and universes you have to offer because you continue to let societal conditionings delude you into believing that there is no good for you beyond the bubble of familiarity and self doubt you’ve trapped yourself in. You’ve been conditioned to close yourself off to wonder and curiosity, and to be ignorant to all of the magic inside and outside of you because you’ve been taught to fear connection instead of celebrating it, and you’ve been taught that dread is realistic and that hoping is foolishness. 

In reality, there is so much more than the bubble that shame has confined you to, and you are worthy of breaking out of the bubble. You are worthy of and allowed to be experiencing all of the emotions, even the inconvenient ones and what society has deemed the “ugly” emotions, that alert you to what matters the most to you. Because at the end of the day, your feelings are information that tell you something about yourself, whether that thing is you needing to heal from something or to release it, or whether you need to explore and assess something further to discover something that will aid you in progressing on your soul's journey. 

And awareness of your feelings, what they say about you and what you value, and the meanings behind them– using them with the purpose of connection to your soul and to those of others and finding empowerment through these- are tickets to your expansion and long term, existential contentment. Following what matters to you and letting it guide you instead of rejecting the truth of your soul will free you. 

The less you resist your authenticity, the more you accept your humanness, the more you become friends with self awareness even when you are in fear of it, the more you unleash your creativity, intellectualism and other modes of expression. The more you remove the blocks of shame and guilt, the more you access yourself. 

And in addition to feelings of happiness, excitement, confidence, connection being blocked by shame and guilt where you internalize unworthiness around experiencing pleasure-- paradoxically, the shame and guilt prevent you from actually acknowledging and feeling the shame and guilt themselves, making it impossible for you to move on from them so that they do not restrict your expressing.

Because in feeling the unpleasant feelings, you express holding space for yourself in both the convenient and less convenient parts, both the seemingly perfect and flawed parts, just like you would do for a beloved friend. You don't expect yourself to be perfect and convenient in order to worthy of existence and taking up space, and in order to be worthy of being loved.

When you value your vulnerability for the beautiful, dynamic person it manifests you as, you become more adept at expressing yourself since you become less resistant to “being.” You feel less of a pressure to "perform" in lieu of being yourself to gain the approval of other people at the cost of your misery. 

If you want to become a better creator, whether that be in being a creator of your life overall or if it comes to a specific creative or intellectual or other medium that you are passionate about, let yourself immerse in these passions in and of themselves. Give more value to these things and the personal existential meanings behind these things. Remember that your affinity towards these would not be a continuous thing, even if you’ve rejected it or been in denial of it several times only to long for it again, finding yourself drawn to it time and time again, I if these facets of your self expression did not serve a significant role in your expansion and purpose in life and perhaps beyond. You really have to focus in on what matters and be willing to get lost in it, even if it doesn’t make sense to other people. 

As the saying goes, “not all those who wander are lost.” 

You must let yourself wander in your own existence.

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