Stop romanticizing what you structurally refuse to support

Something occurred to me today — the same thing that occurred to me months ago, but didn’t yet have the capacity to fully feel.

People become quite attached to your identity — I've written about this before here and here — but in this case specifically, it’s the part of me people found inspiring.

It's shocking, really... how many people need and want me to:

Be the first.
Build the vision.
Lead the way.
Trust.
Keep going.
Risk it all.
Manifest the dream.

It appears that people love the symbolic role I play more than the material reality I live. It doesn't matter how much I've lived to tell a confusing tale, they’ll passionately tell me that my vision can succeed, that I just have to believe in myself, be positive, stay committed, trust the process, and keep creating.

But the moment I counter that optimism with actual realities — with lived experience, 20 years of evidence, trends, numbers, consumer behavior, or economic viability — suddenly people become defensive.

And today, that made me ask a different set of questions, out loud, and probably more confrontationally than I intended:

Are you or someone you know actually purchasing art from local artists?

Are you or someone you know working with a creative consultant to clarify a brand's messaging?

Are you or someone you know investing in long-term somatic practice or nervous system transformation?

Because there’s a difference between emotionally supporting an idea and materially sustaining it.

That distinction matters.

And I've lived it. People love to pretend that their encouragement and admiration magically appears as food on my table.

And I'm so tired of it.

I'm tired of others glamorizing the path of being in these spaces while they sit safely on the sidelines, eternally remaining in the brainstorming process.

I'm done being the source of inspiration.

I'm done being the one who holds the line, when everything in my body is screaming "Bullshit."

I'm done with others living vicariously through me.

I'm done being the "brave" one. The one who goes first.

All while they refuse to acknowledge that the only way many people can afford to invest in these industries, is by abandoning parts of themselves elsewhere. By working jobs they don’t resonate with just to survive.

I’m not saying there’s no market for creative or wellness work. There obviously is. People make careers in art, writing, design, alternative health, somatic healing and other wellness industries every day. I'm one of them.

But having a market is not the same thing as having stable, structurally sustained demand. What people say they want, what they engage with, and what they can consistently support financially are all shaped by the same conditions that produce exhaustion, urgency, and fragmented attention. In that sense, the “market” is not separate from the culture — it is an expression of it.

That’s not cynicism. It’s observation.

And I find people resist these conversations not because they threaten optimism, but because they threaten the emotional frameworks many people use to survive.

Because once you fully confront how unsupported most nontraditional labor actually is — how many creatives, entrepreneurs, and small businesses are surviving through overwork, debt, second jobs, burnout, family support, or years of undercompensated effort — the fantasy that passion or positivity alone overcomes structural reality begins to crack.

And from lived experience, that contradiction creates a lot of grief.

The grief of realizing that many people will spend most of their lives serving systems they do not believe in simply to survive within them.

The grief of recognizing how much exhaustion modern life requires just to maintain basic stability.

The grief of understanding that awareness alone does not guarantee change.

The grief that destabilizes identity.

And I think many people avoid fully feeling that grief because once it is fully felt, performance becomes harder.

Much harder.

The fantasy cracks. The illusion shatters. And the consequence of being fully awake *AND* alive in a reality designed to disconnect you from it, rolls in.

The questions are no longer abstract or theoretical. They stop living “out there” and become fully alive in the body.

Responsibility cannot be bypassed.

"What am I going to do about it?" has an edge... an urgency you didn't feel before.

The call is no longer coming from inside the house.

It is the house.

The mind begins to chime in, trying to act as the bridge between problem and solution. But that bridge is futile as it only loops back to the old path to the building that can no longer hold you.

A constant negotiation between survival and meaning occurs.

Layers upon layers of uncertainty set in.

Not just certainty about work or money, but uncertainty about how to live inside systems that no longer feel fully aligned with what you know, value, or feel to be true. While the body seeks to orient itself to a home without a blueprint.

This is what people are really protecting themselves from... not pessimism, but uncertainty.

Death.

Of the old architecture.

Creative success is not simply a matter of belief, hard work or perseverance.

Structural conditions shape outcomes.
Economic reality shapes outcomes.
Infrastructure shapes outcomes.

Acknowledging that is not cynicism.

It’s honesty.

And maybe that honesty is what makes people uncomfortable.

Because once certain illusions stop holding, life becomes less performative and far more participatory.

You can no longer unknow what your body knows.

You can no longer fully return to the architectures that once made survival feel coherent.

So no, I’m not saying dreams are fake.

I’m saying that somatic-felt awareness changes the relationship between the dream and the dreamer.

It changes what the body is willing to tolerate in order to keep performing belief.

And maybe asking difficult emotional and economic questions isn’t negativity at all.

Maybe it’s the beginning of responsibility.

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Stop romanticizing what you structurally refuse to support

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