Please stop romanticizing what you yourself cannot sustain

Something occurred to me today — the same thing that occurred to me months ago, but am still moving, still feeling, still healing through.

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 much (while wading through the debris and rubble of my previous life) I'm expected to still be the "one" to:

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

It doesn't matter how much I've lived a confusing tale, others passionately tell me that I'm just being negative and that I have to believe in myself, be positive, stay committed, trust the process, and keep going. I feel like a passenger in a near-fatal car crash. Only in my case, everyone is doing everything possible to avert their eyes and just pretend like nothing happened.

The moment I counter their tightly-held mental or spiritual frameworks with actual realities — with lived experience, 20 years of evidence, trends, numbers, consumer behavior, or economic viability — they double-down and become more 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.

Surprise! It doesn't. And I'm tired of it.

I'm tired of seeing society endlessly glamorize the dreamer archetype while the majority sit safely on the sidelines, eternally remaining in the brainstorming process.

I'm done being shamed for speaking truth while just a few years ago, Amazon acquired Whole Foods and Shein is currently in the process of acquiring Everlane, and Walmart is still the world's largest retailer. Yet, no one sees the parallel.

They refuse to fully mentally, emotionally and physically acknowledge that the only way many people can afford to invest in these industries (much less buy groceries these days) 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 under-compensated 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 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 produce change.

The grief of accepting that maybe it isn't enough to be your authentic self.

The grief that destabilizes identity.

Many people avoid feeling that grief because once it is fully felt, performance becomes harder.

Much harder. Nearly impossible.

The fantasy cracks. The illusion shatters. And the cost of being fully awake *and* alive in a reality others designed to keep you disconnected from it, rolls in.

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

Responsibility cannot be bypassed. Freedom cannot be pedestalized.

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

The call is no longer coming from inside the house.

It is the house.

The mind does what it does, attempting to close any question with an answer, trying to act as the bridge between problem and solution. But that bridge only loops back to structures and ways of being the body can no longer survive inside.

A constant negotiation between survival and meaning occurs.

Layers upon layers of uncertainty set in.

Not just uncertainty about work or money, but uncertainty about how to live inside systems that no longer feel aligned with what you know, value, or feel to be true. While the body seeks to orient itself to a home that is still waiting on a blueprint.

This is what people are really protecting themselves from... not pessimism, not the loss of hope, or a dream — but uncertainty.

Death.

Of the old architecture.

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