Without bragging, one of my favorite aspects about this era is how little I am beginning to care about certain things. For the longest time, I wanted the perfect job with a decent income, and mostly to avoid conflict. Even with this blog, I wanted to start making money and gain a following, maybe be able to supplement my income. All of those desires were valid, and unlike my past, my current self-esteem considered me worthy of such endeavors.
Suddenly, everything went wrong, and I have been scrambling to catch up and make it to equilibrium. A number of mishaps have happened this year both for me and the people in my life, and none of us thought that we would be experiencing any of these situations. That is the challenge: we all had to figure out how to make it work without letting everything affect us in a way that caused us to collapse.
However, all of the efforts that we were previously making began to feel trivial because we realized how much and how often we had to rely on the approval of others. We would make efforts, and others would take glee in telling us that we were rejected. I would hesitate to call us more detached, but we finally understood that acceptance itself was a method of power, and the only power we consistently had was the power to reject their rejection as a measure of ourselves.
Empowerment for the masses begins with the understanding that numbness does not have to be a flaw when measured against people’s need to hold approval over the heads of many. The “elites” have taken away so much from so many, and they still demand praise for the parcels they offer. Ignoring them is empowerment, especially when they have offered no cause for admiration. Takers are the ones who suffer most when apathy begins to reign supreme, something they forgot when sentencing all of us to deprivation.
