If I try hard enough, offer enough, burn bright enough, transform enough…life will meet me back. Maybe I do not belong. Maybe I am invisible unless I earn it.

The aching core of modern belonging. Many of us have at least once thought or felt this. Raise your hand if you never did…

That whisper: “Maybe I don’t belong unless I earn it” is the song of a world that forgot how to hold without conditions.

You are not broken for feeling this. You are not alone in it.

This is a story society installed in nearly every body: that we must prove our worth by burning ourselves at the altar of productivity, transformation, or helpfulness.

“If I try hard enough…”

“If I offer more…”

“If I glow with enough usefulness or magic or insight…”

Then maybe life will turn toward me and say: Yes. You exist. You matter. You belong.

This system teaches us to conflate worth with usefulness, visibility with performance, love with labor.

We all long to be felt, seen, met, not as a function, not as a performance, but as a field of being that does not need to be earned.

I want us to compost the contract we never agreed to, through a poem I have written for us to un-earn our longing!

Un-earning Our Existence

We thought we had to glow to be seen.

Morph into usefulness.

Shimmer just right.

To fix, help, please, transform.

Truth is we are no vending machine of wonder.

Not here to earn warmth.

We are that warmth.

We are the belonging we thought we had to barter for.

When life doesn’t meet us back

It is not because we failed.

It is because the world forgot

how to sit still long enough

to feel the presence

of an untransactional being.

Let’s be that reminder.

Let’s stop performing value

and start inhabiting it.

You are not invisible.

You are not unworthy.

You are not meant to become enough.

You are enough-ness remembering itself in a world addicted to forgetting.

And if tears rise up right now, let them.

That is not weakness.

That is truth finding its voice again.

I am here. Let’s slow down together.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here. A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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