Inclusion

Sharing ourselves fully as we are, without comparing, allows us to include each other in our hearts.

Once I used to write for a living, now I choose to live in order to enjoy writing. I also need help. There: I said it. It only took me multiple months of preparation and several days of paralysis and procrastination to get to write those four words. There are a myriad of ways for you to dispute that claim after all. Don’t worry, I thought of them all! Well… I thought of many, but you’ll probably be able to surprise me.

Since I used to write procedures and create crisis management protocols for a cybersecurity team, surprises have generally not been something that I truly appreciated. Hyper vigilance was already the norm for me well before I ended that decade long career a year ago. All of which I feel the need to say, thinking I need to convince you that this is a hard thing for me to do. Frankly, I’m struggling as I write this, because I find it very hard to believe that there are people out there that are compassionate, kind, and supportive enough to even read this far. Yet, after this last year of healing myself while being supported through the grace of an army of internet strangers; I recognize that surprises can be positive as well. It’s time to take another leap into the unknown. A trust fall. To make the choice to suspend myself within the realm of possibilities, where no risk assessment can prepare me for what will happen next.

The Fear of Asking for Help

To start, I value honor, truth, integrity, and authenticity; which for me all starts and ends with honesty. For me that means that I walk the talk, lead by example, and practice what I preach. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve mostly stayed quiet throughout my life and only spoke in environments that I had thoroughly analyzed. A small community can be grasped by the mind, but taking the step to share my full self on the wild web is a feat that can only be accomplished by the heart.

Writing is how I express my heart authentically, but after having written technical jargon and corporate speak for all those years, it’s tough not to fall back into old habits. Intellectual language can be really easily used to conflate a topic and distract from the original point. I already wrote an article before this one that was over 2000 words long and… still didn’t get to the point. Which brought me back to a sentiment I lean on a lot: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” – Einstein

So after wrecking my brain over what I was missing, it comes down to this: ‘I don’t know when I qualify for being allowed to ask help from a community’. Perhaps because I have neurodivergent traits. Perhaps because of the idea that one is ‘supposed to’ be able to do everything by themselves because otherwise they’re ‘weak’. Since my neurodivergent traits can only be managed, I decided to focus on the latter. It struck home, because there’s a reason why one is not ‘supposed to’ show weakness. It’s really simple actually, I learnt it as an 8 year old kid. If you grimace when someone physically hurts a part of your body, they will know what’s effective and can exploit that body part. In other words, reacting in a way that indicates where your vulnerabilities are, opens you and your loved ones up to an attack. It’s engrained in me that nobody should see me flinch physically or otherwise; not even my loved ones. The best defense is mystery, the second best is deterrence.

This is also a terrible attitude when it comes to joining or building a community. But while it’s terrible, it did work for me. I just didn’t have relationships that I could truly rely on and I didn’t really know any better. Nobody in my environment spoke from the heart and it didn’t seem to be the norm for me. After all, threats exist, thus we need to protect ourselves as we would in the wild by being rational. It never occurred to me until recently that threats only exist if you’re holding a limited perspective. But before I digress about polarity and plurality mindsets, let me now get to the heart of this article.

Grace and prediction

Comparison. It’s not only a thief of joy, it’s also been the main reason for me not to have asked for support until now. I was trying to think my way through why you would help me, while also remaining true to myself. Every time I did, I was swinging between reasons why you would or wouldn’t help me. It wasn’t actually so much about trying to figure out why you would, but rather what your criteria were. Was I in a bad enough situation yet to ask for help? Did I need to create more content before I was worthy of your consideration? Was my background as a person even valid to ask for help at all?

The thing is: there’s always someone who has it worse or better. It’s also not my decision whether I get help or not. Not without manipulation anyway. I could choose to tell you all kinds of sob stories or sell you fantastic ideas, but that would only get me superficial support. It would also require me to keep up with that role, because once I would show my true self, the charade would fall apart. These were subtle patterns that I wasn’t aware of, until I was faced with the story I would present about my current situation. Leading me to ask myself: am I persuading or am I showing my true self?

In my experience, the only way that true support is extended, is when someone provides grace. Which in turn, only occurs if you find alignment with someone. Finally leading me to: I can only align with someone if I share my heart. That is what true inclusion is all about. Sharing ourselves fully as we are, without comparing, allows us to include each other in our hearts. It is the greatest gift to give someone, once you hold someone in your heart, they become a part of your life. Not just the superficial material life, but the energetic life. The life where you will use your unique creative energy to support each other.

This understanding also meant that without me sharing what’s on my heart, resulted in me placing conditions on a relationship before it even began. In which case the only love I can expect to return to me, is conditional. Unconditional love only finds you if you are willing to jump into the fray without conditions yourself. That leap seems very scary, until you act on it and realize that you’re still breathing air, that the fear was all created in your head, and that you probably could’ve started it earlier had you released the scenarios you dreamt up. Furthermore, if you keep the right motivation in mind: which for me is true connection; then why wouldn’t you at least try?

Abposters

Leap of faith

Here goes… why do I want help?

My situation is that I’m a physically fit, western European man, who has had a successful career in FinTech as a cybersecurity strategist. Getting a job isn’t my problem, I’m a privileged guy. My opportunity and my focus, is that I want to write and share (spiritual) lessons I’ve received throughout my life. This ranges from bullying, broken homes, loneliness, desperation, depression, psychosis, and bipolar disorder; to mania, pleasure, joy, love, spirituality, magick, and mysticism. I want to thread together experiences I’ve had as I moved from living on social welfare to emigrating twice with my ex and my two kids, living off grid, while not feeling safe deep within yourself. Finally I’ve had two major spiritual activations in my life and I would want to provide an alternative perspective on the mental health industry and society as a whole.

None of which I can completely focus on right now.

The ‘ugly’ side is that I’m three months behind on my lease car payments, have had no income for a year, live in a semi-renovated goat shed in the middle of a forest, and am struggling to get food in the last couple of weeks.
Which is all by my own design, because I no longer want to support greedy corporations, or be a slave to the government’s whims through social welfare. I do want to help humanity heal and grow.

It goes deeper though, because that doesn’t really cover the emotional pressure I’m under. I haven’t had a physical friend other than my wife for the past 10 years, haven’t had any physical people in my life for the past 6 months, and no relationships romantic or platonic in my life at all for the past 3 months. And although I’m a rather solitary being. I do enjoy contact with people. My current lack of connection with people is the result of being a workaholic (being a ‘good provider and father’), burning out (being a ‘good employee’), and divorce due to growing apart (being a ‘good husband’). In short: I was a people pleaser.

By now I’m starting to miss direct interaction with people and I want to connect with a new community that shares my passions and interests. I realized through my attempts of not becoming homeless, that I actually already was. There’s no home when you don’t know where to place your heart and right now, the forest I live in is the only true recipient of that. Home is where the heart is, so I’m not lonely exactly. But I am ready to rejoin society. I’m just looking for connection and the chance to start anew.

The Call for Connection and Community

Now that you know the heart of my situation, let me ask you if you recognize yourself in any of these roles:

• An eclectic mystic which plays with ethereal energies by combining spirituality with magick, i.e. a witch, oracle, psychic, druid, wizard, sorcerer, quantum spiritualist, starseed, etc.

• A visionary dreaming to reform our society and communities

• A creative free thinker who cannot be boxed in, but could be an artist

• A mental warrior on a constant quest to slay the non-actualized self

If so, I would love to connect with you :)

I would also really appreciate it, if you could share this article with your network; promoting myself isn’t my strength and I could really use some help. There’s 2 more articles on my Substack you could check out, before you make that decision.

Finally, if you could support me financially by sending a small donation, you’ll be helping me realize my dream of continuing writing. Currently I have multiple pages of one liner ideas for articles, a partially written book on spirituality/mysticism, a fictional science-fantasy universe that has been brewing for 9 years for which I’ve recently built the basic framework (200+ wiki style articles), and multiple ‘real life’ enterprise ideas focussed on social justice and equality. All I need is your grace to materialize these projects for our shared benefit. I would happily expand on them all, but this article is already very long. Please feel free to comment any questions.

Either way, thank you for reading this far. I appreciate your voracious reading mentality, hope that this article provided you with some of the good stuff, and wish you a great rest of the day!

Blessed be.