Vurnable moment from the draft - 01

This last weekend I was overcome with feelings of dread, fear, and hopelessness as I was watching Poker Face with my wife. For the last few months I had gotten good and used to drawing while we watched something. To me, creating while listening to stories is unmatched by much. But ever since I got back from vacation, I have been in recovery mode. Uninterested, uninspired, and hyper aware that money isn't flowing. Which is the dilemma. 

I paused the show to start processing out loud because I could feel the anxiety building the more we were into this show. I told my wife how I felt that there is something missing. Like my brain refuses to create the bridges to connect the big picture together. If you were to ask me to write a book on digital marketing and everything I've learned in the last 5 years, I could do it without much thought. I KNOW this stuff...and yet, so much of it feel shady to me. Nobody is offering those details to bring it all together even when you pay for the information. Nothing is more irritating than belieivng their elevator pitch, purchasing their product because they said they had the solution to your problem, only to find out its the most vague concepts and things you have already found for free. The being scammed year after year takes it tole. I can feel it changing how I see others, how I feel about others and the world itself. It's sad that tiktok is my go to place to restore my faith in humanity. And the older I am getting and the longer we are in these months and years of crisis after crisis... All I want to do is make things with my hands and have enough money to do that. 

Fools are running around here on the interenet promising answers they just don't have. Am I so wrong for not wanting to be one of them? Am I wrong for questioning the methods of delivery? For not wanting to make another human feel the same way I felt when tricked into vagueness? I know I am too trusting. I know that I am naiive and gullible. I can feel the wear and tear on my soul when it comes to believing people are going to deliver what they say they are going to and then they don't. Where my values feel like they are holding me back in a world that cannot offer me the answers I seek. 

I'd like to believe that it's not a high horse that I sit on when it comes to this. I would like to believe that trusting people is my downfall, because I have too many examples proving all the ways that it is. But what I really do believe is that when I hold space for people to step into that space that I offer, to be trusted, they will be able to recognize that space and follow through. When I was given those opportunities, I not only recognized them but I went above and beyond because I was so grateful to be seen in such a light, epsecially if I had lost it. Most people don't trust other people from what I've read and seen and experienced. Generally there is a bubble to this but there is a distinctually different feeling when someone expects you'll be what you are offering versus the doubt and untrusting space. Micromanagment from a supervisor or boss comes to mind for this as an example. 

After explaing a lot of this to my wife, I felt myself releasing emotionally. Tears welding up in my eyes I continued "I am just so frustrated that it hasn't clicked yet." I understand what this digital marketing and products are. I understand affiliate marketing and facebook ads. I understand it's a numbers game and that most of it is sorting through the masses to find the suckers willing and desperate to find the answers and solutions to the things causing them problems. I understand niches and why they are important. My problem isn't even really sales in itself as much as, I was explaining to her, that it's I'm not as willing to sell myself on this whole thing as much as I want to. I don't have a product worth selling to people yet and I have been unwilling to be just another snake oil salesman trying to convine others that I have all the answers because I know I don't. 

Well if I don't have a product... than what do I have? My brother says insight. Well the only thing I find more difficult than niching into a product it's selling myself as a wise person with insight. As much as I agree with him. There are 4 people in my life over the past 3 years that I can confidently say that my insight, availablity, and love has impacted and changed their life for the better. Those four people I have been not just their hype man but their one person in their corner that isn't telling them what they want to hear but what they need to hear. Nearly every conversation we've had there have been moments where I feel something else take over, like something higher than myself step in and offer them the words they've needed or the insight they've been seeking. The ways their life has changed is out of a LOA book. When they trusted that higher power I facilitated in those moments, the stories they'd have for me the next time we talked... they were almost unbelievable. The consistency that I have been able to offer them has cut their growth time in more ways than one. I don't take credit for making their lives better, because that was on them to actually go do the thing. But I can't help but feel the powerful impact it's had for all four of them. And if I am able to facilitate such wisdom, insight, and love... HOW DO YOU WRAP THAT UP INTO A SERVICE WITH A BOW AND MARKET IT?! What do you charge?? How do you find the people that even want that kind of help?? I've said more than once that I wish I had someone like me for me in these moments. I am excellent at following directions! Just tell me what to do! 

I've seen the progress with this way of helping them. It usually starts with me or them somehow being brought together by the universe. Either their life has fallen apart or mine has. It's usally mine because I have recognized this pattern by now. We end up working together, living together, somewhere there is conflict that I am being brought into. I am then drawn to them in the most uncool, embarrassing, obsessive ways. I blame my ADHD but honestly, as soon as it's happening I know that this hyperfixation on a person is about to be the person that the universe or high power is wanting to work with through me. I take no credit for facilitating such works. Some of it is so obsurd that I often feel more anxiety after initial pursuits than not. The contrasting confidence levels make it obvious it's not all me, to me. 

Once the efforts have been made through invitations, extentions of friendship are made until they are worn down and agree. Sometimes it takes only once of hanging out together, and sometimes it takes months of casual hangouts and nights downtown for them to trust me enough to break down their walls. I never usually know until the one conversation of AH-HA! happens. They mention astrology, energy work, LOA, something along those lines that gets my own interests peeked enough to then segway into life changing conversations of them being seen. 

 

   There's not really any magic or even anything crazy to this. Once you can accept that your not special in your own trauma because everyone has it, you'll see how connected we all really are. I use knowledge from all sorts of sources, scientific, pyschological, metaphysical to repeat back the validation that person needs. I use the same concept that helped me get out of my own crippling mental health issues. I see that the person is masking, pretending, ignoring, minimizing, just like I have. Then empathy allows me to acknowledge that pain they have and really what I am doing is saying "Hey I see you and you aren't crazy." We all begin to feel crazy when we see the world and our experiences as one thing and the world and the people around us are saying its another. Of course that's disorienting. And because so many of us are people pleasers and really just afraid that if we say it outloud others will confirm our fears that we are indeed the one's out of touch with reality, most people I have gotten these moments with find relief in someone acknowledging their truth. I don't even have to see the world the same as much as all I have to do is empathize. 

I would like to clarify that the things that I offer in this way are purely from experience. In remembering how little it took for me to start getting better and how much it meant to me when others have and still do that for me. How many days have been saved, how much chaos has been avoided just by someone interrrupting those moments and saying "hey, I see you. Yes this is hard." 

Some of my biggest philosophies that I tell people are "acknowledgment is key. You can't fix it if you don't know what it is." Learning how to identify feelings, thought patterns, behaviorial patterns allows us to be proactive and find coping tools, and develop skills that allow us to manage our lives in ways that couldn't before. By getting this into their heads early on in our relationship, it allows me to always have a foundation to build other advice and words onto. It makes it hard to help people and answer their questions or help them feel better when they themselves won't or don't even know what's making them feel that way.

Once they're familiar with that and they handled it well, the physical body is in the top three places I'll start help them see. The internet has been awesome in making this a thing. Hydration, food, and sleep.