The Truth Is, We’re More Than Human ‘Beings’—We’re Human ‘Doings’
At the start of the 2020 pandemic, I began a rather extensive identity switch regarding my identity in being a human being — as opposed to a human doing — with my value, gifts, and beauty residing solely in my capacity to be a vessel and container for my soul. With my social life altering to meet necessary societal adjustments, I felt as though this mentality switch was going in a positive direction — one that placed my sense of value in the core qualities I most naturally embodied and away from my ability to produce. This approach to life and self-perspective felt beautiful and came quite naturally, as it was a sigh of relief after a slew of several busy years. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that this mindset shift led me into a chain of passivity — one where I eventually lost sight of the fact that I had any inherent value at all. I did not speak up in moments that mattered, I did not ask for what I wanted, and at one point in time I lost sight of deciphering what I wanted at all. I was horribly lost, and I had fallen into a deadly trap of feeding into my own disempowerment.
Over the course of the past three years, I have humbly grown to realize my initial statement in us being human beings (not human doings) is fatally wrong. Some thoughtful relationships carefully guided me into questioning my belief system, as I believe the most transformative and powerful relationships often do. The truth is I am equally valuable in my human being, and my ability to enact it is just as, if not more, important as the core essence living inside my soul. Otherwise, how would these gifts unfold? Would I stay silent in moments of matter? Would any societal change ever be made, quite frankly, at all? Is not the purpose of our lives to be a little messy, and for this messiness to raise the consciousness of the world, even when we ourselves do not have the answers? Sometimes all meaningful change requires is a question that appears as if it is devoid of matter.
What creativity does is change people, and this creativity shifts paradigms before there can be tangible answers. Our world is pregnant with growing answers in search of questions — questions regarding systemic racism, human sexuality, the impacts of religious conditioning, how we value and organize occupations, artificial intelligence, health and wellness, the definition of human relationships, where the line of science and evolution must unfold.
To say I am anything less than a powerful human being, creating, doing, and speaking does an incredible disservice to the world. Empowerment is an equation of intention infused into action. Doing does not equate to being more, and the only gift we can truly give the world is the vessel of us being ourselves. With our wisdom, our “life juice,” our life force blocked haphazardly through the narrative that our doing comes secondary, what we create is a world full of passivity, full of blocked consciousness, full of hopelessness, disempowerment, and of lost creativity. Lost creativity that takes us outside ourselves, and we become afraid to speak at all. What the world needs is empowered individuals unafraid to be messy and trust in the belief that it is okay for us to be truly vulnerable, the collective will still see, love, hold, and appreciate us all.
What the pandemic did is not make us not that, the pandemic made us less vulnerable. As we hid behind computer screens, we became more polarized in our viewpoints and grew in internal fear. Social media algorithms fed us more of what we wanted to see and hear, increasing a sense of in-group and out-group behavior. We became less compassionate people. We quit jobs in favor of working from home. We became afraid to leave our houses when we didn’t feel well, cancelled plans at the slightest sense of disease. We replaced dancing and talking to strangers with dating apps, and quite frankly most of these paradigm shifts have not changed at all.
To be seen, to be loved and valued for who we are, is only obtained through entertaining the notion we have any value at all, and this question is only unlocked through the actions we choose. Consequences of movement both seen and unseen, of words and actions all transformed through energetic exchange. We are here in this portal, standing in this void, where the actions and words we choose matter, and where the impacts of who we are create movement extending further than ever before. This need not drive fear into making us smaller.
The truth of who we are as human beings matters, and each of us is equally capable of enacting this power. Enacting change that does not feel hopeless, of using words that do not feel devoid of meaning. Every moment we choose to feed authenticity, to not be afraid of the unknown is a vulnerable step in investing in the future of humanity, even when we are unsure as to where this step will eventually go.