Mark's Blog

Insecurity in our knowledge, experiences and abilities causes us to neglect our needs.

Many of us have unique latent talents that extend beyond conventional comprehension.

For example, someone can be a skilled a language learner, but they may be deprived of the ability to flex the language learning muscle because they grow up in an environment where mono-linguistic communication is the norm.

Monolingual communication requires less empathy since it can only reference its own lexicon to express and comprehend empathy to and from others.

That’s one example of what I call imaginative empathetic limitation, and a contributor to the underlying illness of soul-starvation and self-neglect.

I believe we deprive ourselves at the expense of shames we don’t have the resiliency to deal when we get a burst of inspiration to do something new. At least if it’s a wild, paradigm-shifting idea. I don’t mean radical violence or expressing controversial views based on limited experience. I mean the real stuff, like the woman who wants to be a software developer or the heterosexual guy who wants to model in make-up. Or, better yet, the neglected emotional needs of a person who puts on a brave face trying to do something new because they’re bored with their life.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to marry a girl who looked like barbie, speaks 3 languages and ages like Jennifer Lopez. I had no one to read my writing as a child, so I learned to draw. In drawing, I learned the better I got, the more time expressing myself took. Drawing was expedient and much more dismissible than a 30-page book. I learned to deprive my needs because the adults in my life deprived their core needs for comfort and security. While that might work for some, I found that working a 6-figure job brought me significantly less happiness than trying to make money on only fans by shooting adult videos with my wife in a safe, anonymous environment.

Rather than sharing how cool that was, I felt “oh man” I don’t want to be that guy, but man, that would be awesome.

I think there’s a weird, “I can’t so you can’t” trade off with people who have not had the experiences they have yearned for. At least in my very limited life experience. It’s usually not malicious. Hurt people, hurt people. If you live, you will get hurt.

Ideally, those pains are accompanied by knowledge about how fleeting our lives really are. Every heartbreak is a reinforcement that hearts can be mended. Every death we experience reminds us how to live, if we are lucky.

That said, I think we do so many things we don’t like because we don’t understand how short our lives actually are. I think after a certain age (23 -25) we lose the fearlessness muscle until it manifests as a crisis and doom ourselves to the perceptions we’ve attached our realities to.

The consequence, we do what we don’t like and quell the cognitive dissonance with thought-terminating clichés and dogma.

– bm