In an Intuitive Private Network chat, we had a discussion about the painful experience of needing paying work.
We talked about community members' fears, experiences, and realizations that in many social groups, people who haven't been able to find paying work are sometimes treated as lesser, or like "losers."
We ask: "Does it make me a loser if I haven't been able to find paying work?"
Here are some of my comments from that discussion, slightly adapted for this post:
"...What many of us are learning is that it doesn't make us losers to not have found paying work. It's happening to a much larger number of people than is visible, because people feel like they mustn't reveal it.
And often when we find a way to know ourselves not to be losers and to share something like that with a community we want to build relationally with, a community we want to be in trust and collaboration with, there are other people in that community who are grateful that we were brave enough to speak up about it — and there are people in that community who want to help us.
This is something I have wanted to do, but I am not able to do reliable work for others based on what they need done because of my injuries and survival situation.
But if I was able to do reliable work for others based on what they need done rather than what I need to do for my own and loved ones immediate moment-to-moment survival circumstances, I would be asking for work in communities. And I would have to do it without framing myself as a loser because I don't believe that that makes me a loser.
That's a challenging point of process for all of us. We've been taught that if we can't find work it makes us a loser.
Bullies and predators taught us that.
The world now, and many other times, has been in a transition process of learning how to recognize and show kindness to one another when times are hard.
It is a beautiful sacred skill. People can only learn to recognize and respond with love and care to situations like that if other people share about their need for that recognition and response.
When we are willing to share vulnerably in that way, when we find it in ourselves to be brave in that way, we're giving a tremendous gift to the people who then discover it in themselves to respond with connection and support.
They don't have the opportunity to do that if we don't tell them the experience we're having.
We don't have to share the most brutal and embarrassing parts of the experience. But there are parts of the experience that are very common, widely shared, and those parts can be especially helpful to others to share.
Not having been able to find paying work — that archetype — it is so full of magic because it is the precursor to discovering connections between living beings that create regenerative economic flow."
This is Intuitive Economic.
A note from Megan Elizabeth:
My ability to respond to messages, tags, & comments is limited because I and our Intuitive Network groups do not yet have enough survival resourcing to support our basic functions day-to-day. With faith and devotion, we continue to navigate very physically dangerous and injurious conditions.
I hope you will comment, tag, and message us anyway! 💖 You're welcome to send me repeat outreach (here are some pointers) and I will manage as many responses as I can.
As always, we focus our work to provide every possible aid to people who need the most help and people who have the least ability to help themselves; within the range of who is most able to communicate effectively to collaborate with us and who is most able to regenerate collaborative success with us; especially in wakeful consideration of our own severe conditions and survival circumstances.
Publishing to our public platforms as on Substack, social media, and elsewhere on the Internet requires profound exertion — takes everything I have, results in compounded physical injuries, leaves me without sensory functions, and results in missed messages or inability to verbalize responses to messages I might have briefly glimpsed unless more direct conversational support or other assistance is offered. It is likewise for the group members who are sometimes able to assist me.
Kindness, patience, gentleness, and pleasantly-persistent follow-ups (particularly using Telegram Messenger) are very helpful.
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