a story called scarcity

on how the truth really does set us free

Dear friends,

I wrote a piece on freedom last week, (which you can read here), and I‘ve been sitting with new thoughts about that since then. In all honesty, I’ve always been a bit obsessed with the idea of being free. From a very young age, I struggled with being told what to do, how to be or how to live. I moved out when I was 15 years old, on a quest for freedom, and I’ve been looking for it ever since.

One thing that’s kept me from any sense of freedom is never feeling anything is enough. That’s something completely by societal design, by the way. Because if I keep believing I’m not enough, I’m gonna keep striving until I am, right? (And what wants me to keep working and being productive again?!?) Anyway, it all becomes a devious trap for me of wanting more, because I learned from an early age that there just isn’t enough for me.

Or I don’t have enough to even be me.

What I mean is, at this moment, I don’t actually need any thing besides what I have in this moment. In fact, I’m fairly content writing to you in my home on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s sunny. I just ate. I can go for a walk in my neighbourhood park later. There’s enough right here, right now.

sandra in black

But things start taking a turn for the worst when I want things to be different from what they are now. And I don’t mean I wouldn’t like nice things, have more disposable income or things like that. No. It’s when I get into future tripping on past worries, obsessing about things that haven’t happened yet or things I can’t change, when I think about how I want things to be different than they are. I’m not accepting what’s happening in my life now, but I need to so I can make changes towards what I’d like to see.

Take for instance, I’m over here in the UK wanting to pursue a dream of acting. One day I’d like to become a paid actor. To do this, I had to accept exactly where I was in my life right now, where I’m living, the money I have access to, the fact I have a child and the neurodivergence that impacts my energy etc. Traditional acting schools would never be an option for me at this point of my life. But when the chance came up to do a part time acting class that was 20 minutes train ride from my house, with the eventual opportunity to qualify for Spotlight (the registry for actors in the UK), I realised it was something I could do. No more wishing for things to be different or hoping things might change. When I finally accepted what I really wanted and where I actually was in my life, then I could see the barriers more clearly (beyond the stories I told myself about them), and address them.

The idea that freedom comes from accepting life on life’s terms doesn’t mean life’s exactly how we want it to be or even that we’re happy with how things are. It just means that by being with what is, I’m not making it any harder by the stories I tell myself in how I interpret the situation (my interpretations don’t make things factual). I stay trapped when I stay in the stories, ideas or beliefs that have nothing to do with what is happening at that moment.

And that’s not freedom, it’s a self-imposed prison.

The dominant culture loves to keep us in prisons of what we think we should want, have or be. It keeps us from becoming who we are and seeing our value. We don’t change anything around us or within the systems when we see ourselves as lacking or worthless. When we begin to live like we’re not enough, there isn’t enough and there never will be until we get exactly what we’ve been told we should have, we’ll never be free no matter how free the world says we are.

Indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in The Serviceberry, “What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life?” The moment that I dare to believe that I could be enough, and have enough, exactly as I am in this present moment, the world opened up for me. I realised I could try, take risks, say yes.

Or just be.

Believing in “not enoughness”, takes away all our options and choices. It keeps us locked away, small in the stories that insist we are the problem that must be fixed. We must be changed in specific ways or else we’ll forever be wrong and outcast. Then, we’re bombarded with stories of how there just isn’t enough for us to “fix” us into how we’re told we should be. But what could we change in the world if we could believe, that just like the rest of nature, we too weren’t just merely enough, we were capable of abundance.

And the abundance of who we are, as we are, is necessary, and needed, in this world, right now.

When we bravely begin to recognise the abundance of who we are, and bring our talent, our service, our being into the world, that’s where real freedom lies. We’re no longer held captive by the dominant culture and its stories that tell us what it means to be successful, worthy or whole. But we’ve been conditioned to believe that we can find freedom when we go from being to having. Or when we go from being to doing. That’s some bullshit, friends.

The real problems always stay hidden which are those brought on by a culture born of colonisation and rooted in the oppression of others. And what’s worse, is that when we finally start noticing that maybe, just maybe, freedom comes from the being of who we are and has never come from the having or doing, we start believing we’re the problem. We can’t be the right way, so we learn to participate in our own dehumanisation (remember all those tools of white supremacy culture?!) and that of others, to hopefully make it happen.

And we live like this is a natural way for us to be!

Friends, these are dehumanising systems we live in and the only way out is to start humanising ourselves. We do that every time we uncover a little more about what it means for ourselves to be, right now, in this moment and dare to live from there.

With love and gratitude,

SC xo

I’ll write more on how I do this next week cuz I already have a letter almost ready.