Right now, I’m outside of my apartment patio where it overlooks a gigantic tree, listening to the crows in the tree cawing their throats raw. If you ask me, crows are wonders of nature. I mean, how can such loud, raucous noise come from such small bodies?
Meanwhile, this doesn’t seem to bother my pet rabbit, who is napping peacefully under the patio table, completely unbothered. I think she sucks as a prey animal. She acts like she is in fact the keeper of the estate, roaming around the apartment as she pleases as if she’s the one paying the rent and bills. My husband says that, because of her summer weight gain, she’s starting to resemble a miniature lion, especially when she sits sphinx-like right in the middle of the living room, keeping the peace of her kingdom with staunch resolve.
I woke up this morning, feeling a bit irrelevant and incompetent.
Work isn’t going great because, well, my manager is not giving me any projects to do. In an insecure, absurd terror, I'm wondering if it's because he has finally found me out what I've always known to be true about myself, that I'm in fact useless.
Either that, or he's doing an experiment on me to see how long I'll live before I actually die out of boredom.
Anyway I’m basically getting paid to keep the seat of my chair warm from 8 to 5 while pretending to be doing something very indispensable for the company. But I’m sure everyone in the office knows just now dispensable I really am. I can hear their thoughts loud and clear as they eye me whenever they pass by my seat.
Hence, the feeling of irrelevance and incompetence.
I’m sure everyone has felt this way, at least a few times in their lives. At least with me, I’m getting paid a six figure salary, and therefore, it’s hard to feel too bad for me, at least not for long anyway. But there are those of us who are completely entitled to feel irrelevant and incompetent, as they have hit the scary rock bottom living in their car without a job or even a home.
One such person is Trish.
Ok, so here’s the part I tell you about Trish
Trish is a super intelligent lady in her 50’s who is extremely warm and personable, but is currently having a hard time getting her life together. She has been living in her car with her teenage daughter because she currently doesn’t have a job or a home. She’s not homeless in the sense that she is in rags, pushing a shopping cart full of her belonging. But technically, she is homeless and broke.
You see, my roommate is the sort of person whose heart is made of fluff and mush (and I adore her for it), so she couldn’t help inviting Trish and her daughter to stay with us one rainy night during a very rainy season. One night turned into several weeks, and so we got to know Trish and her daughter quite well.
I wondered what I could do to help Trish, seeing that she was in a dire situation.
When I talked to Trish about the urgency of her situation, her reaction is like that of a person who just got pigeon poop splattered on her jacket, as in, where in the world did that come from, or is that really poop or did someone spit out milk from the second story somewhere? That is to say, she’s completely shocked and in deep denial at the same time, and not without a bit of embarrassment.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that it's understandable that she's reacting the way she is. She's simply overwhelmed by the sudden hit of misfortune.
Only, it’s been several months since she’s become homeless, and several years since she has become jobless. Without an income for several years, she should've known she would lose her apartment. So to say that she’s paralyzed by the shock of it all is like saying that the deer stood frozen in the middle of a train track as the train inched its way slowly toward it going 5 miles per hour. I mean, it should have moved already.
How do I know Trish is in denial of her situation? Because whenever we talk, she is not genuine. She tends to exaggerate her accomplishments, talking big and wanting to look like a massively successful person. She desperately wants people to see her as a keen career woman who has temporarily found herself in an unfortunate situation.
For example, it seemed important to her that I know that, despite her current situation, she is actually a very career savvy person. So I asked her which line of work she was in before. She said she used to be at the top, advising the president of Citigroup, the financial company. When I pressed her on the title of her position, she said, “secretary.”
She told me that the most recent line of work she was in was flipping houses, where she made a lot of money. She bragged that she made hundreds of thousands of dollars easy. However, as to where all that money went and why she is homeless right now remain unknown.
Inserting a side note here: Psychologists in Cornell University conducted a study on incompetence and found out that the worse someone’s skills and knowledge, the more arrogant they are. Interesting, something to think about…
Anyway, getting back to Trish’s story.
Because Trish is very intelligent and very well read, I didn’t doubt that what she had said was true. But the more I asked, the more the truth (or should I say a more complete version of the truth) came out.
I asked her what kind of job she’s hoping to work in, to which she replied, “in tech companies, or a financial company, or a research team at a university.” But what she really wants is to eventually get her own business (perhaps a nonprofit) in social work.
Does she have any marketable skills in these fields? No, not really. She doesn’t know much about technology, doesn’t have any skills in finances, nor does she have skills in research. Then why does she want a job in fields where she has no skills?
In short, she wants a job that’s going to make her feel like a highly competent and acutely intelligent person.
Where is Trish getting lost?
Well, if you look at how Trish spends her day, it’s obvious why she is where she is.
Although she talks a lot about doing this and that, it’s always in future tense. In reality, she dreams a lot but does not do anything about it.
She sleeps a lot, most days getting up from bed in the afternoon. It’s not that she’s lazy, but I think she’s unmotivated (understandably so). When she finally gets up, she drinks wine and reads magazines all day, not putting in much effort to look for a place to stay or to look for a job. She doesn’t study for those jobs she wants either. And yet, she feels like some time in the future, with the power of visualization and her unwavering beliefs in its magic, she’ll miraculously manifest these high-paying jobs. The universe will come save her, she thinks.
Once, an agent from a job placement service called with a job that would pay her $17 an hour, which, I thought, was a good rate to start. She’s not exactly in a place where she can be picky, especially with a daughter to feed and educate. Trish didn’t seem share my opinion, because she declined to apply, saying that the rate was too low. She told me all this as she was cutting pictures from magazines to put on her vision board.
It’s a bit frustrating to see her in a desperate situation, but more frustrating than that was seeing her stuck on ideas of what she thought her life should look like and how things should work out.
If you peek into Trish’s mindset…
When Trish talks about how she’s going to get a glamorous and important job in the corporate world, what she’s really saying is that she wants to do something that makes her feel competent, capable and important.
While this desire seems innocuous and even commendable, in actuality, it comes from feelings of insecurity and uncertainty about oneself. It comes from thoughts such as, “What if I’m not capable? What if I’m left behind? What if I never become anyone that matters?” so on and so forth. Because Trish feels insecure, she desires to manifest something that’ll give evidence to how capable and competent she actually is. As if her getting the glamorous corporate job would validate how competent and important she actually is and snuff out the thoughts of doubt in her head.
I understand what it means to feel irrelevant, as if your existence doesn’t matter. I understand this dark fear that sits at the deep pit of the mind.
I just had a conversation with Jay this last weekend, and he said that what drives him to work relentlessly is to know where he belongs in this society, where his place is. And I completely understand what he means by that. He wants to know how he matters. I’m sure that’s something Trish wants to know as well. And that’s something that I wanted to know too when I was neck deep in my slump. I think all people want to know if they are relevant, that they’re doing relevant work. And that’s pretty hard to achieve.
Even though it’s completely understandable, I also know it’s not the kind of mindset that’ll bring about success. Trying to be relevant and trying to achieve a point where you would finally feel absolutely competent and capable are useless efforts.
And this is the reason why
It’s because of frequency. Vibration.
If you think about it, wanting to be relevant and wanting to matter, actually comes from a deeper belief that you are, in fact, not relevant and that you don’t matter. You see, nobody struggles to be something they already are. If you already believe that you are relevant and that you matter, then there’s no such thing as ‘trying’ to be so. You simply are. You live your life, taking it for granted that you are a person that matters.
This belief that you are small and insignificant comes from a conditioning from the past. Maybe that has been your experience so far. Maybe that’s how your family treated you. And maybe that’s how society treats you still.
Though it’s not anyone’s fault, if you make decisions and strive to accomplish something holding a belief that you are small and insignificant, you won’t be able to manifest into your reality wealth and abundance, because those are two things carry opposite vibrations. Even if you do somehow manifest wealth and abundance with sheer force, you won’t be able to hold onto it for long and you won’t be able to enjoy it either. Unless you change your tune, that is.
You must know that, much like animals that leave their scent everywhere, you leave behind your energy (or your unique vibration) in all that you touch, in the words you speak, in the decisions you make, and the actions you carry out. As you leave a trail of your energy all over your life, events that carry similar energy to yours will sniff and find their way toward you. These events will then emerge and manifest situations that most represent the energy you’ve been exuding.
So if you’re frustrated, you leave that energy of frustration everywhere around you, and so situations that carry similar energy would emerge. You’ll be caught in traffic. You’ll get into accidents. Someone will spill a drink on your shirt. And so, this is how we create our own reality.
In this way, the physical world is a reflection of your inner world.
Now, if Trish is living her life speaking, making decisions, carrying out actions from a belief that she is not relevant and that doesn’t matter, then what kind of situation do you think would manifest?
So then… What can Trish do about this?
In the next post, I’ll talk about the Five Steps to Get Out of a Financial Funk.
