How many people feel unheard?

Looking back, I have had many people tell me that they don't feel heard, don't feel understood, don't even really feel like they're known by the people closest to them in their lives. If their dreams and passions are known at all, they're disrespected. Their life choices are mocked. Others  may seek their company, but rarely their input. Love is often conditional, like a business transaction: I do thus and such for you if you do thus and such for me.

And so some people -- many people, perhaps? -- close themselves off to the world, living unfulfilling lives in the process.

The internet was supposed to change all this, and in some ways it has: now people have the opportunity to easily find others who believe exactly as they do, live and love exactly as they do, and especially vote exactly as they do. That's how you get echo chambers and siloes and all that goes with them. Great, now instead of single people feeling misunderstood and unheard, we have entire enclaves of people who ONLY feel comfortable in their own 'safe' spaces...and who are liable to be attacked anywhere outside them.

I don't feel like that's any kind of improvement. Do you?

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It's something I have always tried to do...to hear people. Because I have felt unheard and misunderstood my entire life. 

I will not disavow my share of blame in this: sometimes I insisted on being misunderstood by misunderstanding others. I think that still happens on occasion today. Also, I had to Grow into understanding myself, and I'm not sure some other people have that privilege. A safe space to do it is only the first prerequisite. Then you have to be lucky enough to find people who want to grow with you...the people whose voices enhance your life and whose lives your own voice enhances. Not everyone is that lucky.

But I feel like there are many people...so much human potential...ice-locked in hearts that have never felt the warmth of real, non-transactional love...minds that have never felt safe to discover themselves, to grow into the next grandest vision of the greatest version they can imagine about who they are. That's the gift Eva gave and gives me. I choose to pay it forward...as best as I possibly can, anyway.

People have to be allowed to be real. They just have to. That means, within reason of course, that people have to be allowed to be in bad moods, to lash out when they feel hurt, or be gloriously, messily HUMAN. 

I wish there were a way to live off this, because I really do. I feel most alive when I am connecting with other souls. I hate to say anything so crass as "monetize", because UGH that rubs me EVERY KIND OF WRONG WAY...but really, at heart, because money isn't real.

It isn't, you know. We lived perfectly wonderful, fulfilling lives for MILLENNIA before income taxes and credit scores. It's hard to even imagine life without our screens. But you know? We've lost a lot of humanity when we gained technology. 

Go back 150 years -- which really isn't all that long -- and look at the world you find yourself in. Two and three generation homes are the norm. There's yes, an ungodly amount of work involved in mere survival -- but you hopefully don't have to do it all alone. And when you're not surviving, you're connecting, which is to say thriving. Entertainment was music, or storytelling, or just talking to each other in a way we so rarely even attempt anymore.  Go back very much further and the whole idea of a 'job' was more seen as a 'contribution' to society at large rather than a way to pay for your right to exist. Maybe some people are still lucky enough to have jobs like that. I sure amn't and I'm about to lose the job I do have, which is probably part of my I can't help musing like this.

God, it does sound fucking cultlike, doesn't it? Hey, Ken, how can you get people to pay you to love them? Don't they pay you enough, you selfish fuck? 

No, that's not it at all. It's just:

This is the gift I have. This, and writing about it. I do want to write about it...but only as a way to get others to think about it, to open up, to feel safe, to grow, to tell THEIR stories, to LIVE their stories. 

Anyone got an audience stretcher? Or is it pure arrogance and hubris to even think my audience should be larger? Am I actually batshit crazy?

And yeah, I'll ask the question. How do I derive a modest income flow out of being me? I have no desire to amass large sums of money...I would give most of it away if I did. I just want enough to keep my backbone from my belly, a roof over my head, and to give me occasional chances to travel, again modestly. I should have asked this like thirty years ago, but like Eminem says, I had to go through that place to get to this one. 

I don't feel fulfilled in my job. And I couldn't be a therapist -- I just know I couldn't -- because I know I'd live inside my patients' heads and eventually snuff myself. I feel fulfilled...making others feel better about themselves. Which means really hearing them.

And I never see that position advertised in the want ads that don't even exist anymore, do you? "Professional safe space, apply within."

I really don't mean to belabour this, but I am at a crossroads here and I need to shit or get off the pot. I have not wasted my life, far from it, but I feel like I can help other people not waste theirs. Somehow.

How?