Letting go of dreams.
What do you do when the cost of the world you desire is opposed to your dreams? When head knowledge becomes heart knowledge, it means one thing: letting go.
What they don’t tell you about resisting capitalism is that it’s not just all rest and bubble baths and shorter work weeks. It’s not even just marching in protest or charity work. Truly dismantling capitalism also means letting go of some of your dreams.
When I chose to leave my marriage after ten years in 2019, it felt like the end of my future.
When I left my faith after 33 years of deep toxic indoctrination, it felt like splitting open, the way a canyon does, eroding over centuries, like a soul-deep tear, a primal cry echoing through my bones, muscles, and flesh, ripping me apart in my identity - and after, I was a new shape.
The last 12 months have split me open, once again, in a way I didn’t think was possible.
This time I found better words to describe the process, being so familiar with it now. I wasn’t splitting apart. It was the veil. The veil in front of my eyes tore completely, so now I could see behind it. See behind the lie. See behind a dark secret. And see the liberating truth.
But I identified so much with the veil - the veil was all of me, it was what my whole life built on - that it felt like I was being ripped to shreds when it finally tore.
In reality, I was whole. A snake sheds its skin in one piece. And I was about to become even more whole.
photo of me by my friend Ami.
Today, as I had this download of truth, at the age of 38, I wondered, when will the splitting end? Does it ever?
Of course it doesn’t.
I thought at 33, that was all the splitting my body could handle. How could I take more agonising nights writhing on the floor, gasping for air like a fish out of water?
Of course, I was wrong.
When I jolted out of bed at 7 am to write these words down because they all came to me while I was face down on my pillow, I realised I had been writing this piece for a few years. I had been searching for the words for a while, but I didn’t know the search would lead me here. They had been brewing over my head like storm clouds.
The last two weeks, unable to write, were simply the final push, the one that feels the hardest, most confusing, exhausting, and most scary.
For a few years now, I have been reading, talking, craving, researching, and sinking my teeth into deep analysis and detective mode on this topic. Calling it ‘topic’ feels strange because it is so much more than that. It feels so visceral. So true.
I know this mode intimately. I know this hungry side of me. Once she is unleashed, there is no stopping her. She has no emergency breaks.
The side that can’t help but follow her questions and curiosity through to the end, no matter how dark it is down there, no matter the scary or uncomfortable consequences.
When I am in this mode, I know it’s too late to turn back.
This has happened to me before.
It always happens before I burn things down.
It always happens before the shedding of a skin.
I just never thought this was the skin I would shed, nor was I aware for a long time that this was something I would eventually outgrow.
This is the beauty of growing with life.
You have no idea of the versions of you that await. The versions that are possible.
This time, the veil was hanging thickly in front of my eyes, hiding behind good intentions. The old skin was made up of my own dreams.
The last couple of weeks, I realised that there was no going back from what I know now. I had to take responsibility and get into integrity again.
What am I willing to give up if I am serious about making a lasting change? (Whether I will live to see it or not)
Two of the biggest pillars of capitalism are “Love” and money. The nuclear family, sold to us as the ultimate life achievement - and the goal of being a financial success, which means you are a successful human.
So much is connected to those two things. With the dismantling of the capitalist version of love and money, so many other systems will fall apart too.
Over the course of the last five years, one part of me spent time building a life around me that I deeply craved internally - a life of community care and collective love - another part of me kept working towards a version of ’success’ that wasn’t aligned with that. My whole body could feel the discrepancy between the two. All along. My mind, as so often, just caught up later.
All I could think, breathe, dream, and talk about with friends was collective liberation, taking down the structures that oppress us, living in community, and distancing ourselves from capitalism.
Yet I was chasing it so ardently too.
I left the community I had built in one place to go after commercial success in the big city.
Always telling myself I was resisting capitalism because I was ‘resting more’ and not participating in hustle culture.
But oh, Nadia, resisting capitalism is more than that, isn’t it?
Within capitalism, rest is a privilege. Who is going to pay for my rest?
Resisting capitalism means I have to actually let go of my dreams. Brutal and simple. No, I can’t “have it all” if I am serious about dismantling the powers at be.
I have to give up my conveniences, the luxuries I desire, and the things I think I am entitled to. I have to let go of what I want, for a more equal distribution of wealth. My idea of becoming rich so I could use my money to help others started looking more and more bizarre: having a few wealthy people who ‘help the poor’ is not the ultimate solution; it will always uphold the imbalance we have right now.
”Generational wealth” started looking differently too: If I am only looking after me and mine, am I not just raising future capitalists? What is really going to change, then? Who is going to benefit? One group of people or everyone?
My friend sent me a link a couple of days ago about an online coaching programme for single people, hosted by an American couple on Valentine’s day: how to have ‘liberated’ relationships and find love. She asked if I wanted to join?