The Menu of Deserving Pt. 1
Until recently, I deeply envied entitled people. They seemed to have mastered the art of making life go their way without effort. I felt these people possessed a skillset I didn’t and student that I am I had an ache to learn.
One day, I slipped off my perception and put theirs on. I do that sometimes. I like to see the world as others see it. I was hoping to find the key to unlocking “self-worth” (a phrase I’m currently in a fight with). My thought was, if I could taste deservingness with someone else’s eyes I could bring it home to me.
In their eyes I found a perspective of the world where everyone existed merely to provide sensation, validation + experiences to them. Their entire being was outside of them. That shocked me. Here I thought entitlement meant being full of oneself. Yet inside these eyes not only did I find no key to self worth…I found no self.
In other words entitled eyes belie a soul seeking soul in other souls. Nothing to envy at all.
I am curious what it must be like to be born believing that you are worth receiving love from others simply because you exist. I wonder who I would have become if all my life I had an expectation of care baked into my nervous system.
But I don’t. Even still. The absence of this data makes it possible for me to be curious about it. “Self-worth” and I have been talking for months. Trying to understand each other. My question—Whose evaluating the self as worthy? I don’t like the idea that I 3D printed on this planet as a brilliant electromagnetic being and yet other people get to participate in my evaluation. What if I don’t like their metrics? What are their metrics based on? And 75 other questions. If anyone’s gonna evaluate me, it’s gonna be me damnit.
I’m playing with the feeling of deserving to capture in the body what “self-worth” tries (poorly) to convey. I like that word better, it feels like uncomfortable memories and conversations about privilege. It feels like a quiet thing people don’t know they have a loud relationship with. Deserving has meat and it has potatoes. It gives my mind something to bite into.
What does it feel like to you to deserve? When you deserve something how do you know you deserve it?
I struggle with the idea of deserving bc as you said, based on whose metrics? It also implies that some people are undeserving which causes even more pause from me. Overall though, I relate deeply to this exploration of “worth”
In order to move forward in society, depending on the situation we try to eliavate, we need some leverage. Expressing entitlement in the short term helps to express the means to make it happen. Just behavioral tools. We're not supposed to stay stuck in a caracter neither are we to wear the same outfit over and over again. Allowing ourselves to personnify what we've imagined could fit our battle is extraordinary in so many ways... a chance given to flip scripts everyday at our own pace.
People too entitled are just way too identified with their narratives.
In other words the will to overcome a situation is linked to a sense of worthiness. Therefor we create the means to manifest our will by embodiment. At the degrees of our own depth.