|
|
|
|
Sunday, 5 April 2026
As Humanity Drowns, Evolution Suffocates.
0
103
2
0
Share
Share on bsky
How performance culture disconnects us from imagination, fulfillment, and our capacity to evolve.
One of the core problems with the collective’s potential to evolve
is how pervasive performance has become.
A performance wrapped in the clothes we wear,
the accessories we buy,
the jobs we strive for,
the bank balance that defines what the collective calls “success.”
This constant performance pulls us away from love, freedom, and fulfilment.
From birth we are governed by growth charts, milestones, and grades,
targets to meet throughout childhood
that quietly extinguish the freedom of imagination.
Imagination is not frivolous.
It is the language of possibility.
It is how humans sense what has not yet been created.
Yet from an early age, imagination is disciplined into productivity,
and creativity is rewarded only when it can be measured, monetised, or approved.
We are guided into jobs that can pay for a life
we are taught to believe we want as adults,
while the soul burns with an unfulfilled desire
to imagine, to create,
to reach through the veil of the divine
and bring a truer vision of humanity within reach.
Many people experience this not as a dramatic collapse,
but as a quiet discomfort,
a persistent sense that something essential is missing.
Selfishness; rather than fulfilment leading to service and ultimately evolution,
is not born from malice.
It is born from the need to perform.
When worth is measured externally,
attention turns inward only long enough
to ensure survival, approval, or status.
Later, performance is replaced by survival.
And survival leaves little room for service, creativity, or reverence.
Somewhere along the descent into performance,
the idea of service slips out of reach,
not because humans stop caring,
but because they become exhausted.
Exhausted from maintaining identities.
Exhausted from meeting expectations.
Exhausted from chasing definitions of success
that never quite deliver peace.
And so the human quietly drowns beneath it all.
When presence is replaced by performance,
and imagination is replaced by obligation,
evolution slows, not dramatically,
but subtly.
And with it, the subtle breath of evolution begins to fade.
~
A Good Friday Story of Atonement & Forever Family.
0
153
3
0
Share
Miiyuyum, notuung, Erica Rose, yaka.
In the language of the Payómkawichum people, that means: Hi, I am Erica Rose. I speak.
This is a story about atonement and redemption. About a mother and a daughter who found each other both too late and just in time. A lost and found story, if you will.
I am Native American—or Indigenous, depending on which term one uses. My tribe is called the Payómkawichum, commonly referred to as the Luiseño people in modern times, named after the Mission San Luis Rey just off the 76 Freeway in Northern San Diego County. The mission was built in 1798, and with it began a long and familiar story of cultural erasure and loss.
My particular clan is called the Wáșxa, or Rincon. We still live in Valley Center, next to the San Luis Rey River, on the same grounds our ancestors once called home—lands that stretched across Southern California from the mountains to the sea. That continuity is remarkable given everything that was done to erase it, and given everything that was done to erase us.
After what I learned while researching my own history, I am quietly amazed that I am here at all.
I am adopted. I was placed into foster care in early 1973. My mother, Rose, was a high school dropout and single mother of three children at 24 years old. Facing an extraordinarily difficult future, she made the most painful decision a mother can make: she gave up two of her three children to foster care in order to start over.
I was taken into foster care on the morning of April 20, 1973. Good Friday.
My brother and I were fortunate. We were placed into a loving home with kind parents, and lived a (mostly) good life as children. Rose’s sacrifice became my redemption, though I wouldn’t understand that for decades.
By the early 1990s, the Payómkawichum people had recognized that children like my brother and I were being permanently separated from their heritage.
Coupled with two hundred years of cultural erasure—the Indian Boarding Schools, the missions, the systematic dismantling of language and identity—the tribe assembled a small, dedicated committee to facilitate the adoption of tribal children into carefully chosen outside homes. It was an act of communal atonement. An acknowledgment that the tribe owed its lost children something, even if it could never fully repay the debt.
I did not know any of this for a very long time.
I met my biological mother, Rose, during the height of Covid. Finally.
Our first phone conversation lasted two and a half hours, ending only when both of our batteries died and she had to go—it was 10 at night, two hours past her bedtime.
Over the conversations that followed, she told me she had spent her entire life wondering if she had made a mistake.
She worried we were criminals. In jail. Forever broken.
I assured her I was well taken care of.
She then told me something I have never forgotten: every year, on Good Friday, for forty-seven years, she went to church to pray for us. Because April 20, 1973—the last day she saw us as children—was Good Friday. And that annual pilgrimage was her act of atonement. Forty-seven years of it, quiet and unwitnessed, carried alone.
Every person in transition needs a rock, a safe harbor. I had been rejected before. But something about Rose—the easy rhythm of our conversations, the life stories exchanged, the lessons offered without judgment, except on Bingo Nights when she was unavailable and unapologetic about it—made me brave enough to try again.
I want to be honest about what that moment cost me—sharing something so deeply personal with a woman I had only just found, someone who was still, in many ways, a stranger becoming my mother. The vulnerability of that conversation is something I will never forget.
Neither will her response.
She simply said: “Do what you need to do to make you happy. Life is too short. I don’t understand it, but I want you to be happy.”
No hesitation. No conditions. Just love—the uncomplicated, generous kind I had always hoped a mother could offer.
In that moment, Rose gave me something I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for my entire life: permission to be exactly who I am.
She died on June 6, 2022, a few months before I became Erica.
I met my half-sister at the hospital in the days before Rose passed. I told her everything—our talks, my secret, and my grief at losing my rock, and the unconditional love that came with her.
We planned the funeral together. She was a lot like her mother—our mother—best friends in every sense. In those few days, we replaced our immense loss with newfound family. Losing a mother and gaining a sister in the same breath is a heavy burden to carry, and a gift you don’t expect.
At the wake, I stood up and introduced myself. I told the room that Rose had always worried about us, but that I was okay. I cried when I said I had only known her for two years—and that they were two of the most important years of my life.
Afterward, one of Rose’s closest friends pulled my sister and I aside.
She had a secret, she said. One she had promised Rose she would keep until after her death.
That tribal committee—the one assembled to make sure children like me were placed into loving homes, the one that gave the tribe’s lost children a fighting chance at a good life?
It was Rose’s idea.
She had built it herself. She had absolute oversight and final say over every placement. She had spent decades making sure other mothers would never spend a lifetime wondering if their children were okay, because she knew exactly what that felt like. The work was revered within the tribe. And she had kept it secret from her own children for the rest of her life.
102 children.
I will always remember that number.
Two for the sake of 102.
Atonement, as I have come to understand it, is a bridge. A path that reconnects us to something greater than ourselves—to community, to love, to the people we have lost and found along the way.
Rose built that bridge quietly, without recognition, without her own children ever knowing. She carried her atonement to her grave, and left her redemption as a gift for strangers.
I am trying to follow in her footsteps, in my own small way. Atonement and redemption, wherever I can, when I can.
I love you, Mom.
I am Erica Rose. I speak.
~
author: Erica Rose
Image: Personal Image of the Author: Painting by Rose.
Editor: Molly Murphy
The Labyrinth of the Familiar: Why We Stay in Jobs & Relationships that No Longer Serve Us.
0
3k
8
0
Share
View this post on Instagram
I spent years in the high-stakes gold markets, watching people lose fortunes because they were afraid of the unknown.
But the greatest loss I witnessed wasn’t financial.
It was the slow erosion of the soul that happens when someone stays in a known misery because they’re too afraid to face an unknown potential.
One dealer I worked closely with had been in the business for decades. His shop smelled of metal and old paper, the kind of place where time seemed to thicken rather than move forward. The numbers no longer worked the way they once had. New systems, new players, new rules had quietly changed the market around him.
He knew it. Everyone knew it.
When I asked why he wouldn’t change—why he wouldn’t step into a new way of working—he paused, held a coin between his fingers, and said something I’ve never forgotten:
“At least I understand how I lose money here.”
It wasn’t ignorance that kept him stuck.
It was intimacy.
He understood this pain. He knew its rhythms. He knew where it would sting and where it would let him rest. The unknown, by contrast, felt like fog—disorienting, destabilizing, identity-threatening.
I’ve come to see that most of us live inside similar labyrinths.
The Comfort Of Familiar Pain
We often imagine that people stay in unhappy jobs or relationships because they lack courage, clarity, or options.
But that’s rarely true.
More often, we stay because the pain we’re in has become familiar. It has edges we recognize. It has rules we’ve learned how to survive.
A job that drains you but gives you structure.
A relationship that hurts but feels predictable.
A version of yourself that no longer fits but at least feels known.
There is a strange comfort in pain that has become routine. It asks less of us than change does.
Change demands presence.
Change demands humility.
Change demands that we become beginners again.
And for many of us that feels far more threatening than suffering we already know how to endure.
The Invisible Architecture That Keeps Us Trapped
What keeps us stuck isn’t just fear—it’s infrastructure.
Over time, we build entire internal systems around who we are:
>> Our identity
>> Our reputation
>> Our story about “how life works”
>> Our role in other people’s expectations
These become the walls of our personal labyrinth.
Leaving a job isn’t just about income—it’s about who you are without the title.
Ending a relationship isn’t just about love—it’s about who you are without the shared narrative.
Changing direction isn’t just about risk—it’s about releasing the version of yourself that once felt solid.
So we stay.
Not because we don’t see the cost, but because the cost of redefining ourselves feels unbearable.
Known Misery Versus Unknown Potential
There’s a quiet calculation happening beneath the surface of many lives:
This hurts, but I know how to survive it.
Unknown potential, on the other hand, has no guarantees.
It might be better.
It might be worse.
It might ask something of us we don’t yet know how to give.
So we negotiate with ourselves.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Others have it worse.”
“Now isn’t the right time.”
Over time, these negotiations become habits. Then beliefs. Then identity.
Eventually, the walls feel permanent.
The Cost We Don’t Talk About
Staying too long doesn’t usually explode our lives.
It erodes them.
It shows up as a quiet dullness.
A loss of curiosity.
A shrinking sense of possibility.
A subtle resentment toward ourselves.
We become experts at functioning while disconnected.
This is the cost we don’t talk about enough—not dramatic failure, but slow emotional depletion.
The soul doesn’t scream when it’s being neglected.
It withdraws.
Why Leaving Feels Like A Betrayal
One of the hardest parts of leaving a familiar labyrinth is the feeling that we’re betraying something—or someone.
A younger version of ourselves.
People who believed in us.
Years we’ve already invested.
We confuse continuity with loyalty.
But staying somewhere that diminishes you is not an act of integrity. It’s often an act of fear disguised as responsibility.
Growth almost always looks irresponsible from the perspective of who you used to be.
There Is No Map—Only Willingness
Most people wait for certainty before they leave.
But certainty never comes first.
The people who eventually step out don’t do so because they’re fearless. They do it because the cost of staying finally becomes louder than the fear of leaving.
Not all labyrinths have clear exits.
Some dissolve only when you stop reinforcing the walls.
Sometimes the first step isn’t action—it’s honesty.
Naming what is no longer working.
Admitting that familiarity is not the same as safety.
Letting yourself grieve the life you’re outgrowing.
A Gentle Truth
If you’re reading this and feeling seen, know this:
You’re not weak for staying.
You’re not broken for hesitating.
You’re human.
But you’re also allowed to choose differently.
Not because you’re certain.
Not because you have a plan.
But because something inside you knows that life is meant to expand, not contract.
The labyrinth only holds as long as we believe its walls are real.
And sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is step into the fog—not to escape pain, but to reclaim possibility.
~
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Read 0 comments and reply