Writing essays have always made me appreciate clarifying thoughts and articulating ideas. Here you can read how I analyze design principles when making exploration of design concepts and behaviour.

How We See Ourselves

(personal essay)

I’ve spent much of the year starting to learn what “remaining” looks like. It’s hard, but letting go doesn’t get easier just because you open your hands. You still have to adjust to the weightlessness of that feeling because you thought the vice grip was what made you strong. I think men have been conditioned to say what they want but not how they feel, so they look outward “how are you?” versus inward “how am I?” They seek connection but are unmotivated with the early stages of establishing familiarity within themselves and their emotions. Which later can conform to the pressure of self-hatred or doubt about caring for themselves, something I struggled with in the past. In a focus group conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, “men described their own symptoms of depression without realizing they were depressed.” They made no connection between their mental health and physical symptoms, such as headaches, digestive problems and chronic pain. Women on the other hand were very attuned to what they were experiencing but were not vocal about it. Too often, people depend on techniques to fix who they are with good intentions. However habits and rituals give you the skills to enhance who you are, but the process of discovering yourself is much more chaotic. Life will present you with people and circumstances to reveal where you are not most free. Wherever there is an external response to external stimulus, it demonstrates to us we are not ok with that situation or event. 

Which predicates a kind of fragility or discomfort to our integrity. Our integrity is a personalized list of demands that we have to meet in order to like ourselves, but if we fail to meet these demands we become dissatisfied and eventually we begin to doubt ourselves. Even though some of the external factors that we’ve faced were not in our control, we find ourselves tormented by the gap that separates our expectations from reality; the gap that separates the ideal from the real.  

One way that I’ve learned to approach the feeling of dissatisfaction or the feeling of defeat, is by focusing on myself rather than the external factors that made me feel powerless. The integrity you have lost functions as a precursor to the feelings, behaviours and actions that become a natural cascade to the thoughts entering your mind.

Occasionally, whenever I find myself sinking into despair, I discover that beneath my sadness resides a rage; anger that induces angst. I protected myself through this anger, it is my adaptation to not feeling inadequate. Judgment is the friction needed to cause that tension to build up.

I realized that the anger that I held had tremendous benefits and the stimulation that it caused in my mind was about giving the attention it deserved rather than ignoring it. I had to accept my sensitivity was also my vulnerability, whereby I used anger to not expose myself to hurt.

Conflicts are a natural part of being human. They can occur over differences of opinion, communication, struggles and strategies even within ourselves. Our tendency to underestimate these conflicts pushes us to numb them through subconscious language derived from survival mechanisms that fit our programming for coping that we have developed over time.

Eventually, I worked on my anger to become a tool for diagnosing discomfort faster. While others might try to repress their feelings when they’re angry, I instead look to reframe them. Proactively visualizing mental states that differ from my current one. That allows me to see my future self, while also engaging with my past self to grasp the root of my anger. Which has helped me create a new relationship with myself that has nurtured how I frame problems. When we experience past hurt and disappointment our brain is designed to predict and protect us from the reputation of those experiences. Changing how I’m critical towards myself allows me to not attach negative thoughts towards myself and heal from those harsher experiences. I instead turned my focus and questions to what led me to those failures. Loosening my grip on my beliefs and untangling them from my identity allowed me to observe them from afar objectively, challenging them and changing them, without feeling like I’m fundamentally departed from who I am.

My anger became the driving force and thinking that allowed me to be more courageous, and confident to understand the complexities of a problem. Whereas others would solely look to identify a solution that only addressed the outcome of a problem, my focus would be on its impact. My anger was not a resemblance of how I felt about a problem but rather a perspective of how badly I wanted to fail in knowing the problem?

I had to unlearn and let go of the idea that this behaviour signaled self-sabotage or a lack of assertiveness but rather it was more of a strength because it gave me the ability to connect information and possibilities faster to a problem. Many are capable of envisioning things going positively but only a few are capable of foreseeing roadblocks that may be ahead. Honing into this part of me allowed me to appreciate myself and my values. 

The relationship between myself and my anger is not a mirror to my identity but rather a refraction. Refraction is the change in direction of a wave passing from one medium to another or from a gradual change in the medium. Creatives know that light plays a pivotal role in helping us capture emotions more than how people express themselves, as light blends and moves when it interacts with different mediums. Our perceived understanding of what we are seeing can be easily altered by how we see light interacting with that medium. For example when capturing darker skin tone individuals, one might want to diffuse the direction of the surfers that light is initially hitting in order to capture them in all their fullness and details.  

The light that we see corresponds to a very narrow range of the spectrum, 400 - 750 nm (nanometers) in wavelength. For some molecules, photons in this range have enough energy to excite electrons, promoting them to higher energy levels. Since these molecules will only absorb a specific frequency, what reaches our eye is no longer white light, but is now coloured. When we think about the self, especially in regard to the western context we often see ourselves as a single source of self, rather than as a mix of light, each with a different colour. It’s almost always an individualized entity. It’s effortless for us to accept that this kind of thinking is the same for everyone else. Phrases like, “do you”, “think about yourself”, and “focus on you” have become synchronized with our thoughts of self, and they’ve become hard to replace.

These relationships of identifying with the self are not common in other cultures and traditions. In other societies, the meaning of the word ‘self’ often takes shape in a different context and it often has a different meaning and form. Sook-Lei Liew, an assistant professor of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, at the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Department of Neurology, makes various references to how these cultural differences play a role in the workplace. In her intriguing research on brain mapping, which explored the "boss effect" (a strong modulation of self-processing in the presence of influential social superiors) she explains that there is a wealth of research on cultural differences between interdependent notions of the ‘self’ versus individualistic notions of the ‘self’.

Neurological researchers have found that certain regions of the brain are only active when we think about ourselves, and when we think about other people we have different regions that are active in our brain. However, when a Japanese individual thinks about themselves, it’s not just them or just oneself that they are thinking about, but instead to them the word ‘self’ signals a whole collective - a group. As a result, the regions of the brain that are triggered by thoughts about the individual, and the regions of the brain that are triggered by thoughts about the collective, are simultaneously active and are lit up. The Eastern self is connected and fluid in this way.

Wildly enough the pronoun for “I” in the Japanese language varies depending on the interpersonal context. “Watashi” is the most commonly used word in various situations but not in all situations. This pathological structure implies that the self in Japanese culture is not sustained internally as a clearly bounded individual but is constituted as the self through being perceived positively by others. The choice of the first-person pronoun is also a part of this composition of the self. This demonstrates perhaps the establishment of a stable relationship with others is an actual part of the structure of the self in Japanese culture. In other words, it’s ok to think about others within yourself or as ourselves.

Most of us know that we have to focus on ourselves because if we don’t, who will? There are several obstacles we’re up against and there are people who deserve us at our best. I’m able to thrive because I have learned that treating my anger, my personality and my identity separately from myself allows me to have a greater appreciation for my wholeness and flaws. 

The internal dialogue of the changes we desire is only amplified if there are others to receive us. Without others, we lose our capacity to know ourselves. You will always have the choice to improve yourself but underneath all that you have to transform your relationship with yourself and how you see it.

How “Men Are Trash” Became Beautiful Art

An essay on technologies that are changing how we give and receive care, 2020

Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of “Vitruvian Man,” is a perfect example of art and science intersecting. Drawn in 1490, which depicted a nude male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart inside both a square and a circle. It is an Illustration of what he believed to be the divine connection between the human representation of beauty, complexity, and symmetry of the human frame, the ideal man, which also meant the ideal human. Art history is dense with people making sense of the embodied experience and for centuries it has shaped the kind of debates we often pretend we are having for the first time. Ideas and conversations we were afraid to have, that must be said that aren’t always appealing but if they are reflective of the truth, then that idea and conversation can fundamentally make them beautiful. But if “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as the aphorism has it, then how does the phrase “men are trash” become beautiful online? What underpins beauty to us and how it is visible online? What power does that seemingly objective beholder online share with the beautiful, or the not beautiful? And what does the ability to be seen online offer the beautiful for being seen?

The phrase men are trash is largely debated and discussed for its visceral understanding, controversy and its constant utility for condemning men. What is wildly lost in these conversations with its use from the abyss of being created online, is its configuration and roots linked to art. There are social nuances attached to each word and together they work within each other to express historical context that might be seen as distinctive as a word by itself but still opaque as a language occupied online. It is this tension, this back and forth, that attracts us and that infuriates us. Like most good art, it’s saying something. You can be having a different experience from someone else, and yet the extremity of it, for you, can feel equally extreme. This is what creativity can do. It forces us to be obsessed with the presumption that words can transmit perfectly and evoke our emotions.  

However the gift of creativity is more complicated than that, creativity has been, and still is, a force for change in the world. It is a collective energy that has the potential to tackle injustices rather than augment them. There are works of art, or aesthetics, that the world does not make space for or accept so quickly. In the 1990s, David Hammons, a Black American artist especially known for his works in and around New York City, is renowned for breaking this tension of what is art and who should have access to it? Hammons joined the online trend of showcasing his art when he reached his senior years, but he also created a vocabulary of symbols from everyday life and messed around with them, in the forms that capture people and challenged them through street installation, from communities that were ignored. Like his public installations of Higher Goals (1983; 1986), located in abandoned parking lots, these immensely wood towering basketball poles decorated with metal bottle caps bent to look like cowrie shells. His work was always an extension of a conversation and often an uncomfortable one.

The discomfort that is represented in the history of art doesn’t always reflect the honest truth of Hammons' use. It instead frequently produces a conflict of our understanding of beauty. Throughout the art historical record, men’s work has always been deemed more charming. Even when it came to the experience of women’s bodies. Sexual violence against women was a subject typically rendered by male artists for a male audience. Artists like Titian, Rembrandt, and Nicolas Poussin, these artists immortalized these violations of women’s bodies in their paintings. Treating rape as a romantic, dramatic euphoria that ultimately led to some kind of betterment during that time. Through their deception of color, technique and composition lie beauty for us to accept their art, which we praise today. It wasn’t until in 1973, the simple somber testimony of a brave few women began to challenge the conversation and norm that art was having about their bodies but was met with shocked silence. Four years later women were ready for candid organized resistance and for opening the definition of rape to forms of assault that hadn’t before been thus categorized, as Nancy Princenthal a former senior editor of Art In America explains in her book, “Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art and Sexual Violence in the 1970s. We can see how an American feminist artist like Suzanne Lacy condemned sexual violence throughout her art. In 1977, Lacy and several other artists had organized Three Weeks in May,  an event that produced national headlines and a new genre of art. The development of “relational aesthetics” a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context. In other words, the artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than being at the center. For example Lacy staged the first beginning by naming herself “The Women Who Is Raped”, in solidarity, she made it clear not from actual experience and read out loud the day’s police report of rapes. It’s important to note that she had the benefits of an urban context, including being a white student in a reputable art school that led to the factors that converged her gaining a level of support from a variety of outlets and the potential that art could be a potent force in resisting sexual violence. The principles surrounding this kind of feminist work as Lacy discovered was through embedding her art into the public sphere, where individuals can experience openly the trauma and the consistency of rape, like identifying and updating new rape cases on a public map, while women simultaneously felt encouraged and safe to share their experience. She took complete control of her messaging and its public image, through women discussing violence and victimhood in her work.   


While the internet age has brought on many challenges in understanding victimhood now. What is often overlooked and equally important is the design of communication into how we receive victims. Color is largely an indispensable part of our lives and having a vocabulary for seeing it gives us a richer visual experience. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. “Colorblind Ideology”, is this resistance or dissociation of Blackness, a collective framework shared by Professor Tricia Rose, an American Sociologist who explains or refers to as: only the absence of accounting for race will bring racial equality. A predominant framework that is culturally encoded for how online platforms, social networks since inception have tried to operate. Which fundamentally relies on and wears the idea that race is non-functioning and does not matter. Therefore they must keep it that way, by staying and being colorblind. Since systemic discrimination isn’t invisible, colorblind ideology actually hides them, it has to work relentlessly harder all the time to undersaturated them, marginalize them, and introvert them to look minimal. They instead look to categorize our individuality online based on behaviors and creating uniform behaviors to identify and collect. This process is also consistent with the words we choose to use and interrupt online with our identities. A combination of moods that produce an easy association for us to understand. The kind of homogeneity we desire to navigate and exist online amongst each other. That reinforces absolutely, there are no structures that can impede on us, through our race, sex, and gender online. Respectability politics, practiced as a way of attempting to consciously set aside and undermine cultural and moral practices, is a function of maintaining this colorblind ideology online. It serves to hinder a broader embrace of racialized individuals who face different sets of interlocking systems of oppression, such as Black women and of their sexuality. For respectability politics, Black people need to distance themselves from Blackness and Black culture and assimilate to the Eurocentric values, culture, and norms to be guaranteed their safety and protection in society. A symptom of indignity, that Oli Mould’s book: “Against Creativity”, pointedly warns us about. In how the online experience becomes divisive when creativity is barely a hidden form of the ever-expanding marketplace that prioritizes profit. A stark lesson that Product Designer Chris Messina, who is the creator of “Hashtag” as we currently use and know it on social media platforms, which Twitter originally rejected but became the first adopter of, had learned about later on in his professional career. When he took to the internet to talk about sex, specifically on non-monogamous relationships (i.e. how to ethically have more than one intimate relationship at a time), he was met with indecent responses and negative intent. He learned quickly that identity and authenticity are not realized through the same mechanism, lost on him was the automatic privilege conferred upon him by being born white and a male. In which he observed this emergent conflict between revealing more of his sex life with the apparent need by the public (or at least a public on Twitter) for him to maintain his stable perception as a white male in tech. The dogma of respectability politics, rules that social platforms harbour through their design tarnishes making conversations about sexuality and out of place sexuality less accessible for women to receive and to share. That made a younger generation of women, particularly Black feminists, reject it as a way not to conform, due to its links towards worthiness for respect to sexual propriety and behavioral correctness. This shift in attitude in return forced the culture industry to revamp and the mainstream market to adapt to co-opt their language of resistance and instead negotiate it for consumption. Which drove the popular narratives of Black resistance from online, such as themes and words like, being “unapologetic”, “savage”, “trash” “sex-positive” and it to be skewed for allocation of attention to individuals to be shaped by social, economic and market conditions instead. Which allowed Black vernacular to explode and gain a wider audience a route to online virality. With the speed of communication online, hashtags over the years have become a kind of vanguard or a form of viewership and a mode of display: they acknowledge a user’s past interest as an audience while offering content to future audiences. A Hashtag thus has similarities to what sociologists call “prosumption”, the act of consuming and producing at the same time. For some, prosumption constitutes part of their online practice, though most exemplify this relationship with content as a way of curating. 

Mohau Modisakeng, a South African artist remembers during his early childhood his father would come back home from work with a stack of sketchbooks and a bundle of pencils and pens wrapped in a rubber band. Eagerly drawn to the symbols of power he completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2009 and worked towards his Master’s degree at the same institution. His work engages race, forced migration and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial continent. Modisakeng’s work is a mature, sombre yet ultimately erotic venture into near-fantasy “iconographic worlds, paying homage to old gods and ancient warriors” as one reviewer put it, after seeing his solo exhibition debut in New York in 2017. Awaiting for a flight to take him back home at Kenyan airport with a female companion in 2018, Modisakeng struggled to board the flight that was delayed as staff witnessed him abusively yelling at his companion. She mirrored she was in fact visibly terrified. They later found out that he had ripped apart with his hands her passport during an argument. Kenyan authorities were eventually called to the scene and arrested him. A passport is considered the property of the state, and purposefully disfiguring it or tearing one is considered a serious crime. South Africa is also where the phrase men are trash originated from, a crisis. Unlike most gender-based trauma attached with a crisis or a hashtag, it denies the practice of the victim as the anchor and propels its frustration instead on participants. It isn’t particularly interested in personal morality, rather it’s interested in being conveyed like a punishment but used like relational aesthetics in its undeniably black vernacular. Its beauty lies in providing opposition to social leverage that our standards of values can’t offer. It is a phrase that garnered its popularity on Twitter from feminists during 2017. Where there was rampant disappearance of young women and girls. The rate of deaths and sexual violence was overwhelming and still is today in South Africa. There was radio silence from the numerous task forces set up to develop various approaches in addressing the crisis. And still, women continue to die. To remove blame that always followed these women’s deaths through social media conversations came the lexis of words “men are trash”, that demanded justice for them but fell on deaf ears, instead was this outcry online. Shame is a central and unavoidable part of the micro-politics and power relations of everyday life in South Africa. In contrast to guilt, which is directed towards an act, shame is directed towards the self. One can say that guilt is a reaction to what one has done, shame is a reaction to who one is. Sexual violence is a powerful example of how shame works and who gets shamed, but shame has a wider hold on society. Men are trash, is a way to combat this shame. For a man’s privilege does not attach merely to what one does or how one benefits, but more fundamentally, who one is. There is nothing about one’s particular self that makes one deserve special treatment and that alleviates moving about in the world that comes with being a man. When one discovers that one is, after all, such a person, however unavoidably, and extended one is morally aware and rational, one can only feel shame. The power of these words gave women voices to be heard by and to help identify misogyny as well as to call out so-called ‘good men’ to take action. Although as the years have progressed since its adoption despite its successes, these movements have been largely unsuccessful in bringing men into the discussion about misogyny and violence against women. Primarily because of the danger of a single story that intellectual and popular feminism has fed to a singular narrative about men, and Black men, in particular, Rebecca Helman interprets and shares as a source for its failure, a Ph.D. Candidate working in “post-rape subjectivities”,  in a joint paper: “The danger of a single feminist narrative: African-centred decolonial feminism for Black men”. A paper that questions the effectiveness of new feminist vocabulary and language of resurfacing of toxic masculinities rather than positive masculinities. Her work draws on her own and others' experiences of being raped In South Africa to understand how they make sense of their experiences in light of dominant discourses that make conclusion of sexual violence and sexual violation in problematic ways confronting some of the racial stereotypes that Black and White women go through when seeking intervention. One example she states is the specific material conditions resulting from the enduring legacy of coloniality, a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies. Which don’t often consider western-centric feminist representations of women in Africa, the dominant focus of feminism in Africa has been on the relationship between men and women mediated through culture and religion and less on the numerous structural inequalities that African women face.  

Today’s advances of art for the purpose of awareness hide all the edges and seams until they’re unidentifiable, even with words. One of the most important things we need to understand about art is, although we associate paintings, aesthetics, creativity, or just making plain anything attractive, as art. We forget what the original intent of art used to be. Art was always a way of creating knowledge. The reason why it even existed, was because of the vast information that we needed to collect without the availability to write it down. Art helped us to bring all of that together. If you desired to tell your children how to harvest in their community, the lineage of family history, or how to resolve conflict, you would embed that knowledge into dance, poetry or a story. The early 20th-century art relied primarily on representational, religious, and classical motifs, after which time more purely abstract and conceptual approaches gained favor. The challenges that Black women face regarding the safety of their everyday lives of mobility are unfathomable. Art that has been made for consumption while vital, seems ineffective when we choose to subject people to issues that are often uncomfortable to discuss and rife with emotional variability. Especially for those who refuse to become the trope, we are taught to replicate before we are encouraged to love ourselves as men. Our shrinking attention spans, a byproduct of the behaviors we are made to just accept as members of this information highway seem to perhaps indicate the trajectory that online art is failing us. Because the fact is, there are only so many hours in a day, and we’ve reached our capacity to engage honestly. If the role of the artist (really any of us) is to create, share, and contribute beyond existing boundaries, then the question of whether art offers online new ways to think about gender violence or just produce anxieties in an unhealthy online environment? Is especially critical to inspect. It is in the public’s interest to know where harm is happening and by whom, should online art still be the authority in informing us? Lost in the discord and beauty of men are trash is the normalization of its abuse. Lost in men, including me, is our inability to do this work to heal other men. Confused about our own prejudiced learning and environments, most importantly not knowing where to start or how to have these conversations with other men. 

Leading With The Mind

Writing on Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)

One of the most vivid arguments that I seem to always remember is with my father. I can still smell the sweat off the shirt he wore and the expression he made as he drank his tea. He tried to explain to me the harms of caring about others too much and the consequences I would face for exposing myself to that kind of vulnerability. “Be a man Sharmarke'' he would say to me. He stressed the importance of separating my feelings from the outcomes of people’s actions. Something I still struggle with today. Up until recently, I didn’t question this advice, after all , who wants to be taken advantage of? Who wants to live with that shame or fear? I felt that this was a piece of knowledge that my father knew too well and he was trying to share it with me.

There’s a thin line between trust and expectation, that line is often blurred by our impressions of others. While we like to think that we are fair in the process of identifying whom we trust, we aren’t. In fact, our feelings which influence our ability to extend trust, are split and silenced from this process. Instead, we predict based on our sensitivity to, and familiarity with, the character that they’re projecting. Human social interaction is as informationally rich as it is ubiquitous. As we spend countless hours engaging with other humans online or offline, we form impressions about them in an attempt to predict their behaviour at a subconscious level.

However, our interactions with individuals aren't always so consistent. As such, social interaction requires continuous, flexible updating of our initial impressions in light of new information. This is extremely much more difficult to calibrate or do online because of the limitation of our actions, which we can only express through words, pictures, videos or through inaction (not engaging or not acknowledging their action).

Due to this limitation, we are more receptive to falling under the influence of a Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE).  

For example, if an icon appears indicating that someone has read your message, while they haven’t responded, or if their tone of communication is passive-aggressive, then we’re more likely to attribute these actions to that person’s personality, character, or lack of knowledge. However, if we made the same actions, then we’d more likely to attribute our actions to the situation that we were in; the environment and or the momentary discomfort that we had in engaging with that individual.

A Fundamental Attribution Error can lead to the subsequent reactions of frustration, disengagement, further judgment, toxicity, and ultimately distancing yourself from that individual. These negative interactions outweigh any positive rebuttals of that person’s situation and these negative experiences are often kept to be compounded with memories of similar emotional discomfort and occasionally retriggered on a subconscious level. We are hardwired to revisit negative thoughts as a way to defend ourselves.

You may now begin to distrust this person; this distrust was created all in your mind. A brain activity associated with updating impressions. Cognitive biases like ‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ negatively influence your ability to make good decisions about whom you can trust. I personally have whole relationships with people whom I met only because they asked me questions after reading my writing, being interested in my work, or wanting to collaborate on a project. I thought that my decision to trust was intuitive, instead what I found was that I fabricated an expectation based on the external wounds that were stored in my subconscious mind. It’s a perception of an absence of awareness that dissociates feelings in real-time, without us knowing it. Our subconscious mind wants instant relief from the pain it is about to anticipate, for example like rejection and our conscious mind can’t make the appropriate connections to comprehend it (to understand how this works further details can be found in the research highlighted above). We all experience emotional patterns over time, some people struggle with loneliness and anxiety, and others struggle with being helpless, trapped or powerless. We tend to have these dominant emotional patterns that are impacting us individually through what information we allow in part of our subconscious programming. Our subconscious mind is on a cycle to maintain these negative patterns (I explained why this was important in Part 1). It is through these negative patterns that we are able to associate challenging times and the conflicts we endured in our lives with them. When we overcome them our subconscious mind untangles these connections and actually builds a stronger positive association with those negative emotions. We begin to open ourselves up gently to experiencing it more often. It’s a relationship within ourselves we barely register consciously. We inadvertently accept it as being a feeling that we are experiencing and become more inclined to be present with a discomfort we once dreaded.

I now see that the initial trust I gave was led by my mind. A decision I don’t regret but feel detached from because it was never their individually that convinced me to trust them but rather their action towards engaging with me. Which further pulled me away from confronting my external wounds that I could not detect consciously. This wound is; a resistance to the past, a painful assumption, a negative thought on repeat.

So what are the harms in having these external expectations at that moment? That we can’t label consciously but we know is working for us in good faith? If it is helping us to stay safe, feel protected and aware.

We are essentially putting someone in a box, a very well calculated box. A box we didn’t have autonomy in making but our mind did. This prevents us to not allow their intrinsic motivation or sense of purpose to be revealed to us, for us to truly trust. When I first started to notice how my own expectations of others affected me. I filled myself with self-righteous thoughts, telling myself that I was somehow a better person for displaying more consideration and care for my actions towards them. These expectations of others was a belief that they should behave in a certain way, and very often I chose not to share that expectation with them. I did not express what I wanted, I just wanted it. Letting go of your hidden or unobserved subconscious expectations of others can also mean denying expectations of yourself. Expectations that make up these intimate parts of you and your wounds. Which are an important aspect of your identity that you should cherish but you should not mistake this as trust or seek it in others. In order for you to truly be in control and responsible for when and how you trust other individuals, situations and the uncertainties around their actions.

This is more or less harder to work on within yourself and painful to do. We’re all in some way fortunate, don’t let instant relief from your mind make you walk away from your value.