The Exhaustion After Awareness

Who were you before the world told you you were wrong and you believed it?

I think we’ve reached a point in time where we’re no longer blind, but we’re not yet free.

We see the systems.

We see the cracks.

We know what isn’t working.

But we don’t yet know how to live outside of it.

And maybe we’re not meant to live outside of it. Maybe the work now is learning how to build something new from the inside out.

This is what I call the exhaustion after awareness - that strange in-between where everything you used to believe has collapsed, but nothing solid has replaced it yet. You’re awake, but you’re tired. You know too much to go back, but not enough to move forward.

We’ve spent years diagnosing, debating, rebelling and numbing. We’ve turned pain into content, rebellion into identity, awareness into another loop. It’s helped us survive, connect, make sense of the madness. But awareness without embodiment eventually becomes another performance.

We’ve been trying to fix what’s outside - our systems, relationships, cultures - and for a while, it worked. But only to a point.

Because when change begins on wounded foundations - control, fear, survival - it eventually rebuilds the same cracks and calls it progress.

We’ve been rebuilding with new ideas on the same old foundations.

It looks like evolution, but it still bleeds.

Like putting a plaster on a wound that never stops opening.

And maybe that’s why we’re all so tired.

Because deep down, we know we can’t fix the world with the same consciousness that built it.

The real work now isn’t rebellion.

It’s reclamation.

Rebellion still orbits the thing we’re fighting. Reclamation begins when we remember we’re more than what we resist - when we reclaim the parts of ourselves we left behind trying to belong.

This isn’t about rejecting the world.

It’s about remembering who you are within it.

Because until you do, everything we build - our systems, our art, our love, our self — will keep collapsing under the same weight.

Maybe the work now isn’t about finding common ground by agreeing on what’s right or wrong. Maybe it’s about each of us becoming honest enough to find our own truth.

Because when we each return to our true essence, we can find common ground and build a new way from there, creatively and in a way that benefits everyone.

That’s how we build the new world.

From the inside out.

Together.

And so, I ask you again.

Who were you before the world told you you were wrong and you believed it?