This summer has been the most intense one I've lived through, personally and professionally, because I think a lot of us are feeling the same thing and reaching for different words to explain it.
We are all cacti in the desert. The desert is the honest condition of this human experience. We, as physical beings, are the cacti.
Many of us are exhausted. Parched. Hungry. Reaching for something that never seems to arrive in the amount we actually need. We keep asking why the rain is so scarce, so inconsistent, so maddeningly out of sync with the moment we need it. And underneath that, a painful question, the one people actually sit in: Why would I choose this? Why this difficulty, this pain, this thing that feels like suffering?
I want to gently suggest that this is not the best question to sit in. The question itself builds a villain. It assumes something is being done to you by someone or something that could have done otherwise. And the moment you build that villain, you stop being able to see the thing clearly.
This is not a villainous experience. It's a mechanical one.
When I say "mechanical," I watch people shift and crease their eyebrows. Most of us already feel used like a machine. Having to audition, process, be chosen or discarded, plugged in for what we can produce, and unplugged when we can't. So to hear that we are mechanical sounds like someone confirming the degradation. Like being told the cage is correct.
Recognizing that you are a mechanism is not the same as accepting that you're being used as one. Pause and process that distinction.
We are machines. We are supercomputers who forgot (or never knew) that we're computers. A computer that doesn't know it's a computer is the one that gets programmed by whatever's running in the background. It executes code it never chose, calls that code "just how I am," and defends it to the death. The machine that knows it's a machine is the free one. It can look at its own operating system. It can see which processes are running, which ones it inherited, and which ones are draining the battery for nothing.
Refusing to be mechanical doesn't make you free. It makes you unconsciously operated. Which is exactly how you stay usable in parasitic spaces.
The conditions of this experience are disproportionate by default. The giving never quite matches the getting. The effort never quite matches the return. The rain never quite matches the thirst, and because the conditions are disproportionate by default, the default emotional response to them is despair.
Nobody says that part out loud. Despair isn't a malfunction. In a genuinely disproportionate field, it's the accurate baseline response. What we call our "frameworks for life" are actually coping structures for that despair. Not descriptions of the mechanics. They are management systems for the feeling.
There are basically three, and each one holds real truth, up to a limit.
The spiritual framework calls the disproportion a sinful nature. The distortion is sin; you are fallen; you redeem yourself through God, through Jesus, through Allah, through whoever holds the ledger. It offers meaning and moral orientation. Its limit is that it locates the problem in your brokenness, and the solution is outside you.
The mystical framework calls it a test. You're in a school, this is the curriculum, your soul is moving through the grades, and the suffering is the lesson plan. It offers purpose and forward motion. Its limit is that it can turn every harm into a required lesson, which can often justify the harm.
The scientific framework calls it dysregulation. It's your nervous system, your neurotransmitters, the neuroscience of anxiety and depression, cortisol, and vagal tone. It offers precision and dignity, and validation that you're not weak, but you're wired. Its limit is that it describes the machinery of the feeling without naming the disproportion that the machinery is accurately responding to.
Each one gives you a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, a redeemed and a fallen. Each one, in its own sophisticated way, is a form of avoidance. As long as you're inside one of these stories, you never have to look directly at the mechanics of the disproportion itself. You get to cope with the heaviness instead of seeing the structure that produces it.
Maintaining the story is work. Constantly reframing, constantly defending your shore. Like, whether it's the shore of hope ("my breakthrough is coming, I just have to believe") or the shore of despair ("it's hopeless, something's wrong with me”). That defense runs underneath everything, all the time, burning energy that produces nothing, because it's spent maintaining an interpretation rather than meeting reality.
As a result, there are two exhaustions stacked on each other: the honest deprivation, and the endless labor of narrating around it.
The mechanical view doesn't feel better. It just offers no villain to blame, no test to pass, no redemption arc. It's colder at first. But it costs less to hold because you stop paying the tax of defending a story. More of your scarce water goes to the one thing that actually matters, which is holding your form and staying open to the rain.
In the arts, we have the cattle call. You show up, you put yourself out there, you audition, and someone else decides whether to choose you, use you, or discard you in exchange for very little or nothing. We treat it as normal. But look at it mechanically. It's a coerced, disproportionate exchange where all the choosing power sits on one side. You must audition to eat, you give enormously, and you receive a trickle if anything at all.
Almost everything has been trained to be a cattle call in this life. Every interaction is an audition. What can you put out in exchange for what someone might give back? That's the logic of the whole field. We've been camped so long in the aspirational hope of "this one might be the break" that we keep auditioning inside a structure we've never actually checked. The story drives us. The story stays unexamined. The disproportion keeps being fed by us.
So what do you do with all this?
You remember what a cactus is for.
A cactus is not a failed rainforest plant. It's not waiting, passively, for the desert to become something else. It is built for the drought—steady, upright, a little prickly. It’s guarded enough to protect the scarce water it stores, and open enough to still receive rain when it comes. It is not desperate for water, and yet it needs it. Both of those are true at once, and holding both is the entire art of it.
We were never trained to hold the drought. We were trained to expect the rainforest and then feel betrayed by the sand. But the point of being a cactus is adaptability. It’s the capacity to hold form in conditions that would kill things not built for them. The deprivation itself, as strange as this sounds, is part of what builds that capacity. It's not the enemy. It's the pressure that shapes the adaptation.
While reflecting on this post, I discovered that cacti actually bloom. But only when the rain finally comes in proportion. Enough, at the right time. The bloom was always inside the plant. It was never a reward for suffering. It was gated by a threshold. Below the threshold, you hold form. At the threshold, you flower. If you've never seen yourself bloom, it doesn't mean the bloom isn't in you. It means proportional rain hasn't come yet. Those are completely different facts.
The way through isn't a better story. It's honesty, the unglamorous, uncomfortable kind. Honest about what you're actually experiencing, how you're experiencing it, what you see, how you see it. Not performed transparency. The real, awkward, grounded kind, offered in the spaces that can actually hold it.
That kind of honesty does something mechanical to the body. It re-trains it to hold more. Each time you tell a true thing and survive it, your system gets one piece of evidence that honesty didn't kill you, and it can open a little wider next time, even in conditions pressuring it to stay closed. That's how a cactus becomes more adaptable. Not by pretending it isn't thirsty, but by staying honestly porous to the rain while holding form through the drought.
And if enough of us do that (if enough of us shift how we show up), the atmosphere itself has to respond. That's not a mystical phenomenon. That's just physics. If you evolve, the field you're part of evolves, because you are part of it. We're not separate machines. We're one mechanical body, inside of bodies within bodies, and this whole disproportionate stretch of the human experience is something like a scrape on a much larger organism. When one part shifts, the whole part registers it.
However, we’re not all on the same page at the same time. Evolution isn't synchronized. So the ones who reach the mechanical clarity first, in other words, those who stop defending the shore, and start holding the honest signal—they tend to feel invisible for a while. Perceptually ahead of a curve that isn’t visible. Building bridges into water, while most people are still standing on the two shores they were born onto, defending them.
I know that invisibility well. I've been living inside it. What I offer is deeply fulfilling, but the cost (under depriving conditions and delayed timing) can feel like an intense tug of war.
I'll be plain, and then I'll let it go, because I don't want the map I just drew to read as a setup for an ask.
The frameworks, the writing, the music, the whole ecosystem I have is me holding a signal while deprived. I'm a cactus articulating the desert from inside it, with enough room to observe and name the pattern that most people are too depleted to put into words. None of this is a rescue, nor a shortcut. It’s a clearer map of the mechanics, so you can contextualize your own experience and stop repeating the same disproportion, expecting a different result.
We are genuinely all in this together. That's not a slogan; it's the mechanical truth. Everyone's contributing to the drought, whether we want to or not, in how we oscillate between honesty and survival.
If you can be honest about where you are in this (and honest about the fact that you've benefited from this work), then let that honesty become tangible. Put your support where your benefit is. Share it. Start conversations about it. Process it out loud instead of silently. Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the silent benefit of people taking what's useful and applying it to their lives. That's real, and I'm glad it's landing. But validation helps. Financial support helps. It's what lets the signal grow, which, in the end, reduces the very thing so many of us are exhausted by.
I'm not asking you to support me because I'm forcing you across a bridge you're not ready to cross. I'm making the gap legible, so that if and when you are ready, it happens naturally, on your own clock.
Until then, I'll do what a cactus does. Hold form. Stay prickly enough to protect what little I've stored, and open enough to receive the rain when it finally comes in proportion.
We are all cacti in the desert. Exhausted, yes. Parched, yes. But built—genuinely built—to adapt, and carrying, every one of us, a bloom that's only waiting on enough. Please stay the course!
In the meantime and in between time, be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same. If you want to support my tea-drinking habit or treat me to a meal, here’s the link to donate.
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