When Triggers Change Into Information

Something interesting happened when I opened myself to receiving.

I’ve had this theme in my life where giving has been much easier for me than receiving. I write because writing is something I have always done. It is one of the ways I understand myself and metabolize life, a kind of therapy and alchemical laboratory where experiences that are still formless slowly become visible to me. I have never really written because I wanted something in return.

Recently, however, after several people had told me that I should allow others to support what I do, I opened a small channel where anyone who genuinely feels moved by my writing can support it financially. It seemed like a rather simple gesture: I wasn’t putting anything behind a paywall or changing what I do. I was simply opening a door that had previously been closed.

Almost immediately, life began showing me what was standing behind that door.

Someone left a laughing reaction on the post. Such a tiny thing, just an emoji, but I felt it instantly as a small dropping sensation in my body, almost like momentarily stepping outside myself. The image that came to me was very specific: walking onto a stage at school and suddenly everyone bursts into laughter. The feeling of being exposed, ridiculous, the one everyone is laughing at.

My mind translated the emoji almost immediately: Does this person think I am ridiculous?

And because it happened underneath this particular post, the question carried another layer. I had just made myself vulnerable by saying that I was willing to receive. I had effectively placed a cup on the table and said that if someone felt moved to put something in it, they could. Suddenly the laughter seemed to say: Who do you think you are to imagine that anyone would want to give you something?

Later I spoke with the person and discovered that their reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with ridicule. They had literally just been discussing this exact subject with their lover in the car, opened Facebook, and immediately encountered my post about it. They were laughing at the synchronicity.

The external situation was completely innocent. My internal reaction, however, was real.

The trigger wasn’t telling me the truth about the other person. It was giving me information about myself.

Around the same time, someone else left a provocative comment underneath the same post, making a comparison between receiving money for something that comes naturally and being paid for sex. That touched another nerve. We misunderstood each other, both became defensive, and once again I found myself wondering why something seemingly small had produced such a strong response in me.

At first it would have been easy to interpret all of this as evidence that I was somehow failing at receiving. I had decided to open myself to support and immediately found myself triggered by people’s responses to it. But the more I stayed with what was happening, the more I began to see it differently.

And what came to me is that this wasn’t a failure of the practice.

This was the practice.

I had opened a door to receiving, and life was simply showing me the beliefs that were still guarding the entrance.

One of them seemed to ask, Who do you think you are? Another insisted that I needed to prove that what I give is valuable before I am allowed to receive anything for it. Underneath those voices I eventually found something much older and more brutal: if I do not produce, I do not have the right to take.

And beneath even that was an old wound I know well: I don’t know how to do life.

Money, I realized, is not only money in my inner world. It has become entangled with adulthood, independence, usefulness, responsibility and even the right to occupy space in this world. Somewhere inside me there is still an equation in which a competent adult knows how to make money and support herself. If she cannot, she becomes dependent on other people’s labor, and somewhere in the shadows of that belief lives the accusation that she is a burden.

I don’t consciously believe that human worth works this way. In fact, much of my life during these past years has been an exploration of the opposite: what happens when I stop organizing my existence around productivity, pushing and proving? What happens when life is allowed to take a shape that actually resembles me?

But conscious beliefs are not always the ones running the machinery.

This is one of the reasons I have become so interested in triggers. They reveal the beliefs that are too fast, old or embodied to announce themselves politely to the conscious mind. I can sincerely believe that my worth is inherent while another part of me still contracts when I am not financially productive. I can speak about abundance while something deeper wonders whether I am simply telling myself a beautiful story because I haven’t figured out how to support myself in the conventional sense.

Rather than seeing that contradiction as hypocrisy, I want to know it intimately.

I also began looking at the role writing itself plays in all of this. If being seen and appreciated feels so important, could writing be another elaborate way of trying to earn that appreciation? Is there some younger part of me underneath all these words saying, Look at me. Look at everything I have survived. Look at everything I have understood. Can you see me now? Am I valuable now?

It is an uncomfortable question, which is precisely why it interests me.

I don’t think our motives divide neatly into pure and impure. Something can genuinely move through me and want expression while another part of me simultaneously longs to finally be witnessed. One does not necessarily invalidate the other.

I did not grow up with a great deal of encouragement. I don’t remember having much of that particular kind of mirroring where someone looks at what a child is becoming and says, with genuine delight, Wow. Look at you. Look what you made. You are good at this. Keep going. So of course something in me is nourished now when another human being reads something I have written and tells me that it touched them, helped them understand something, or accompanied them through a difficult moment.

Writing gives something to a part of me that was hungry for recognition for a very long time.

But that doesn’t make the writing false.

The more revealing question was whether I would still write without any of it. If I wrote for an entire year and nobody commented, nobody praised me, nobody told me my words had meant something to them, and nobody gave me a cent, would I continue?

I think I would.

Writing existed long before the audience. I have been doing it for as long as I can remember because it is one of the ways I meet myself. And this showed me a distinction that feels important:

There is a difference between writing in order to be seen and allowing myself to be seen through what I write.

Part of my work now is accepting that there is nothing shameful about the latter. There is nothing wrong with being witnessed, nothing corrupt about encouragement, and nothing suspicious about enjoying it when another human being says that something I created mattered to them.

Then I tried another experiment. I imagined continuing exactly as I do now, writing and sharing while nobody ever gave me money for it. Surprisingly, the image felt quite neutral. Then I imagined people spontaneously supporting me financially without demanding anything more from me.

My body opened.

It felt safe. In fact, almost confusingly safe. There was a sense of being carried, of being able to continue doing what comes naturally while the material conditions of my life were somehow allowed to support it.

That made me realize that perhaps receiving itself isn’t what frightens me most. What is vulnerable is placing myself in the position of being allowed to receive.

When someone spontaneously gives, I don’t have to make any statement about my own value. But when I consciously create a place where receiving is possible, I participate in acknowledging that what I give might be worth something. I put the cup on the table myself.

And suddenly I am back on that stage.

Who do you think you are?

The inner judge immediately begins assembling its criteria. Am I wise enough? Are my intentions pure enough? Am I useful enough, talented enough, spiritually mature enough? Have I helped enough people? Have I done enough work on myself to justify receiving something in return?

And here I began to see the trap. If I answer that judge by presenting evidence of my worth, I remain in its courtroom. I can show it beautiful messages from readers. I can explain how much inner work I have done or how many people have found meaning in my words. But all of that still accepts the original premise that my worth must be demonstrated before I am allowed to receive.

What if receiving does not require a defense?

This does not mean abandoning responsibility. In fact, another part of this inquiry is about taking material responsibility for my life more fully. For a long time my circumstances have made conventional ways of working difficult, and I have depended partly on social support. Becoming financially supported through what actually comes naturally to me would therefore represent something much larger than earning money. It would be another step into adulthood and agency, a way of standing more fully on my own feet.

That carries its own trembling.

Recently, when a friend began talking to me about how difficult money can be, I noticed irritation rise immediately: Don’t come and tell me about money. I know how to do this. I know how to create.

When I looked underneath the defensiveness, however, I found a much more vulnerable possibility.

What if I don’t know yet?

I know how to write. I know how to listen deeply. I know how to live with very little. I know something about following what feels true even when I cannot see where it leads. But perhaps I am still learning how to let what naturally moves through me participate in materially sustaining my life.

There is no shame in saying that.

I don’t have to already know. I am allowed to learn.

This also touches something important in my relationship with abundance and divine guidance. I have spent years learning to trust life more deeply, to stop forcing everything into predetermined forms and to listen for where life itself seems to be moving. Yet there is still a part of me asking a necessary and uncomfortable question: Am I actually learning to trust life, or am I sometimes simply telling myself a beautiful spiritual story?

I don’t want to silence that question with affirmations about abundance. I want it to keep me grounded.

Trusting divine guidance cannot mean demanding that life prove my spiritual beliefs by sending money whenever I believe myself to be aligned. Nor does material difficulty necessarily mean that I have failed to trust correctly. What interests me now is something much more embodied: whether the things I understand inwardly can gradually find form in the material reality of my life.

Not abundance as an idea, but abundance entering matter.

Not surrender as passivity, but participation.

Not waiting for life to prove that I am worthy, but opening actual channels through which giving and receiving can begin to move.

And this is coagula in one of its simplest forms: the invisible becoming material.

I thought I was opening a Ko-fi account. Apparently I was opening a door, and almost immediately everything guarding that door became visible: shame, the hunger to be seen, the fear of being ridiculous, the belief that usefulness determines worth, the fear that needing support means failing at adulthood, the desire to become independent, and at the same time the deep longing to discover what it feels like to be carried by life.

There is also an image of a woman that emerged during this contemplation. When I asked myself what kind of woman can receive abundantly without having to earn, prove, please, serve or give herself in exchange, I imagined someone wise, powerful, radiant and courageous.

And then I noticed something.

I was looking at her somewhere in the distance.

I wasn’t looking in the mirror.

Perhaps I have been waiting to become her before I allow myself to receive. Waiting until I am wise enough, courageous enough, useful enough, pure enough. But then I am simply repeating the same old equation in more beautiful language.

I am still standing at the gate checking my own credentials.

This is why I am becoming grateful for triggers. Not because every interpretation of me is correct, not because every comment belongs in my space, and certainly not because self-awareness requires abandoning boundaries. A trigger does not necessarily tell me anything reliable about the person who triggered me.

But it can tell me where I am still not free.

The laughing emoji was not evidence that I was ridiculous. The provocative comment was not evidence that I should close the door to receiving. They simply illuminated places in me that were already there, waiting to become visible.

And this is where something fundamental changes.

Instead of asking, What is wrong with me that this affected me?, I can become curious about the part that reacted.

What in me wants to be seen right now?

Before receiving money, praise or support from anyone else, there is another kind of receiving: allowing the parts of myself that still believe they have no right to receive to come into the room too.

Not as proof that I have failed.

Not as another wound that needs to be fixed before I am ready.

But as information.

And as another doorway into a more intimate relationship with myself.