Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the friction we have with receiving a thing. Mainly because of the kind of world we live in where everything feels like a transaction. Gifts are given with love and received with a burden because even in a non transactional setting everyone unconsciously wants to be the one who is giving more, who is winning.
There is a disorienting individuality which comes with viewing a gift as a transaction but when everything around you is a transaction it is hard to define things without it. And I don’t mean to argue that a gift is something that should be taken and accepted with no returns either. That is another side of the same capitalistic coin I’m trying to fight without using the C word over and over again. A gift isn’t something you should take with no thought of any return.
A gift is an extension of someone’s good will of someone’s love towards you. It is something you exchange, something which cannot be defined using a metric because it cannot and does not hold the same value for different people. Like the limitation of neo-classical economics that assumes everyone’s end goal is profit so that a deal for 10 tshirts is the preferred transaction you’d participate in compared to food for a day at the same price. The cognitive dissonance kicks in when you try to define the exchange of gifts and favours using this framework.
I think to be able to openly accept a gift without any form of guilt we have to be able to sit with the weight of what that gift means to you. To not say sweet nothings and pretty promises to absolve yourself of the burden but to really sit with it. To let it fester till it makes you think about the things you can produce the things you can contribute and not lose it in defining the worthwhile payment without actually ever paying it.
I say this because over time I find it easier to do the giving but almost impossible to do the receiving without trying to instantly tell people just how well I can pay them back. And in doing that I try to erase the need to actually do any of those things. Painting a picture of what I can give them is absolving me of the guilt of getting something but at the same time it is taking away the serotonin boost I could get by actually taking the time to do the thing.
What I’m trying to say is that we (me, I mean me) need to get better at receiving things but I don’t want to be the kind of person who just takes. I want to be able to take things and then use the energy shared with me to reshape and restructure it. Make something else, something new and then pass it along. Receiving is not a selfish act, and in a world with oppressive systems snatching and taking things with no guilt and remorse I think it is important to remind people (myself) that receiving things is not the same as taking it away.
I strongly believe that humans are beautiful, kind, sensitive. And I’m really tired of all these systems trying to block our means of giving by making us hate receiving.