Smoking Section — Dealing With "People Just Be Saying Shit" Realities As The World Feels Like It's On Fire

The Realities of Language, Self-help, Spiritual & Divination Bypassing & Pole politics

Many days of feeling the flames and now here’s the smoke. Thinking shallowly about deep shit.

Dealing With Realities

Simplified TLDR : Words mean things. Consensus and agreement are powerful. We all should review and renegotiate our consensus with the language we understand and the associations we make with words specific in this pole dance collective. The stakes are high as we navigate hard lived realities.

The tools and concepts of self-help, bypassing and politics have got every aspect of our lived reality in a chokehold right now, as the world feels chaotic. Word to Nova. Nova is my ass shaking, real nigga, stripping, down south, sex studies academic scholar friend. She had to remind me that many of us are: stress-scrolling, boredom engaging, helplessly laughing to soothe and salve the realities we are facing. Because we should be enjoying life even though hell rises.

My reality right now is I’m not doing well, as an instructor, in the pole industry. And I hate admitting that, cause pride; but not being honest about a reality that is experienced for many right now is a disservice to what is communally happening. The (or a) reality is that the current consensus of the pole industry is vapid and if you’re not conforming to particular trends or “IN” with particular organized groups or easily identifiable by your occupation or your physical appearance, you’re out.

As the pole industry continues to develop in its mid-life, ‘big business’ explosion, I now see how our psyches are playing musical chairs with self-help, bypassing and politics causing people to conflate their lived realities. And the use of these things to sell to consumers is rampant.

I think to myself: Why are so many people using *shit like* astrology, that aren’t astrologists or have studied astrology or at least experimenting with astrology day to day, using it to sell classes?

When you say you do a thing, when you decide to use a word— the consensus should be evident in practice, behaviors and experiences.

The more I interact and observe—and even myself try to make a livable wage with the pole apparatus—I find myself having conversations that restate: “We’re all using a pole. We’re all talking about the same things, sometimes even using the same words but we are not all doing and are not effected by the same things.”

---

Meanings

Improvement (self-help), spirituality and politics. My meaning as I type this soundboard is:

• Improvement: the development of actualizing ourselves measurably

• Spirituality: the dimensions of being human in conjunction with dimensions of reality that require a sort of 6th sense to experience

• Politics: the consensus , contracts and agreements we attempt to make as a group that create power and synergy.

---

“When You Paid You Got Beaucoup Places to Go Ha?”— Is The Reality Being Created The One That’s Actually Lived?

I was scrolling Instagram and I got triggered (go figure) — There’s a video of a pole dancer/pole dance instructor using the same language, even delivering the same message that mutuals ( Carmine, Krystal, Folk From the Coterie) and I have been amplifying through different mediums for the last 9 months— through which, this dancer has been directly impacted. But of course, this dancer has more reach and the consensus about them is that they’re ‘good vibes’.

The anger from the sadness that I felt welled up in my heart and I debated whether or not to hit the block button. I did not appreciate how witnessing them made me feel. Before I made a reaction— which people do half cocked— I sat there with my ill-feelings and talked myself through it. The reality started making sense: they live a different reality than I do. Our realities are different and while we’re saying the same things, we’re not doing the same thing and that is a significant revelation.