Two and a half years since arriving home, I no longer need to vilify or romanticize the place where I grew up. A friend and mentor encouraged me to make a list of all the things I had learned during my time so far in Nebraska – and about relating to people across difference – at the end of last year. Through this invitation to inventory, I became clearer than ever what this place does and does not offer me. There have been many “penny drops“, or moments when I finally understood something after not understanding it.
Sharing some of my random notes and insights from this documentation of this return home and “soul retrieval”, in hopes that some of the exercise or realizations may resonate with you as well.
- Wanting to belong is innate to being human. Belonging is often far too conditional.
- Coercion is not love.
- I can and will always belong to myself first.
- Intimacy is worth it, and way messy.
- People can love you and not be able to meet you where you are. The expectation that they should is what causes suffering.
- No performance. No apology. (For who I am.)
- My favorite people are those who say, “We’ll figure it out together.”
- I don’t have to do it like everyone else to get it done. Step by step is the only way anything gets done. It is almost (!) always possible to go slower and negotiate “deadlines.”
- Sometimes the only closure you’ll get is knowing you tried your best.
- I can include pleasure in my life. I can even prioritize it. It takes practice to go towards joy.
- It’s ok to want more. It’s ok to ask for more. It’s ok to change my mind.
- The opposite of peace is vigilance.
- We all deserve safety, but to extend it to more people, it has to be defined completely differently. Safety is not a place, but it’s co-created, built and rebuilt.
- Black women have very different safety calculations than white women. It’s hard for white women to recognize this. The assumption of a “right” to safety is an immense privilege.
- Privilege is believing you “shouldn’t” have to experience pain or loss.
- White violence is rooted in their [our] belief in “inherent goodness,” fueled by generational mythologies.
- Not taking yourself (caregiver) out of the caregiving equation by erasing your needs, and not distancing yourself from the “other” (those needing care), takes practice.
- Staying at the surface is not as safe as people think it is. The surface is a place most often defined by those in power. The fear of depth is real for people. The obliviousness may also be an illusion.
- “Protection” is a false promise of patriarchy. It requires servitude to access it.
- Patriarchy isolates men too and makes them dependent on women. No one is happy in these oppressive systems – even the ones who benefit most.
- The narcissist will always tell you what they’re up to by accusing you of doing the same thing.
- De-centering the male gaze is hard, even for pro-women women.
- Capitalism replaces culture with consumerism.
- People become immune to the pain they cause, so that they can live with themselves. Without accountability, they dehumanize and disconnect themselves from others in the process.
- No one has the right to tell another person if and how to forgive someone.
- Duties, obligations, obedience, piety, “prizes” or possessions are flimsy. Families based on these assumptions are brittle.
- We live in a world where relationships are ranked and restricted.
- I do not agree to be silent about the violences of this world.
- Not being believed or dismissed after a disclosure is what compounds and internalizes trauma.
- I don’t have to “make it better.” (And I so rarely can.) I don’t have to be right or good or better. I don’t always have to be the teacher, the holder, the leader, the healer. To live fully is to wrestle and reckon with our powerlessness, and not totally surrender to it.
- There is never only one right way. Some folks don’t have the interest or the capacity to find another way.
- There is so much to cry and rage about, and not nearly enough time for tears.
- Stories can be weaponized, dangerous – especially without context. Storytelling suffers under time-bound conditions.
- I can pay exquisite attention to where/how people are open to receiving care and support.
- It’s easy to be an advocate/savior of the “unborn” or people “over there.” It requires very little of you, and your privilege remains in tact. This is the convenience of saviorism, rooted in a false narrative that obscures its relationship to colonizing forces.
- Notice the ways people have been taught to outsource their inner authority or “knowing”…from birth!
- If I feel any judgments of a mother or someone’s mothering arrive, the next question for me must be, “How can I/we support her?”
- Notice the binaries everywhere. They create constant anxiety. Binaries are ready tools of settler patriarchal capitalism.
- When presented with a binary, we have to build our capacity to not automatically “claim” a preference. We must resist holding people in contempt as an automatic response to difference. It’s easier to hold the tension of choice, or the urge to choose, when we don’t have to do it alone.
- Contempt is such a temptation.
- Resentment does not build character.
- Be a beacon for those ready for something else. Keep learning how to spot those who are ready.
- To be an artist is to be willing to be audacious.
- Relating to people only materially or rhetorically hurts everyone.
- Ardent certainty can obscure others’ realities. My experience is no more or less valid than yours. My experience can be shaped by yours.
- Boundaries defined by identity still require protecting, and thus far too often, policing.
- Oppressive systems, rooted in superiority, obscure the inescapability of death. They create false expectations of perpetuity.
- Modernity’s false promise is allowing some people to think they have the right to escape death.
- Death is not the end that modernity tells us it is. Notice the ongoingness of Life – its glorious continuousness.
- When nothing is certain, everything is possible.
- Change is the only thing we can rely on. To fight change, is to fight Life. God is change.
- Separateness is a lie. It was created for the purpose of domination and control. Defying separateness is the revolution. Healing is closing the gap between the self and others.
- There is no small change.
We don’t know when or even if the coin will drop for others.
So let’s just keep speaking our truths.
What coins dropped for you in 2023?
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Continue to build and apply the pressure: funders4ceasefire.org
Also for those who work in global development, join us in taking action here: www.change.org/p/calling-on-globaldev-ceasefire-now
We support justice and liberation.
We are done being silent.
We demand a ceasefire now.
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Thank you so much Jennifer, this was beautiful! Ben