Sometimes, you just have to try.
Try something else. Pursue something new. Take a chance. Step into the void. Feel the fear and do it anyway.
You know all the clichés. They’re all true, and no less terrifying.
Last year, I invited four online friends I had made since the start of COVID to Nebraska, from four different states. We had been meeting on Zoom every Sunday, growing our connection and intimacy. I had asked them here to help me thank the farmland I inherited last year from my family for its harvest, and to continue to birth new ideas of how we might live and work together.
Our gathering together ushered in honesty, healing, challenge, breakdown, rawness, confusion. All my skills in ‘staying with the trouble’ and ‘loving with boundaries’ were required and put to the test and refined. Dreams of mutual delight and reciprocity came and went and exist somewhere in the mess of the highs and lows.
I often tell people, gently if I can, that grief work is part of liberation and community building. A big part in fact. Realizing and feeling in my body (not just learning about) the cost of oppressive systems on myself, and on our relationships to each other and the planet is something that I know cannot be done or even held on our own. Along with all the calls to “reimagine” the future, is the slog of building our self-trust and stretching ourselves beyond what we think is possible. And for me this includes building my skills in being together when all I want to do is bail.
Despite the sadness and disappointments, I want to be someone who dares to love, who tries to extend generosity and possibility to those I care about. I will get it wrong. I may choose to trust the wrong people. I may cause harm, hurt people’s feelings and have mine hurt too.
But I will not stop trying, despite the conditions and circumstances, how bad or good it gets.
This is an idea I also try to gently reveal to people whenever they come to me with this dilemma: “It’s so messed up. I don’t know if I should even stay working in the global development sector.”
The instinct to bail is something I have to hold in balance in myself. On one hand, as someone who has complex trauma in my past, the flee response is a survival response. It now tells me when there is danger. On the other hand, growing up in what bell hooks refers to as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” has installed in me a proclivity for disposal (related to my shadow right to comfort?) that is activated far too quickly. And of course in the case of our professional lives, everything is made muckier by the need to earn cash to live.
But the truth is that there is no escape. The muck is real and it will catch up to us, even if we leave. Because the social good sector is merely a reflection and expression of the society it seeks to shift. You can join the private sector or work for the public sector, and find the same challenges in another form. “There” is no better than “here”, and at the same time, we have to make choices that are aligned with our values and that honor what is best for our personhood. For me, given my background, I have sought out, co-created, co-led, and left all kinds of spaces aimed at ushering in healing within structures that are fundamentally broken. Bayo Akomolafe, in his course on post-activism that I took in 2021, refers to these spaces as “the cracks,” where we can find “a strange abundance in those ruptured places.”
I asked one of the capstone students that I support recently, “What does healing mean to you?” She replied, “the ability to get back up and try again.” That is exactly it. Some people may call this resilience, though we know the depoliticized and problematic individualized aspects of that concept when working across difference in the global development sector.
But for me, when I can pay attention to the trying, I can more accurately gauge my energy and precious life force. I am more in touch with my “why” and motivations. I am more attuned to where my over-ambitious changemaker self may be taking over. I can set a pace that works for me. I can offer my tender-hearted inner child the messages it most needs to hear so that I can keep dreaming and stating those needs and desires out loud.
This time in my life is teaching me that when it feels hardest to keep going, that’s when I most need rest and reset. And this is what I wish for everyone who identifies as a changemaker in these times as well, and for every overambitious team. Let’s keep daring to reset.
What do you need to be able to keep trying?
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“Despite the sadness and disappointments, I want to be someone who dares to love, who tries to extend generosity and possibility to those I care about. I will get it wrong. I may choose to trust the wrong people. I may cause harm, hurt people’s feelings and have mine hurt too.
But I will not stop trying, despite the conditions and circumstances, how bad or good it gets.”
Very touchy! Best wishes! ?