growing into complexity

an.
an.
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

I am not a good person.

This isn’t a call for people to refute the claim. This is just a fact. I’ve known this about myself from a very young age, and I would say that still, after all this time, it is true. I don’t particularly feel the need to name specifics, but I know that I have done, said, and thought some profoundly ugly things. And I will continue to do so.

But, at twenty-three, I’ve realized that…I don’t really give a shit about good or bad.

Two years ago, I wrote the following:

“I value complexity and nuance first and foremost. I feel exhausted and dishonest when I try to ‘convince’ others to see things in a certain way. It’s so much more interesting and, for me, important to complicate. I feel like this world is so quick to judge right or wrong, left or right, radical or reformist, etc. In reality, it’s always both, neither, more.

“It’s always so much more.

“I, like all humans, embody contradictions and hypocrisies. It’s not our job to scrub ourselves into some straightforward, consistent being. We can’t. At any point, I can occupy the space of both the oppressor and the oppressed, the abuser and the abused. I don’t want to be either, and yet I am both. We won’t win if we keep trying to pick one or the other. But I think in investigating how we embody all of that and more, we’ll find some new–and better–answers.

After a grueling year in graduate school and student teaching, I feel this more than ever. Over and over again, I was asked, “Why are you doing this?” The current state of the U.S. public education system certainly makes it hard to figure out why people should go into teaching. A teacher does so much in any given day that it’s hard to keep perspective: am I teaching so students become ivory tower academics? Raging, critical revolutionaries? Obedient members of an oppressive, racist, heteropatriarchal capitalist state? Participatory citizens of a free democracy? Every day one sees how I and my students are pulled in so many directions. I find it hard to maintain a clear vision, and oftentimes I fear I am perpetuating harm through my actions or inaction. Then, suddenly, I find myself catastrophizing and seeing myself responsible for the end of all things.

(If you know me, you know I do this a lot.)

But I’ve also learned this past year that Alice Walker was right: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” We have to be. Adrienne Maree Brown and the principles of emergent strategy also remind me that so much of Mother Nature teaches us that we are surrounded by beautiful, harmonious systems that know how to be in community with each other. And they achieve that beauty through simple, important movements that generate an elegant complexity. The future we want is in us, right now.

My students, community, and I all live with so much trauma. To be honest, as a woman of color and a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse, there is not a day that goes by where I don’t question my sense of safety at least once. For many of my students and loved ones, hardly ever do they feel safe enough to take a deep breath, to truly relax. Trust and safety seem to exist in scarcity, rather than abundance. I watch them test their environment and the people around them, oftentimes causing pain just to see who is really going to stick around in the chaos.

But I see how incredible these people are. Behind their (justified) fears to share it all, I see a limitless desire towards trust, belonging, and connection. I see a firm will towards complexity. They don’t want to be reduced to any single assumption or stereotype. They want to be their whole selves, but sometimes survival is easier when we make things simple.

So, as a teacher, I feel successful when I see complexity in the classroom. Every time students feel love and loved, every time their natural curiosity leads them to more complex ways of seeing the world, every time they connect ideas and hearts together…I feel like we are all bringing the future we want and the present moment closer together.

Going back to my original point, I am not a good person…but I believe in good.

I believe that goodness, kindness, generosity, and love are worth the struggle. No matter where I land at the end of my life. And that these things are real when they are complex.

Focusing on these syncopations in isolation, seeing these offbeat moments in our lives solely as mistakes or happenstance successes, bar us from the full richness of the music. Sometimes an off-beat may surprise you. May make you want to get up and dance. It is too easy to dismiss people for the terrible things they have done or said, and decide that I do not love them anymore. It is also disingenuous to ignore what is terrible and call my willful ignorance “unconditional love.”

It is so much more beautiful to look at all of it. To look carefully and deeply at others and myself. To see the ugly, to see the good, then point and say,

“Look! Here is where love can grow.”

an.

Written by

an.

poet. buddh-ish. emotional midwife.

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