Enrol Yourself and Mental Health
So. This blog is ten months’ late…
Early in Enrol Yourself’s first Learning Marathon, we tried a design activity called ‘the abstraction ladder’, an activity to draw out your most personal motivation in relation to a problem you’re looking to solve.
It helped me realise I’d hacked my learning question. Instead of asking one question, I’d designed my question to allow me to ask at least four.
I wanted to ask: What role can…
… user experience play in economics?
… user-centred design play in economics social change?
… UX research and design techniques play to support both?
And, finally, what role can I play? Can I become a UX researcher and designer in the field of economics social change?
Since starting Enrol Yourself one year ago I’ve found a role — in all sorts of meanings of the word. I now have a research and design-related job in a campaign, Economy, hoping to transform economics’ role in the public sphere where I designed my own project which asks the first question. They let me call myself a ‘UX researcher for the economy’ and make things to communicate our experiences as ‘users’ or the end-recipients of economics as a decision-making rationale that shapes the world. Yum. :)
But far more than this, the supportive, collective, legitimising process that was being in the community and structure of Enrol Yourself enabled me to re-form my relationship with myself.
Don’t get me wrong, my Learning Marathon was all about economics and design and I’ve come out the other side knowing deep in my bones that this is what I will do with my life. But more importantly, that feeling of knowing something in my bones, that was missing for me before.
Along the course of my marathon, I realised one other question I was asking was: what’s been my own experience of economics social change and how can I design a better role for it to play in my life?
Enrol Yourself and mental health
I came to my first Learning Marathon having lost the end of 2015 in my third major, and most overwhelming because least supported (socially, geographically, financially), depression. It happened because I couldn’t get access to something I desperately needed — work that’s good for the world and access to a world I want to live in.
The thing which I personally have found most overwhelming about depression is that not only do you so completely lose your ability to be alone with your mind, you also hate your mind so much that you lose your ability to expose it to others.
Finally, you lose your ability to structure or process any information about yourself or the world around you. Depression for me feels like a process of skills falling away — you forget how to be a person, how to be in the world, and then you have to hide from it.
One reason to be prone to depression is to who try to grapple with information which is beyond your current ability to process. At least this is true for me. Enrol Yourself helped me create a safe space to re-establish a relationship with myself beyond uncertainty, which, in the long cruel drive of bad work and a place in the world I can live through, had taken my life.
It was the learning experience which enabled me to relearn how to respond to this. To learn how to structure my own learning, unlearn old responses which will not serve me and respond positively and actively again to the idea that you still have so much further to run.
Over Enrol Yourself, I learned how to be accountable to myself, how to have a personhood and how to be in the world. I can tell you from my whole heart that Enrol Yourself is a transformative process for mental health.
In the days running up to our showcase, I wrote this down, and meant it, bone-deep and boldly:
I have learned how to have a personhood in a community, an economy and within economics social change.
Enrolling again — an act of participation
You can see why I chose to do another one. It’s now four months into my second Learning Marathon and I’ve found yet another supportive, beautiful community still enabling me to forge my own legitimacy and learn how to work with others around me. I’ve been just as inspired by the people on this journey as on the last, but, if anything, more continuously open to joy. It’s been overwhelming at times — this sense of being thrilled that we all exist.
It gives me a glimpse of a world I hope for. Zahra Davidson, Enrol’s founder, summed it up perfectly in writing:
‘Peer-to-peer learning that is purpose driven is an act of civic participation.’
As someone who longs for civic participation and a society I can participate in, I get it here. And it feels good.
I also wasn’t finished. What also happens with depression is that your mind becomes something that starts destroying social spaces.
A reason that my last depression was so devastating was that it was fundamentally to do with work. For multiple reasons in the run up to breaking down, work became a terrifying social space to me. After breaking down and leaving that job, although I had six weeks of space with a GP note that probably took me to where I am today, I still needed to work. (It’s that dratted money thing, innit?) And, although by many other measures my life improved, my social anxiety kept rocketing, eventually causing me to quit work entirely five months later.
Alongside the after-effects of the above which I still feel now, closer to the present day, not being able to find a way to socially express anti-capitalist views had made me want to go silent in social situations. A fellow Enroller shared an article the other day which captured it well:
‘Question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead.
… The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism.’
Jason Hickel & Martin Kirk, Don’t Be Scared About The End of Capitalism, Be Excited About What Comes Next
Our conversations around economics are often memes, culturally transmitted surface-level ideas, rapidly released. To myself, who has been thinking and talking critically about capitalism for a long time and striving against this type of feedback (‘Well, what would you replace capitalism with? Communism?’), it makes me feel like a meme of myself to speak about it, this time in the sense of the image. I feel like ‘a piece of text, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread, often with slight variations.’
It’s also the subject matter — in my experience, economics is deeply unintuitive to talk about. Try getting a decent definition of economics out of what’s written or defining the economy, I dare you. And to talk meaningfully about economics, you also have to ask ‘What is money?’, which is a question which has a fantastically unintuitive answer (money is debt) which takes a lot of defending from socialised myths. Talking about economics and capitalism involves talking about things which are abstract, contended, jargontastic, glaringly wrong, and almost all of which are defended by myths that go to the heart of us socially.
And, strangely, as I started working in a social change campaign about economics communication in society, I have become less and less able to talk about it. Perhaps it’s because my charity, Economy, and its sister movement, Rethinking Economics, is pluralist (we don’t hold a view on whether economic issues should change or if an economic view is right, we hold simply that multiple views of how our economies work should exist and being able to get clear information and speak about the economy is a democratic right). Perhaps it’s because I’ve been listening. I’ve been interviewing others, letting them speak about how they experience economics communication, and a fascination with this ‘user experience’ of the economy has given me the habits of an ethnographic outsider. Either way, somewhere in there I got used to listening and hanging back.
As I am now, I think I am at a place in this journey where this quote from an article shared by a fellow Enroller rings true:
‘If you’re not able to turn empathy into some sort of action, it becomes harmful.’
Holly May Mahoney, The Other Side of Empathy
I’ve been empathising and on the defensive for too long. You can hear it here. Each time I try to talk about economics recently, I go another layer into myself, and another step further from communication.
My second learning marathon question is ‘How can I communicate economics x design socially?’
How can I communicate economics x design socially?
By the end of my first marathon, I’d moved from my research question asking what role can user-centred design play in economics social change to a hypothesis about potential future relationships between the worlds of economics, design and tech. I think if we viewed economics culturally as a user-centred design discipline rather than a hard science then we would build less obsolete economic systems, like the one we have today. We’d build agile, human-centred economies rather than Waterfall, trickle-down ones.
I have things to talk about and ideas to combine. I find them hard to convey and at the moment, the answer to my question is I think I don’t want to.
If Enrol Yourself 1 helped me learn how to connect my high level question with the human one inside it (What role can I play? What role in my life should this play?), Enrol Yourself 2 is allowing me to reveal to myself more of who I am outside of economics again, and acknowledge that my confidence communicating about this area has become deeply tied to my social confidence and sense of self. This learning marathon is allowing me to feel my feelings, one of which currently is reticence.
I want to lean into this reticence. For me, it’s a learning to let go, and to put myself first over my drive to communicate about economics as an activist. Maybe for a conversation to start, I have to draw breath.
A marathon
This blog has been a long time coming, and in different forms. I wasn’t brave enough to let it live the first time it came out. So I want to give you the unedited ending I had the first time I wrote it, but preface it with something new — a stanza of Enrol Yourself’s manifesto poem, created by participants at the end of the very first learning marathon pilot.
We learn quickly by sharing, slowly by giving
Take your guards down, let your clothes off
We are not interested in what you failed to achieve
Not your excuses, nor your cover ups
Who do they serve? It can’t be you. It isn’t us.
Even a big step backwards can be part of your strut
Walking down the street naked is scary, but
Time takes conviction from the head to the gut.
…We’re not interested in how you’re different, but how you are the same,
As all the other people being people.
For me there’s been something else to this Learning Marathon idea — if I had to sum up Enrol Yourself it would be slow learning.
What do you learn from running a marathon?
I have developed my mental and physical stamina. I’ve learned how to listen internally and push my boundaries continuously. I’ve learned how to self-communicate. I’ve learned how to pace myself, with people there alongside me, willing each other to succeed at something unnecessary, optional and important.
A learning marathon is a challenge to integrate your life with boundary-pushing and gives you a chance to recognise that every day every person is keeping making courageous, embodied choices to go on. A marathon in which you can tire but keep trying.
I want everyone I know to do it, to give themselves the time and legitimacy and self-trust to explore something. To relearn how to see their adult selves as a learner and the lifelong exploration of your mind as a thing which is available to you whatever your circumstances.
‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.’ Plath
