2017 for me (as me) & 2017 for me (as an American)

a love ethic for changing the world

This reflection/these notes are adapted from a post I drafted when challenged to reflect on 2017 and to share 2018 goals as an admin in a Facebook group that friends and I started together post-women’s march/post-Trump election last year to educate, crowdsource organizing resources, and turn allyship talk to accomplice action. I hope they remind you of your own agency, as is their purpose.

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” — Cornel West

2017 was a personally fulfilling year in which I experienced what feels to be self-growth — during which I let go of hesitation and fear and just *did* instead, as much as I could, anyway. How I did this I don’t know. Imagine Anxiety using my heart like a pull-up bar. I pried their hands off and fled as quickly as I could before they catch up and start the whole process over again. In some ways, I was finally on my way to becoming the cool adult the young me always wanted me to be, by fighting this internal battle and getting wins.

The personal highlight reel:

• I travelled to countries I’d never been to — and alone, without dwelling on this fact (it was not a deterrent at all where it might’ve been just a few years ago).
• I learned to express anger more productively — and begin expressing it at all.
• I accepted and did two public speaking gigs — one of which I used to call out sexual harrassment in the atheist movement.
• I wrote an article about the Women’s March with excerpts that I’m still proud of.
• I examined my cis-monog-heteronormative-amatonormative relationship desires and made strides in determining for myself what liberates me while coming to peace with how my desires and ways of being were shaped by the society I grew up in.
• On a separate, but related note, I am learning not to reflexively fight my “hysterical,” “psycho,” “needy” feelings and pay attention to what they signal about my needs and ways of interactioning with the world (oftentimes, they signal a need for more safety, respect, and clear communication than taking place).
• I continue to persevere in questioning everything — while also somehow trying my best to not let others take my truth and stand firm in knowing my experiences of life are valid…you know, whatever the fuck this means.
• Most importantly, I worked on building community via my own Facebook page, letting go of my insecurities and impostor syndrome not by no longer being afflicted by them, but by seeking support, investing in my skills and knowledge, and continually fine-tuning my ability to listen to my inner voice. (This has been elucidating and confidence-building, but also time-consuming and I’ve taken pause this year to more closely monitor my social media behavior — to be even more intentional about my use of time.)

I wrote in my reflections at the end of 2016 that I “fell a little more in love with myself,” and 2017 ended no differently. Love is wanting to nurture and invest in my growth, love is wanting to treat my body and time with care and attention and respect, love is patience. Love is seeing myself through my own lens, not anyone else’s.

bell hooks wrote in All About Love: New Visions, “There can be no love without justice,” a sentiment I’ve always felt that I understood implicitly, but have never previously considered with regard to self-love, an arena in which my discerning nature often fixates on flaws instead of compassion, on the vast imperfections of my existence, on control instead of on growth, learning, and living. So I’ve had to learn, how do I apply justice in seeing myself to make room for love?

These years came with their challenges, a lot of moments of despair, but with this self-love, these years also came with an increased confidence in my ability to “be fine” — if not immediately, eventally — an increased confidence in “this, too, shall pass,” mostly because there’s too much still left to be experienced and too many stories left to tell and too much left to be made better in the world.

But most importantly, a Big Question of 2017 of mine, and I would argue a Big Question that the US is grappling with as well — it’s present in all our public conversations about the role of journalism and the economic map of US media, our marches, our five million thinkpieces that we suddenly all feel emboldened to write on Facebook or Twitter — is answered with self-love, and that question is how we channel the outrage generated into progress, as defined by each of us.

And the answer, quite simply, is self-love because it enables doing. And doing together. Energy is available. The catalyst is present. The next hurdle is to resist the urge to hand off the baton to another — to not heed to impostor syndrome or to the bystander effect. We must act, mistakes and all — bearing in mind that we are working as thoughtfully as possible and will attempt to practice restorative justice. It is time to wield our agency, be proactive, and to trust ourselves, because we’ve always been capable — at the least — of learning how to become capable/figuring out where we are capable — even if that means surviving, which is not a bare minimum but a perpetuation of the truth that is you.

Personally, I’d like to continue my work in providing services for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. I’d like to figure out how to do more for young Black girls, who are tasked with burdens of community cohesion, managing the emotions of men (who are tasked with the burdens of lack of access to economic opportunity), sexism, and racism. #prisonabolition

I’d like to research how to do more with regard to the homeless population in my community. I’ve become incensed ever since armrests were put up on the three benches in the “park” (a very small garden with three benches) that I walk past every day because residents of my neighborhood “felt unsafe.” These hostile design measures were apparently put in place as a “compassionate response,” and we all know in whose favor the compassion i$.

I’d like to contribute to constructing a virtual hive mind for organizers and organizing.

• I envision a directory of contacts, venues, best practices for resistance methods by issue, and local laws on assembly and demonstrations.
• I envision a library of in-depth research on the policy approach on particular issues in our localities, devising surveys of the populations they affect, consulting organizations and experts working in these fields (panel sessions where we bring our informed questions), and bringing this information to our lawmakers.
• I envision creating citizen’s guides for scenarios based on the discussions we have in the group about handling racism in the workplace, about interventions when we witness sexual harassment, about what to do in a medical emergency, about homelessness, about substance abuse, etc.

I have been toying with the idea of designing a temporal physical space (CONFERENCE!) for the accumulation, elevation, and showcasing of secular women-brilliance that will lead to further collaborations among the non-men who care about church-state separation, but realize our true power lies in our ability to wield our rationality in fields that tackle social ills head on. I don’t see this manifesting in 2018, because I don’t see myself currently efforting this undertaking. My experience with the atheist movement has generally left me distraught or at least uncomfortable. While I generally stand my ground to make room for me and others like me, the feeling that I don’t belong and never will — as someone who never had to deal with leaving a faith, as someone who is never going to be well-versed in Judaeochristian lore, who has little emotional investment in discussions of subjects such as Jesus’s existence — this feeling persuades me to invest my energy elsewhere.

And there is so much more I’d like to get done (read 75 books, for one of many examples!), so much to be done, and so much we are capable of working on.

Am I daunted by all this? Only if I shoulder the responsibility myself and only if I have an ego so large I believe myself to be some sort of savior, instead of a cultivator, a farmer among many, tilling the world to be kind, seeding kindness with that of my own.

And I’m clearly not alone. I’m among many, bursting with brilliance, whether they know it or not, whether they write it out and publicly share their motivations and goals or not. If the conversations already taking place online were not enough affirmation, my own offline conversations and engagement with other changemakers (aka human beings) cements my confidence in our ability to affect change.

More than that, we must trust that we are loved (we can know this tautologically when we love ourselves), that our skills are valuable, that our existences uniquely contribute to the world through the very ways we interact with each other. Never doubt the impact of your own actions — and don’t try to prejudge the magnitude. Your presumption of your own worthlessness based negative self-talk could deprive another of the tremendous impact you have on them.

We must also trust each other: to trust that one person’s expressed desire to accomplish something is genuine and in turn, follow-through with offering our assets.

What does this mean? This translates into taking responsibility for the evolution of the US political sphere, of our communities, of our places of employment, of our families, of our homes. Each of us has a network, each of us lives in a place that is governed by multiple governing bodies that answer to their constituency, each of us is a concerned individual who cares about reducing unjust human suffering, each of us has resources — whether they are our own two hands, a working knowledge of how to search on Google, a bank account, a person who loves us, a labor economics textbook in the closet that we know how to read, a car.

I have lofty goals. You have lofty goals. Some might call them naive. They are only naive if that’s the type of world we’ve resigned ourselves to, if we’re protecting privilege, if we’re working only for ourselves, not for the future. I promise you I won’t have the energy to consistently drive forward my dreams for myself or the world. I am confident and I will need you to be the formidable leaders I already know you to be and to shape our futures together.

Xo.