How We Keep Going

I’ve been working on this post for a while: processing, writing and deleting, and writing, deleting, and processing.

Hey…how are you? That was the text I sent to my closest female friends in the days following the election. On the first day, I sent it from my bed, littered with crumpled tissues and an overwhelming sense of despair. On the second, it came from my office, where my (seemingly bottomless well of) rage was tempered with tinges of resignation, and resolution. The texts led to conversations, connection, community - in short, what we need now and in the coming years to make it through whatever is to come.

The answers I got back over text revealed a chasm of emotion: We were raging, grieving, sobbing, exhausted, terrified, feeling guilt and shame, feeling resolute, feeling hopeless, feeling helpless, feeling betrayed, feeling that we hadn’t done enough, feeling the weight of collective pain.

It was all so familiar, at first. The outpouring of grief and rage stripped bare in the public square of online spaces. The severed relationships and finger pointing. The endless analysis from mansplaining Monday morning quarterbacks.

And yet, after the initial shock and despair, things had a feeling of - I won’t say normality - perhaps sameness is more apt, that I wasn’t expecting. I began to notice my conversations shifting as many of us described a similar feeling. A quiet sense of retreat, a newly distilled clarity about what (and who) we wanted to be with, and a nearly irresistible pull to turn inward.

It’s understandable. There’s a limit to how much the collective consciousness can process during any given decade, and I think we hit it some time ago.

It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we’re out of capacity. Having our values challenged and feeling a lack of autonomy are two of the most common causes of burnout. I think this is where many of us are right now.

We desperately need respite, rest, and healing in community. But we also need to stay engaged and keep working for good. The only way to do that is to be ruthlessly clear about our capacity, both personally and as communities.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what collective sustainability and realistic capacity looks like in this moment. I don’t have all, or perhaps any of, the answers, but I do have a collection of things I’m rooting into.

Making Space for Grief

Our culture treats grief as something to be managed and overcome. We want to move through stages and check them off a list, but the truth of the matter is that you don’t move through grief, it moves through you. No matter how much we’d like those stages to be linear, they rarely are.

To me, grief is a spiral where we move through the different facets of grieving over and over, but with less intensity over time. As we grow more distant from the center, we gain perspective and create space for other emotions to exist alongside our grief. But if we don’t allow space for ourselves to experience the grief, we might stay locked in the center of that spiral, unable to move beyond the loss.

When it comes to equity and justice work, I’ve both experienced and witnessed what it means to create space for grief, and what it looks like when we refuse. Allowing ourselves to grieve builds our capacity by connecting us with the richness of the full emotional spectrum. It gives us permission to accept reality and begin from there. When we don’t make space to sit with what is, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to create what could be.

Slowing Down and Connecting

Overwork as a form of numbing is so ubiquitous as to be invisible in our culture. I’m not talking just about the jobs that we do to make an income, I’m referring to the all-consuming pressure to be productive at all times. Impact is important, but when everything from hobbies to how we care for our bodies to the time spent with loved ones becomes something to obsess about getting ‘right,’ it makes life an endless chore.

One of the things I hear most from mission-oriented leaders that I work with is “I don’t have the time.” My response is almost always: You don’t have time not to.”

Allowing yourself to spend time without an end goal is an act of resistance. Making time for being, instead of focusing on doing is where we find true rest and creativity. Finding genuine connection with other humans and taking time to listen to each other or enjoy silence is how we nourish the community we need to sustain ourselves. We cannot heal alone; our strength is in community. This is how we build capacity for the important work we want to do.

Finding Pockets of Joy

As an ND person with a high degree of empathic sensitivity, I’ve struggled my whole life with allowing myself to fully feel joy. Part of this is because joy is one of our most vulnerable emotions. The minute we experience it is often the same instant we’re struck with the fear of losing whatever it is that makes us joyful. In addition to this, many of us might feel that experiencing joy is somehow a betrayal of all who are experiencing suffering.

Nothing could be further from the truth because joy is the birthplace of compassion, hope, and longing for a better future. Making time to experience joy is what keeps us from falling into despair and losing our ability to create change. Joy is what fuels our hope and as Austin Channing so eloquently stated after the election, “Hope is a duty. Hope is what we do, regardless of how we feel.”

I’ve spent these last months experimenting with ways to build time and space for these three things into my life and work. It’s an imperfect process, but I’ve noticed an energy within me that feels purposeful and aligned, rather than reactive and frantic. In this moment, I’m motivated to keep going and find areas where I can have impact, in spite of anything else that’s happening in the world. In this moment, I’m rooted in the work of resistance and that’s enough.