Movement is not the center of revolution, but the doula to it. We must be able to see and hear the revolutionary capacity of people anywhere.
We must build an internal sense of movement and justice that fortifies us and sustains our resilience and strength.
This is a time to be brave in our learning, and in our interventions.
This may be the last time my primary intended audience are active in movements for social and environmental change. I wrote some of these essays while embedded in this world, and some from a distance, more orbital. All come from a place of deep longing.
I have been reflecting on what I learned as a full-time movement worker, and what I am now learning as an artist and a writer dedicated to changing this world of ours—still feeling my roots in the soil of movement, even as I take new forms of flight. What I see is that my deepest longing is to shift our collective ways of being from fragility to fortitude.
When I speak of movement, I am including those of us who live with the wisdom that a better world is possible through our collective actions, our organizing and outreach, and our practices. I believe movement is meant to be a ground solid enough for people to step on to and feel the future, feel at home, and to feel welcomed, compelled, and engaged. Ideally, movement is not the center of revolution, but the doula to it. I believe movement can—and should—embody futures that course-correct for the current worlds we are immersed in, and invite our best selves to flourish.
Our collective revolutionary practice, then, must include the eradication of the unjust worlds that live within and between us.
It takes strength to let go of what harms us. One of the gifts of fractal thinking is that it allows us to see how the lessons we learn in our individual lives reveal what we need to understand collectively. For instance, I have had to extract myself from bad relationships more times than I’m proud of. I’ve said yes to outdated romantic offerings, which framed “love” through a lens of control or limitation. I am writing a book on love, but I can share here that through these lenses, love was a construct of fundamental compromise—as well as unspoken commitments to lie to each other—as we contorted to “make things work.”
I can see how these small, private relationships were frontlines for me, sites where I participated in scarcity thinking, competition, and unnecessary suffering that kept me disempowered and distracted from freedom. I can also see how my current practices of love—staying rooted in cooperation, honesty, boundaries generated for the sake of freedom, and being transparent about who I am and what I need—feel like planting seeds of the worlds I want within me.
To get to a new way of being, I have had to be brave enough to break my own heart (quoting Cheryl Strayed) every time it took on an outdated shape, in the name of connection. I didn’t see this when I was in the middle of it, but now I understand that I was trying to build and remain in a “caterpillar house,” instead of surrendering to the goop that would allow my evolution into my butterfly nature. The caterpillar and butterfly are true forms—one is not better than the other—but the need to grow and change is inevitable. I believe the human species is meant to make drastic transformations and adaptations, such as moving from walking to flying; from battle to having ease in our connections; from isolation to existing interdependently; and from struggling to taking on shapes that allow our survival and our wonder.
These metamorphoses are not for the fragile or fainthearted. To break one’s own patterns down, to enter the space of truly not knowing what to do differently and surrendering to that, becoming not “nothing” but rather something entirely foreign, something unrecognizable, and perhaps not even truly visible to the past self . . . This is miraculous work that requires strength, repetition, and practice. And, unlike the caterpillar and butterfly, humans require mindfulness to change so drastically. Before most of us surrender, we must first grow tired of having our faces in the dirt, and weary of our fatal games of dominance. We must grow tired of self-proclaimed fragility and recognize that we can change, that we must change to keep living.
What do I mean by self-proclaimed fragility? I am trying to point to the tendency within movements that I have watched fester and spread over the last two decades—a tendency toward complaint without solution, toward building a repetitive narrative of what is wrong. Similarly, we focus on each other’s mistakes and misalignments instead of devising ways to collaborate, to support each other’s unlearning and growth, and to be accountable for what happens in shared spaces.
Too often I have witnessed people participating in movements in ways that increase our collective fragility, make movement spaces volatile and reactive, and keep collective attention on surface-level flaws and the weaknesses of the oppressed. Too often, we have not spent enough energy to extract oppressive roots within ourselves, and within our shared spaces. This is deep, entrenched, and necessary labor.
This is not to say that our internal accountability is not important—it absolutely is. In fact, authentic internal accountability is a nonnegotiable part of this freedom work, because so many of the systems that oppress us do so by using our own minds against us. These systems make us believe we deserve to suffer, overwork, go without, and believe, in some way, in our inferiority.
One of our current patterns is to demand accountability from others, accountability that we are unwilling to demand of ourselves. Or we demand accountability in performative ways that actually weaken our collective work. This isn’t easy to talk about, because one element of fragility can be immense defensiveness. I want to reach past that defensiveness, past our parts that are scared to set our fragility down. I want us to resist the habit of attacking those who are closest. In my opinion, we often make these moves to avoid feeling humbled by the massive scale of the opposition we actually face.
Movement fragility occurs when we want accountability or action that is beyond our current capacity, and/or when we believe we cannot change, and/or when we want accountability without relationship. Fragility occurs when we are in movement formations that rely on our collaborative effort, but we spend the majority of our time pointing out each other’s shortcomings and failures or building blaming narratives about others—especially about those who risk stepping into leadership. We make our own formations and structures shaky because we are not willing to engage in the depth of honest communication and relationship that allows fortification.
We must be able to see and hear the revolutionary capacity of people anywhere, to uplift the good in each person trying to make this world more just. This means hearing people who we might see as a bit behind us in their analytical development, and it includes people who may not agree with us on every issue. We can struggle with each other, but we must be mindful not to get caught in patterns of struggle while our oppressors take note, celebrate, and accumulate more power.
We must build an internal sense of movement and justice that fortifies our resilience and strength. This is a time to be brave in our learning and our interventions.
As you finish reading this book, here are some questions for moving from fragility to fortitude:
Am I complaining or focusing on limitations (my own or others) as a form of procrastination?
What am I committed to changing in this lifetime? Is my current work aligned with that commitment?
Which relationships in my life matter to me? How can I fortify those relationships?
Do I trust myself to learn from my mistakes?
And some practices:
Meditation, meditation, meditation.
There are so many ways to meditate—your way might be sitting in awareness, walking, yoga nidra, or something else. But meditation is a way to learn to be in relationship with your mind, rather than trapped within your mind.
Mediation.
Small to large-scale mediation helps tend to the raw edges of fragility. Having someone hold a conversation, referred to in my book, Holding Change, as “kitchen table mediation” can help people hear each other, find alignment, and clarify boundaries.
Boundaries!
Everyone isn’t meant to do the same thing in the same way in the same space with the same beliefs. Boundaries allow us to find the right distance from everything else on earth for our brief lifetimes. Boundaries keep us from wasting our precious lives. And knowing what lanes are yours can help you really let go of trying to control people in their lanes. I can testify to the fortifying power of strong boundaries to support my clear sense of what I am not here to do, and to protect the time, energy, and focus I need to answer my actual calling.
Truth telling.
Learn to speak the truth, learn to hear it, learn to honor that there are many truths, and become allergic to anything that isn’t the truth. Cause we live in the real world, my loves.
I hope that everything in this book lands with the loving energy I poured into it. These are all lessons and corrections I have learned the hard way and learned in relationship. What persists in me is the spirit of curiosity, the desire to keep learning how to be human, with you.