This week I am again confronted with my impatience, my tendency to take on too much, and my difficulty slowing down to talk about what’s going on so that others both know and have the chance to support me. Something in me feels it’s easier if I do it myself, and yet doing it myself brings great tension, and these days the responsibilities I hold are becoming too complex and varied.
A burden carried alone is far heavier than one shared, but to share a burden we must:
1. Acknowledge it is a burden.
2. Decide if it’s worth carrying or letting go.
3. If we choose to carry it, tell others how they can help us in doing so.
Each step may be excruciating in its own ways. There is a terror in disappointing or being disappointed, harming or being harmed, and yet so much freedom when we can honestly acknowledge how we feel. “I hate doing this, and I don’t want to do it anymore.” Or “I hate doing this, but not doing it would be worse.” Or “I love doing this, but it’s still feeling like too much.”
Then we can have an honest conversation with those involved in our burdens. We can put on the table our gifts and limits, our desires and frustrations, and look at them together like a puzzle we need to solve—rather than a series of personal attacks on each other.
This week as a therapist has been a real throwback to the late 2016s and early 2017s when the political climate threw a lot of folks into an urgent need to see a therapist, and as a “politicized healer” I was one of many who invited these conversations.
The right wing coined the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to make fun of liberals and lefties who they saw as overreacting to the presidency, and these days I feel like that’s as good of a name as any for how much he got under our skin, how much we became enflamed by his words and actions, the intensity with which we followed every word and every event. And there was so much drama! And so much lying! And a relentless barrage of things happening and being said that broke our social and democratic norms and kept many of us in a constant state of stress and outrage.
I think there’s something to Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think it was a product of a chaotic president and a media culture that profited off our nervous system dysregulation.
This past month, I see that TDS beginning to take hold again, and hear some of my therapists who apparently must have started sometime after COVID wondering how to support clients with political anxiety, so I feel a collective bracing for impact among those in certain circles of ideology.
If I seem glib or dismissive, I’m not, but after eight years I don’t think anyone wins when this kind of upset takes hold. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, in crisis we do not rise to our heroic imaginations, but sink to our familiar coping and survival strategies. I don’t blame anyone for surrendering to doom and cynicism—I spend far too much time there myself—but let’s take a breath.
Studying martial arts is kind of an oracular experience, in which the teacher offers a correction of my technique that ends up hitting far too close to home. I am thoroughly called out. This morning, my sensei kept calling attention to my tendency to flinch in the face of an attack. In one moment that keeps lingering with me, he said, “Tony, don’t fall before you’re thrown.”
On a practical level, it’s just annoying for your partner to fall before you’ve actually finished the technique, so it’s on us to stay with the throw as long as we can. Why that statement lingers with me today is the conversations I’ve been having this week about making plans in an uncertain future. One client is contemplating big, meaningful changes in life but wasn’t sure what to do if their worst fears came true in the country.
But giving up on your goals and being the person you want to be before an election even happens is falling before you’re thrown. Making yourself small and starting to hide for fear of future targeting is falling before you’re thrown. It’s tempting, and it makes sense for wanting to survive, but whom does it serve? The other side of falling before you’re thrown is that the person throwing you might have bad technique. They might make a mistake that gives you an opportunity to turn the interaction around. You miss the opportunity if you give up before they’ve even won.
I don’t know what will happen in the next four years, and I do not dismiss or belittle the fears many of us are bringing to this upcoming election. If your fears need attention and need you to take some reasonable precautions, that is a sound practice. What I’m inviting is for us to take our psyches and our power back from derangement and doom. If you’re afraid of being bullied, don’t do the bully’s work on their behalf. If you’re afraid of losing your joy, don’t throw your joy away. Don’t take in the dark voices that fill you with dread and powerlessness unless somehow that gives you liberty. Stay engaged as long as you can.
I keep avoiding this—the blog, writing Internet things, self-expression.
Partially it’s because my writing energy has gone toward other projects.
The book I am working on is with the publisher and in the editing stage, and whenever I complete a major undertaking I find there’s a period of lostness, emptiness, and fallow creativity. I maintain a level of daily writing practice and the all-important social media self-promotion through making little contemplations every morning to post on my professional Instagram and Facebook. This has been a lovely practice of bringing together my therapist and spiritual selves—tuning into the planetary ruler of the day, listening to what it wants to “tell me,” and then creating a short contemplation that could easily scroll by someone’s feed and give them a moment of thought, connection, inspiration. It’s been a relief to hide a bit, revealing a tendency outside of myself rather than something within.
Partially it’s because I’ve been going through it since December on the personal level.
I am grieving some precious losses, regaining my strength in a body that is aging, navigating professional challenges. I am feeling more and more the weight of carrying an entire practice alone. I am overwhelmed by how much the conditions of my own country are changing so quickly and realizing that the dreams of my childhood were for a world that no longer exists. I am so blessed and privileged that it feels hard to complain about it. Parts of me get impatient with my own complaining. And yet when I go too long pretending I’m fine, a collapse is inevitable. So I must allow myself to complain and seek support. But to complain appropriately, to the people in my life who can support me, and not those whom I serve.
Partially, I have been avoiding this because I’ve been protecting my heart and that protection is making my heart cynical and shallow.
What I want to practice is an open, connected heart but still defended against danger and inhumanity. How that practice is showing up for me lately is to turn where I’m being led. If I want to go one direction but I’m being pushed in another, it works so much better to just let myself take the turn and go with the movement. This used to feel like some kind of weakness or sacrifice of will—I have to do it myself! And yet it seems just as often that turning where I’m led ends up introducing me to the opportunities I need. At the very least I’m not overwhelmed with struggle and able to remain clear, present, connected, soft.
Partially, I have been avoiding this because every time I sit to write I feel I am supposed to have a take on what is happening in the world.
I hear Sinead O’Connor singing, “These are dangerous days. / To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.” The past four years have done a number on my idealism and particularly on my sense of who I am and what role I play in the world. I burnt out on my white saviorism and fell into some cynical despair.
As someone who tends to affiliate with “politicized therapists” I have been in a time of re-reflecting how to be with politics in the therapy room.
I wouldn’t say the therapy room is or can be a space outside of politics, or depoliticized. And I feel so strongly that the therapy room is a space for us to be safe to explore every part of ourselves, and if there’s a strong political agenda in the room, that tends to shut down safety and exploration. So I feel more appreciative of the tradition of therapist as blank slate and conscious of the truth that it is impossible for me to be a truly blank slate. My parts of self are always with me in some capacity, carrying their unique blindspots and gifts, their perspectives of the world informed by my material conditions and history.
The challenge continues to be how to create opportunities for honest and courageous conversations in a way that allows for the emotional safety and care of my clients, whom I serve. Ongoing Internet discourse seems to be frustrated with the idea that the therapist is on the side of their clients, and probably those sharing those memes are imagining someone they’re really done with who’s ostensibly in therapy and not “getting” what they think the person should be “getting” and blaming the therapist for that.
And, sure. That’s always a problem. Maybe the therapist isn’t challenging the client on those issues and there are so many reasons that could be happening. The therapist may share that blind spot. The therapist may be wholly unaware of this problem because all we have to work with is what the client tells us. The therapist may be wholly aware of this problem and sensitive to the reality that coming at it with a direct confrontation could severely damage the relationship, and then the therapist has no leverage at all.
Sometimes it is wise to be patient, and wait, and wait until the client feels safe enough to begin to talk about a thing, and wait some more, and help them to be able to tolerate exploring their own ambivalence about their behavior, and help them to arrive at their own change. Sometimes it is wise to be direct and strike at the skillful moment of opportunity. There’s no law, no psychological test, no statistical model that gives us the knowledge of when and how this works. All we can do is be in the field of relationship, take risks, learn what happens, and use that information to guide future risks.
Here is where I’m coming to differentiate activism from therapy. Activism leans into strong, forceful declarations to get attention to their cause, take control of the narrative, and spur action. They have to state things in really strong, totalizing ways. Therapy leans into softness, curiosity, and the confusing terrain of nuance. We keep going deeper into the questions and exploring the roots of how things came to be framed in these terms. This distinction does not mean the two don’t coexist in the same body—there are activists with a therapeutic touch, and therapists who are activists. I draw this distinction to make sense of my own inner contradictions, my pulls to be aggressive and to be sensitive and nuanced.
So I will say what I feel I can say.
I have known and loved Jewish people my whole adult life, and I know that Jewish people in America are targets of anti-semitic words and actions, violence against synagogues, and bizarre and dehumanizing tropes. So many Jewish people in the US have friends or family in Israel, and so many Israeli people have horrific stories of witnessing or experiencing traumatic violence. It makes sense to me why there could be a longing in many Jewish and Israeli people for strong, ferocious protections, to hope for a land in which one could be safe from cultural and physical violence. What happened on October 7th was horrific by any measure, and it makes sense that a person from this perspective would see Hamas as nothing other than a clear and present danger that needs to be neutralized. It also does not make sense to me to speak of Israel as somehow an exceptionally evil or invalid state, when the Israeli state is doing no more or less than what my own country has done to make space for itself and safety and wealth for its citizens. Yet the USA is not spoken of as an “entity,” so I appreciate how that is anti-semitic.
I also know and support so many Jewish people who are critical of the actions of Israel, who see the state and military’s actions as genocidal and a tremendous overreach, who feel pinched between their family’s support of Israel, attacks on their own Jewish identity for being critical of Israel, anti-semitic attacks for being Jewish or being insufficiently critical of Israel in the eyes of largely non-Jewish left-wing people. It makes no sense to me to speak of “white supremacy” in regard to Jewish identity. Jewish people are of many racial lineages, and Jewishness itself has always been sort of white when it’s convenient for white people to consider them white, and then excluded from whiteness when there’s tension and upheaval.
I also feel so much for the Palestinian people whose lives are clearly treated as less valuable than those of Israeli people. The blockade, the bombings, the killing of thousands of non-fighting Palestinians for the sake of trying to get hundreds of combatants is horrifying. The slow encroachment of territory and displacement of those who lived there before is never going to be welcomed with understanding and compliance. These are the conditions that breed more terrorism. Netanyahu’s government has apparently supported Hamas as a convenient enemy to align with his political goals, much as the USA has for various terrorist groups we’ve ended up fighting over the decades. How on earth could one blame Palestinian people for being angry when their political and economic autonomy is curtailed and stripped? They are also deserving of safety, of autonomy, of a state that has their back—if any of us are “entitled to a state.”
I am located outside of all of these positions, someone who is a witness but also culpable because my taxes are funding what is happening. So I feel these tensions of not wanting to get into a mess while also being unable to step out of it. All of these tensions make sense and the people of that land need to find the resolutions that can restore peace. What makes sense to me today is to support a ceasefire, the USA ceasing to provide armaments to the world, and focusing any US intervention on humanitarian aid.
So now I have spoken all the things I’ve avoided, and I’m curious what will come next.
Not the worst month ever, and nothing I need to share publicly, but my body went through some stuff that required a lot of deep rest and more gradual return to activity than I’d expected. In the month prior, I’d committed to returning to in-person services, and spent several days acquiring furniture for the office, setting it up, and trying to prepare the ground for myself to focus on rest and recovery and then easily transition to the office. I have a part that works so hard to give future me a break, and when future me ends up struggling anyway, this part of me takes it personally.
Other challenging things decided to occur that were not part of the plan. My recovery was not so swift or complete as I’d expected. The doctor I saw said I had “no physical limitations” and could go back to normal activity, but did not clarify what normal activity was, only to add, “obviously listen to your body and use common sense.” As someone who really, really craves clear explicit expectations, this threw me into confusion. What is common sense? Nurses, friends, and family members all had a range of opinions as to how I should be doing my recovery, how long I should wait before going back to the gym or martial arts.
Earlier in life, I was so afraid of hurting myself or making injuries worse that I tended to over-rest and avoid exercise and effort when I thought something was happening. Later, frustrated with all that lost time, I pushEd myself to keep exercising too quickly after injuries and illnesses. I learned that a certain amount of movement is helpful toward healing more quickly, while trying to do the same exercise you did at prime health was a quick route to creating more injuries and setbacks.
Whatever sense I could derive—I don’t know if it’s common—is boiled down in what the doctor said: listen to my body. The historical problem was that I was not fluent in my body’s language and needed a number of good and bad experiences to gain a more robust vocabulary. The most definitive thing I can say is that my body needs both movement and rest in varying proportions. Even immediately after I went through the stuff, I was advised to do a little walking around to help my body clear whatever gas they used to inflate my innards and make room for their little surgery machine. But walking for five minutes was pretty agonizing, and I was happy to rest shortly after.
What I found helped the most was to do a little bit, rest, and then try doing a little bit more. For the first week, I did little other than rest on the couch, catch up on all the fever dream horror movies I’d missed (laughing hurt too much), and do little laps around the living room. For the second week, I started doing half hour walks around the block, especially to and from the office.
By the third week, I felt like I could do more stuff but didn’t want to overdo it. My dojo had a special class memorializing the unexpected loss of one of our community, and that felt like something I could attend and just do what I could and sit out what I couldn’t. To my surprise, I could do a lot more than I expected, without pain. To my other surprise, there were things my body seemed to struggle with that were easy before. I’d get stuck in weird parts of the movement that were formerly smooth, and I couldn’t tell why I was stuck.
What worried me most was getting treated like a black belt and thrown around the way my dog shakes his toys. Usually that’s fun, but I wanted to ease into it more. My dojo is very open about modifying practices based on injuries and body needs but I couldn’t figure out a way to communicate what I needed other than, “I’m at 60%.”
It turned out, this was extremely effective. Most people heard this and slowed down for me until we found a speed and intensity that worked. I couldn’t tell you exactly what 60% looks like, and no one asked for specifics, but it was enough of a signal to say—let’s not be super intense, but I do want a workout. After a week, I feel I’ve upgraded to 66.6%, which is two-thirds, but somehow percentages feel more intuitive in these conversations.
60% is beautiful because it is effort, but the slowness and gentleness has allowed me to really inhabit and explore the movements. We are still offering enough energy to each other for practice, but I could take time feeling through those places where I got stuck and sense into how the technique wants to unfold. Then I could go and rest, and feel my body integrating the effort that pushed its edges, but not to injury. This feels like a practice I want to remember in future setbacks. Not to force myself back to even 80%, but to find the percentage that feels like effort and stay there, then rest, then see if I can do a little more.
If you’ve been around activists for a long time, you might have noticed an oddity when they start getting success. When people finally are ready to hear their message, or show up newly awakened to problems and ready for direction and guidance.
Sometimes, that activist who’s been at it so long doesn’t respond in kind with gratitude or enthusiasm. Sometimes, they respond with resentment, bitterness, and a kind of collapse. Sometimes, they’re pissed at the newer people for taking so long to see the issues. Sometimes, they’re utterly unwilling to continue the work of educating.
This sucks for the folks new to the work, who could use the mentorship and wisdom of the ones who have been on the journey for a while. It sucks when we blast our new would-be allies and co-collaborators with more hostility than we’d direct at our adversaries. It feels unfair, and disillusioning, and may alienate new folks or lead them to marginalize the cranky elder.
It also seems self-defeating. Why would a person who’s tried for so long to get attention to their causes be so dismissive when people begin to care?
This emotional pattern shows up also when the resentful leader in the organization cannot stop complaining about their work and obligations but is also wholly unwilling to relinquish them. There’s a longing to be supported and mistrust that anyone could shoulder these burdens.
I’ve never understood either of these expressions until I began practicing Internal Family Systems therapy. Then I began to see a parallel experience in the inner work. When we as clients are finally able to access our Self energy and turn toward our protectors and our wounded parts with love or caring, the response is not always joy and gratitude. Frequently, it’s some angry version of:
“Finally! Why now?”
This response may feel daunting, like our connection is unwelcome, but now I see it as a sign of finally connecting. These parts of us have felt neglected and alone for too long, fighting a tough battle to keep us safe or endure their personal suffering.
As much as they may hate it, our parts also tend to cultivate a kind of pride and righteousness in their capacity to endure: I hate being alone, but it’s because I’m the only one strong enough to do this.
When it turns out there is a well of strength, love, compassion, and caring that is available and ready to take over leadership, our protectors might experience a rush of resentment and mistrust. Where have you been all this time? Now you’re going to come in and take over? And beneath that, What will happen to me if I lose my only job?
One source of this anger is the eruption of all those unmet needs and dreams deferred in service to the mission. Our protectors may have endured years of hard, unappreciated work to fight a threat that seems obvious to them and yet somehow invisible to everyone else, which only hardens that sense of I’m the one who has to do it.
All along, what these protectors have needed is concerned, caring attention. To be heard and understood and taken seriously. To be supported in community. To know that others were watching out for the same threat so there could be time for rest, or play, or enjoy the comforts and ease that those oblivious to the threat appear to enjoy.
So in these moments, that spark of anger and resentment is a good sign. Finally feeling heard and understood means there’s enough safety to feel all that exhaustion and need for care.
When we are doing our inner work from the IFS model, we have the resources of the greater Self to build trust and take over leadership from those worn-out parts, and let them take a true rest knowing their concerns are being addressed. That Self only needs to be with the resentment and the sadness, the exhaustion, offering its compassionate understanding and witness until trust is restored.
In the outer world, such ease is harder to draw upon without a larger community or spiritual body to serve as that font of care and compassion. Trust is a tricky qualit. It requires nondefensive presence, clear expectations, and making promises that are kept. In early stages, it’s easy for one mistake to undo all the gains.
When I think of my own experiences in community leadership, I was able to let go of resentful exhaustion when I felt there were protocols and people in place who were attending to the important work of the community without it all having to be my responsibility. I could let go even more deeply once I accepted it truly was not my responsibility to save anyone—that all my skills and brilliant ideas actually exist in various forms across the world, as though some larger intelligence keeps offering them to those ready to listen. So many of us are doing the work of liberation.
In observing this emotional pattern, it seems to me a kind of psychological law to understand rather than a problem to solve. Now I feel great compassion for the cranky activists I’ve met whose irritability felt so confusing and personal. I feel, too, great compassion for the newly awakened and ready to work, unsoiled by cynicism and too many years of defeat, who could not be expected to tolerate a torrent of resentment that isn’t really about them specifically.
In my dreams, we build communities with rituals of care, honoring our elders and giving them space to process these feelings with loving witness, and honoring the newly awakened to bring them joyfully and gradually into responsibility for the work we are doing. Until such rituals are in place, we can begin by honoring our own resentments, our own hard work, and to have gratitude for those cranky, battle-hardened protectors in us that were given more responsibility than one person should bear.
A recent opportunity to see the contemporary play Nonsense and Beauty, about Edwardian British author E.M. Forster, inspired me to return to my English major roots and revisit Howards End. Having only read this book once, two decades ago, my memory of it was nonexistent other than one of the central epigrams of the protagonist, “Only connect” being her message and aim in life.
As a young, voracious, American reader who spent a lot of my youth and young adulthood trying to read classics, I had read a great number of English novels without understanding them. The romantic idealism in Forster’s heroes resonated with me as a young man with spiritual inclinations, but I did not understand the class system or the economy that made those young women independently wealthy and able to pursue their philosophical and artistic interests, even in a patriarchal society that demanded marriage.
Upon rereading the novel, much later in life, I now see how central issues of class, economy, and imperialism are to both the novel and to much of the English classics I loved. “Only connect,” as expressed through our protagonist, is multivalent in calling for the connection of mind and heart, of one’s own responsibility to others, to seeing how others are guilty of one’s own sin and letting that recognition halt the call to merciless judgment. It is also, explicitly, the heroine’s call to connect her recognition of her idealistic liberal ideals and wealth to the brutish world of business, war, and empire upon which her wealth was built. Her Romantic family is set up in contrast to the businesslike capitalists in the Wilcoxes to critique the limits of both and then to literally marry them together, which illuminates and recognizes that these worlds were already bound up as one.
Because you cannot have plucky, independent heiresses living off their investments and having thoughtful debates about social issues and welfare without the business people who make those investments grow, who make calculated and cold decisions, who see the world as a resource to be harvested and managed.
More than a century after the novel’s publication, I am struck by how the central conflicts around liberal guilt have only continued to evolve. Forster’s anticipation of the continuing incursion of urbanism into undeveloped land and the rootlessness of people who do not own their own land, merely rent, seems to be well borne out at a cultural moment where more and more “ownership” as an experience seems reserved for the wealthy, and everyone else rents and pays a fee for access to even the technology they purchase.
Yet even this transformation of property and culture is lain on a foundation where many of us do not belong to the land on which we live, and would not know how to if we desired it, and would be penalized for doing so. We are trees balancing precariously on sawed-off trunks with no roots to hold us steady when the wind blows. But instead of turning toward the grief and horror of this condition, we direct our attention outward, in the pursuit of power over others or the longing to save others from our own suffering.
One of the most unsettling developments in Howards End is the deft and subtle ways Forster shows a young poor man’s life be absolutely destroyed by the well-meaning charitable interventions of our heroines, who ostensibly put all the blame on their antagonists the Wilcoxes for giving bad business advice and not caring for the outcomes—but the women themselves take on the young man as a project without his knowing or consent. They involve themselves in his life, blunder about without understanding his world or his heart, and lead to his ruin while they move on with their own concerns.
For the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of the savioristic tendencies within me. As with so many folks in mine and prior generations, I thought to balance my confusion and guilt about my unearned privilege with a dedication in service to the uplift of those less fortunate, without considering what I actually had to offer. My first years out of grad school, working with chronically homeless and mentally ill people, showed me that I knew nothing about their world. All I had to offer were values and disciplines that made little sense to their day-to-day needs for survival. They were of greater help to each other than myself, and many only saw us because we were the gates to resources they needed.
In Forster’s England, as with today’s America, this ambivalence about privilege and inequality rest upon the trembling foundations of an empire. The urges of seeking power over others and seeking to save them are two edges on Imperialism’s blade, and together they ease the blade into those countries to carve out the resources we exploit for profit, to keep the empire running.
Of what value is the inner life when it relies upon war and profiteering to exist? And what purpose is business and commerce when there is no soul to harvest its resources and give it meaning? Is there any escape to this dialectic when it only continues and seems to grow harsher with every decade?
No wonder we become tense, vigilant, reactive toward our neighbors and families, unable to tolerate the wrong word used when it may signify discord and disagreement. Our debates become shallower and emptier of thought and reflection, merely memes and talking points thrown at each other, and a listing of words that do not connect us to each other, and companies that use our anger to sell us more things.
When I look at the world in this way, it is tempting to imagine there is the possibility of going back, of rejecting empire and its fruits, of even rejecting “whiteness” as an identity and a descriptor. And yet to what could I go back? As a person of mixed-European descent who has always lived in the United States, to “go back” into my heritage would still be an act of creation, of going forward, of curating my various histories and lineages and creating a new identity.
Increasingly I find social justice discourse to be empty wind rattling litter down the road. I see the “-ism” words strung together like a spell against cancellation, as though naming all of them without explaining what is meant is enough to convey one’s conscientiousness. I see people weaponizing their identity as a basis for the authority to gatekeep and shut down disagreement rather than engage—even when it’s coming from someone sharing that identity. I see white people telling each other that there is nothing we can do to escape our whiteness, and so no action we can take is generative, all we can do is stay lost in our self-reflective white neuroses and know that we’re failing. (And I’ve been that white person.)
We all want to connect. To belong. Few of us truly want to be harmful to others, while most of us cause hurt because we feel it is necessary to do so in the moment. I do not know how to undo centuries of empire, and increasingly I think it is a paralyzing distraction. What I want is to connect to what’s here in my life. To say hello to neighbors. To nourish and nurture the people I can touch and talk with. To water the plants and keep the floors clean.
We cannot set aside generations of trauma in an instant, but we can try to take a risk with the person in front of us today. Connect the mind and the heart. Connect one human to another. Connect to the land on which we live.
This past month, I was involved in two conversations in my spiritual communities around our offerings of work and the practice of Self-care. In both conversations, in slightly different ways, I noticed an attitude of recognizing the value of our practices while simultaneously apologizing, slightly, for them.
By which I mean, adding caveats about Self-care not being a replacement for advocating for systemic change, or dismissing suggestions like “take a bath” as belittling of the struggles people experience in this world.
How I understand and experience this impulse is having been a therapist and spiritual practitioner for several years, having lived through the rise of Self-Care Discourse and the inevitable backlash to it.
What often irks me about backlashes is the tendency to overcorrect, to dismiss what was important and useful about the movement in the effort to address what is inadequate and harmful about it.
The backlash to Self-care originates, as is often the case, in its over-popularization and watering down. Important practices become touted as cure-alls, and any threat they posed to the political or economic order quickly becomes neutralized once absorbed into it.
So the transformative practices of simply sitting and doing nothing but breathing and observing one’s self, or of taking a break from hustling and consumption to relax in a warm bath, feed back into the atomizing culture of making each individual responsible for their own stress and the management of it.
Don’t you dare tell this woman this bath is silly.
I get it. I worked at a place that offered us complementary yoga sessions and back massages once a month or so, and that was absolutely lovely, but it was not enough to make up for the horribly run meetings, the unreasonable workload, and the the covert manipulations and politics. We would be pulled into meetings where we might be asked to provide recommendations of how to improve our work conditions, spend a great deal of time and care crafting those recommendations, and then sit through another meeting where our leader spent five minutes explaining why the majority of those recommendations would not be considered.
When Self-care is offered in these contexts, it comes across as both panacea and dismissal to problems that we aren’t causing and we can’t control. What I wanted was for my voice to be considered and to have control over my work conditions. No free ten-minute back massage can compensate exploitation.
In the backlash, I have seen calls for more collective, community care. Which is a beautiful vision, and one that I endorse. Knowing there are people out there who will have your back, who can be there for you and you for them, is deeply relieving of stress and buoying of the spirit.
Yet so many of us have no such community, have never experienced that kind of connection, or wouldn’t know where to begin to invest the effort and trust-building required. So many of our communities are ephemeral—they’re primarily remote, or they depend on shared employment, shared values and interests, or shared neighborhoods, all of which may change quickly and unexpectedly. When we invest in a community and find it dissolving or giving nothing back, that is deeply demoralizing.
Lonely people need something to hold onto while they’re doing the work of building community or advocating for change. Taking a bath, going to therapy, taking a walk, meditating or praying, spraying a bottle of charged aromatic water—none of these things are enough to transform oppressive and exploitative circumstances.
Yet those of us who know the importance of these practices need not apologize for that. These acts are not meant to transform the world. They are meant to create enough space and calm for our Selves to be seen and tended. They are meant to help us remember who we really are beyond this moment and this struggle, and to bring that essence into the work in front of us.
Our work is not to disconnect, but to connect with greater depth and presence over time. Self-care helps us to face the world with an inspired imagination; an open, courageous heart; and the power of our wills.
For Pride I want to say what has been on my heart for years. There has been a thread in Queer Discourse that seems to be comparing the conditions of “coming out.” Some people, it is said, have the “privilege” to be out, while others experience too much oppression or precarity. People who come out late in life likely experience some scorn and criticism for waiting so long, while recently I read a dear friend suggesting that youth have an easier time coming out than those later in life, who have to deal with the complexities of coming out with a career and sometimes a family and children that do not align with their sexuality and gender.
Multiple conflicting things are simultaneously true. No one should be pressured to come out if they’re not emotionally ready or if their life circumstances are too precarious. And the challenges and heartbreak of coming out late in life is certainly much different than the risks of coming out young. What rankles me, however, is the way these perspectives seem to subtly invalidate the courage and risk-taking of those who do come out, whether early in life or at all.
The truth is, you do not know if you have the “privilege to be out” until you are out. When I came out to my parents, I had no idea whether they’d be accepting or affirming or even allow me to stay in the house, as kids my age at that time (and today) are at risk of being thrown out when they come out to their parents. My own friends made jokes about beating up queers.
What prompted my disclosure, at age 15, was going to church with my mother and listening to yet another homily from the priest about the sinfulness of homosexuality and the Catholic love that wants to call them home (to be straight, or celibate). By this point in my life I’d been wrestling with my sexuality consciously for three years. Catholicism was deeply important to my identity and the culture of my family—our extended relatives would pray the rosary together with my grandparents during out family vacations.
I was fully aware of the Catholic teachings on homosexuality, and after much prayer, contemplation, and painful efforts to change, I’d come upon my own knowing that God was not the one who had the problem with me or my desires. What made me feel like my heart was being ripped in half was not knowing how I could honor my truth and my religious and family identity.
So while I had no reason to believe I would be shunned, I also had no idea how my parents would react. All I knew was that I could no longer live with it being a secret. That took courage. That was a risk.
Feet standing in the center of a series of rainbow-colored circles.
Coming out is always courageous, always risky. Every time I’m in a new situation that requires me to come out, there is always a moment of assessment—how safe is this situation? Am I in a condition where I’ll be able to deal with a negative reaction? And every time, you don’t know how they’ll respond until you’ve done it.
To cope with the anxiety of this, I made a practice of finding ways to come out as quickly as possible—mentioning a boyfriend or husband, or otherwise giving a tell. As an adult, it’s possible that being openly gay closed certain doors to career opportunities or other forms of social acceptance and privilege that would be available to those who kept their queerness hidden. And it’s possible that my being out allowed me to be an advocate and an influence on culture that wouldn’t have been possible.
The fact that I was able to stay afloat and make a good life for myself is of course a result of the support, community, and privileges I had, including a family that did not reject me and was willing to do the work to understand and accept me.
And there is also a privilege in receiving opportunities for wealth and status that are only available because you’re not out of the closet. And that kind of privilege is its own kind of hell, to live a life experiencing daily discrimination against LGBTQ+ folk, knowing that the life you’ve worked to build could be ruined by an accidental discovery or a disclosure.
What I want to say is, for Pride this year, in a year when the tide of the law is turning against queer people, can we honor that it’s always a risk to come out? That it always takes courage to make visible something within you that could be hidden or repressed? That there is a cost to being out, and a cost to staying hidden?
There is also a power in coming out that our queer elders and ancestors knew. When you are visible, you are a target, but you are also a force. The people in your life can’t have bias against a strange, foreign entity; they have to reconcile their beliefs about this class of people with the person that you are, and the relationship you have with them. Your love for each other makes you both irritants to each other’s worldviews.
It’s comfortable and sometimes necessary to reject the irritant and surround yourself with comforting reassurance and shared beliefs. And it contributes to the polarization we find ourselves in in our culture, where we move more and more toward extremes because we cannot tolerate the irritation of loving someone whose life does not reconcile with our beliefs.
But when you stay with that irritant, it becomes a pearl. My grandmother, with whom I prayed the rosary so much, and who said unkind things to me about gayness when I was young, came to my commitment ceremony to my husband. She was a powerful woman of sincere faith and diligent practice, attending Catholic mass daily and doing regular acts of service. She was the real deal. And as she approached the end of her life, she shared, “I just don’t think it’s that hard to get into Heaven anymore.”
I don’t believe that change was entirely about me and my coming out, but I do believe that my choice to be openly gay and to stay connected to my family was a part of this great process that held us together. And as her beliefs changed, over time I was finally able to begin to heal my relationship with family and religion and find, for me, how my heart can be whole even if the ideologies tell me it should be divided.
Whatever privileges I had or didn’t have, all of this has been work, and it has been hard. And it comes in the wake of the work that my queer ancestors did of coming out and being loud in even more dangerous times.
Coming out is courageous because it’s scary. It’s powerful because it is so risky, no matter who you are or when you do it.
The contemporary atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracism has frequently reminded me of my childhood in the 1990s when the Satanic Panic was vibrant and mainstream, with allegations of Satanic cults attempting to pervert and destroy society through secret messages encoded in Heavy Metal music and other media. There was also a terror of Satanic cults that kidnapped, assaulted, and ritually tortured or murdered babies and children. People in therapy might “discover” a “memory” of being ritually tortured in this way and accuse their parents.
None of this surfaced any real cults that engaged in this activity, and since then it’s become clear that such memories “reconstructed” in therapy are more a reflection of the secret wishes and biases of the therapist rather than a historical occurrence. (And all of which made us so collectively focused on the boogeymen that the children actually being molested in Catholic churches were missed.)
The recent resurgence of conspiracies of blood-drinking pedophiles secretly running the world and kidnapping children makes it hard not to reflect on those times. But paranoia even seems pervasive on the Left, though in a different form, as I read articles of people going to great lengths to indict people for harmful thinking with little evidence.
Often I’ve thought about my interest in loneliness a few years ago, when I learned that chronic loneliness leads to rejection sensitivity and paranoia. The person who has been too lonely too long starts to be so vigilant against social exclusion that they start to assume people are cruel or out to get them by default, making them more likely to interpret warm or neutral social interactions as signs of rejection. Frequently I wonder to what extent this past couple years of isolation, social distancing, and masking has contributed to this paranoid atmosphere.
Moments like these make me so grateful to live in a moment where I could go to my computer and type “red head christian demon exorcist from 90s” and be led to the Wikipedia page that validated this was a real memory and helped me find a linkthe full video of the debate between Christian exorcist Bob Larson’s and Satanists Zeena LaVey and Nikolas Schreck. (As a note, I will refer to LaVey and Schreck as the Satanists, but in this video they suggest it would be more appropriate to refer to them as Setianists who honor the Egyptian god Set, and my understanding is that since the filming of this debate both people have moved into different spiritual paths.)
Looking back, it seems daring and necessary for the Satanists would participate in this interview during the heat of the Satanic Panic. I admire the calmness with which they mostly sustained in weathering Larson’s challenges and at times aggressive questions. I also appreciate that Larson offered a measure of generosity in allowing them to articulate their points.
While he frequently interrupts the Satanists and throws out misleading claims, it’s an almost refreshingly civil and thoughtful debate compared to your average Internet discourse. The sour note comes in his intervening clips where he talks directly to the video viewing audience, portraying these folks as cartoon villains—clearly a canny entertainer who knows how to play to the sensationalism of his audience, and the Schreck and LaVey themselves don’t seem above knowing how to draw and keep attention for entertainment purposes.
In all honesty, I absolutely love thoughtful but strident debate between different perspectives of people who can show up with mutual respect. But when I remembered this the other day, before I found the video, I was surprised and confused. Why on earth would the Satanists subject themselves to dialogue in a venue hostile to them, with an audience completely unlikely to be curious or willing to listen? What a waste of time.
Yet, I realized, even decades later I remembered it. I remembered how their calmness and thoughtfulness came through in spite of the bluster and sensationalism. I remember as a kid thinking Larson’s attacks of them and depictions of their beliefs were clearly unfair, and revealed more about his agenda than theirs. Though I am not aligned with either of their theologies—referencing the distinction Schreck offers between Right and Left Hand paths, I’m a person who thinks both hands are perfectly good and you may as well make use of them—witnessing that conversation opened a door for my own path.
Hard, direct, civil, and respectful conversations with one’s adversaries is always exceptional. And I’ve seen myself and others like me ground down by the effort to be openhearted, curious, and firm in the face of sheer unwillingness to engage. And I’ve seen minor disagreements become increasingly polarized into irreconcilable gulfs because those conflicts could never be fully surfaced, named, and worked through in an effort to stay connected.
Lately, my heart has felt scaled over with familiar cynicism and the sense that history is a serpent that undulates left and right regardless of our best efforts, and there is nothing to do but to hold on. But remembering this debate, and realizing it has stayed with me all these years—that felt important. That feels like a reminder that our efforts matter and have impacts greater than we can know.
These days, I feel minimal interest in engaging in debate with folks on the Internet, and I’ve had to work on strengthening my capacity to stay engaged when in person with the people whom I can disagree with and stay connected. Yet I’m also no longer willing to engage in bad faith arguments or imagine I can persuade the people arguing with me directly.
What I’ve absorbed is the wisdom not to JADE – Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain. Make your point, answer earnest questions, and offer a clarifying perspective if needed, then lay it down. Don’t make persuading or defeating your adversary a condition of victory.
To some extent, I see this in the Larson debate linked above. Frequently the Satanists are challenged to justify, argue, defend, or explain their beliefs and practices based on the basic assumptions of Christianity—”How can you believe that when the Bible tells us this?” Instead of accepting defeat by accepting those conditions, the Satanists remind the entire audience that the Bible is a book of mythology not relevant to their lives and not their foundation for truth.
To do otherwise—to attempt to argue with Christians using the Bible—implicitly concedes the terms of debate, as though accepting Christianity as the measure of morality by which everything must be justified. When that territory has been ceded, then you are already at a great disadvantage.
Standing firm in our beliefs and values, and having esteem in our own identities and traditions, mean we are under no obligation to justify it on other people’s terms. That’s the whole point of a secular democracy with separate religions.
Yet also there is no reason to shy away from vigorous debate, if you have the will and energy. Whether another person is persuaded is perhaps less important than whether we have honored ourselves and maintained our own dignity in the face of adversity.
The first time I heard about “being an ally” was during my undergraduate years in the early 2000s. “An ally” generally meant a person who is outside a particular group but supportive of the group’s needs and aims. Being a small community, we needed our straight allies to amplify our power and voices; though at times some of us felt resentful at the effort required to include and accommodate them in our spaces and work. Sometimes straight people took up space and demanded energy, attention, and accommodation that felt draining and unsupportive. When possible, it was a joy to have spaces where we didn’t have to consider straight people at all.
That tension between needing allies and resenting them seems to have evolved over the years as social justice discourse has transformed via the Internet and cultural change. Now the onus is on the ally to prove their allyship through demonstrating right understanding, not asking for validation or praise, knowing when to take up space and when to be quiet, not centering their own needs, not arguing with people in the group, and recognizing the diversity of opinions in the group.
The sharpest expression of these boundaries is something like: “We don’t need allies. We don’t need to spend the energy educating you or kissing your ass. If you want to be an ally, you need to do the work and not expect our validation or acceptance.” The call is essentially toward prioritizing the group’s interest and needs and falling in line or shutting your mouth if you’re not in the group. Which is, to be honest and clear, not an unreasonable boundary, and entirely appropriate for certain kinds of work.
But is ally the best word for that kind of relationship?
Being an ally doesn’t seem to be the same as being in alliance, wherein compelling common interest between groups makes cooperation mutually rewarding. When I became the Outreach Chair of my queer organization in the early 2000s, I took the call as an opportunity to build alliance, find common cause and common struggle with other political and identity-based student groups, which was easier when we didn’t default to centering white LGBTQ people and remembered that queer people are in every identity group.
But looking through that lens, it would be deeply problematic for one nation to demand all the accommodation and unflinching, unselfish support. I observed this personally later in life when I was in a meeting of LGBTQ spiritual and religious leaders talking about the need for interfaith work, with my Neopagan group.
One of the Christian leaders came to us and warmly invited us to attend their church services some time. Our clergy member thanked him, and similarly invited him to attend one of our seasonal rituals, and the Christian visibly blanched at the offer and never, to my acknowledge, showed.
That moment made clear to me that alliance requires mutuality. If one group expects us to extend ourselves for them, and makes no effort for us, why would we attend their services? The attitude did not suggest respect for us or an interest in collaboration—at best it was facile acceptance, at worst it was proselytizing. If there is not mutual effort and shared value, what is an alliance?
What’s become clear is that “ally” in activist rhetoric is almost without exception a term applied to people in a privileged group who support a more marginalized group. At best, it seems self-serving to call myself an ally—like virtue signaling, like calling myself your best friend—a term I need to earn rather than claim. And “being an ally” has connotations of meaning both “being a good person” and “prioritizing the comfort and needs of marginalized people over your own.”
As a therapist, it has become clearer to me over the years that a relationship without mutual benefit is a deeply unhealthy one. I have quietly sat with this concern that allyship is about self-sacrifice for the other without expectation of any gain or reward and made exceptions due to the enormous imbalance of historical economic, social, and cultural injustice. Yet I have also seen this dynamic play out to the detriment of all involved. Well-meaning white or straight or cisgender people who take this too literally and end up sacrificing too much, then becoming toxic.
To be clear: It’s not healthy for anyone to be consistently compromise their needs, wants, and desires for the benefit of another. It’s not healthy for marginalized people. It’s not healthy for privileged people. Such a relational dynamic leads to abuse, burnout, and toxicity.
I believe some allies overcorrect in response to marginalized people expressing frustrations or setting very healthy and reasonable boundaries in the crucible of social justice discourse and disembodied Internet communities. It is honestly no wonder that folks tire of being the representative and educator on behalf of their identity groups, expected to replicate the same scripts to dialogue with people who they don’t have any relationship with, who might not be acting in good faith, who have cousins and coworkers and random people who jump on the threads to add their bullshit, who come from such different lives that it’s not even possible to have a productive conversation without a lot of context-building.
“I don’t need to educate you” is a healthy personal boundary for those of us not being paid to do the work, and have other things to do with our time and energy.
When we’re dealing with a lot, including oppression, we have every right to have our boundaries and limits and refuse to extend ourselves in ways detrimental to our health. Those who want to be allies need to find their own boundaries and limits, and tend their own fields.
Through the Internet we are connected to more people than ever in human history, but at a distance that allows us to flatten and objectify each other. From the outside, allies seeking for guidance in being right and good look to these myriad and contradictory expressions of clarity, power, grief, frustration, rage, and powerlessness, and reshare them to show their understanding and support, which amplifies a message and makes it seem even bigger. It’s too easy to see a meme shared once or fifty times and begin to think of that as a universal truth coming from a group that has diverse perspectives and needs.
For a time, for example, I saw memes floating around calling upon allies to cut off their bigoted or Trump-supporting family members, calling into question the dedication of those who would not. A person who would make such a call, I imagine, really wants to know that the folks who call themselves allies are truly on their side and committed to their safety and well-being.
But if an ally truly did cut away all of their family, and all of their privilege, who would provide the emotional and material support their family offered? That marginalized person who makes it clear they’re not here to give you cookies for doing what’s right? Who’s already got enough to manage emotionally in life? A person who posted a meme who has no relationship with you in your day-to-day life?
Maybe those allies truly doing the work would luck into being welcomed by a new, socially just family, but I suspect most would not. More often, I expect, those allies who make themselves too at home in certain communities will find themselves firmly reminded that they’re merely guests.
I was once one of three men in a group of mostly white women talking about anti-racism. Knowing that often men take up a great deal of space I was mindful about how much I participated, while also noticing that many of the participants were very new to thinking about whiteness and anti-racism. At the end of the call, one of the women expressed her concern that men were taking up too much space.
Which left me confused—was she talking about me specifically? Or the other men? Or all of us together? Was her focusing on male participation a way of dealing with her discomfort of talking about her whiteness? Did we have agreements or facilitation that could’ve helped the men find boundaries of our participation, or were we supposed to guess? I would’ve appreciated direct feedback to know how much I needed to adjust my participation, but I was left feeling mildly unwelcome and confused.
When a perspective like this arises, the typical response is that privileged people need to do the work to figure out whether they’re being talked about or not, and anxiety or discomfort may be a sign of one’s own complicity. It’s not their job to explain if they meant you. Or, alternately, you should feel grateful they felt safe enough to share this in front of you.
While these perspectives make sense, what’s being asked for are sophisticated social skills that would be complicated by growing up in families that, for example, did not have consistent expectations or give you clear, actionable feedback. Or families where perhaps a behavior was okay one day and offensive another day with no explanation about the difference. Or families that avoided direct conflict but talked about you behind your back, or chastised you with vague statements that you needed to magically divine. Or families that simply froze you out or punished you when you did wrong.
If a person happened to experience any of those communication patterns, or others, then being anxious and confused in response to indirect feedback about a group they’re in is a totally normal and expected experience. Feeling defensive or angry may be less a sign of personal guilt and more a sign of being habitually blamed and attacked.
Since asking for clarity might be condemned as demanding emotional labor, the ally is left having to deal with this indirect feedback as best as they can, which usually ends up meaning using one of their maladaptive coping strategies they learned to navigate those confusing family experiences. Strategies such as shaming and policing anyone else who does something similar, or indiscriminately taking in all feedback and overfunctioning so that they’re always good and never bad, or getting defensive and attacking back, or questioning the expectations, or shutting down. All the behaviors that exhaust the targeted activists in the first place.
These aren’t alliances, with clearly contracted agreements and a process for working through disputes and conflict. Or perhaps it is an alliance, in that there’s not open war but rather tensions expressed indirectly or through proxies.
In What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, author Emma Dabiri calls upon white people who care about racial and economic justice to find our own values and desires in this process. Not to see anti-racism as an act of charity or service we’re doing for another group, but to find its necessity in our own lives, families, and communities. To know what is at stake for us, so that we’re working for common cause.
For these and other reasons, I’ve stopped using the word “ally” to describe myself, and instead challenge myself to find my personal values and stakes in the work toward social and economic justice. I can prioritize my needs and desires appropriately, not trying to get them met by people with healthy boundaries but getting clear about which relationships are about shared values and which relationships are about emotional and material support. I don’t need to feel welcome or accepted in every space to recognize we have common interests, but I don’t have to sacrifice myself either.
It’s been important to me to move from the abstract and universal categories toward the specific and concrete, to my communities of people with whom I have relationships that can be negotiated and engaged with, where others may be willing to extend themselves to educate, challenge, affirm, or argue with me, but I can also give energy and value back. Mutuality is important to any healthy, thriving relationship—if we are constantly giving more than we receive, we are in danger.
