This blog post was originally going to be called ‘How to swim in treacle’ but treacle is delicious and what I want to describe is not. Last month a small group of facilitators from previous holding space cohorts got together to talk about what does it mean to hold space when the world is on fire, and it triggered a lot of reflections more generally around how to we choose to hold ourselves in general in the world when we are both recipients of harm and enablers of harm? How do we make conscious, thoughtful progress towards a better world when we are trying to survive the current one? Or as another facilitator shared during a “Wicked Questions” session I held - how do we dismantle the pitch whilst we still have to play the game? How do we acknowledge our privilege and use that effectively? How do we allow ourselves to feel the horror and pain but not stop moving in the right direction?
Having gone from someone who was just surviving the daily grind under the weight of trauma, undiagnosed autism, kids and capitalism, to a reactive survivor and saviour who called people out left, right and centre on their apathy, to someone burnt out from the fight and now to a calmer, better resourced facilitator and community organiser that can make space for more nuance I wanted to share some of the things that have enabled me to move more steadily, with confidence and in alignment with my values.
But I also want to be clear that the only reason I can even take the time to write and reflect on this is because of funding I’ve received to cover some of my salary as part of a Transformational Infrastructure programme from Thirty Percy - a buffer that has allowed me to get out of the rough waters for a moment and sit on the banks. Before this I was treading water, but I was doing so with a deeply loving community as my floats and lifelines. Not everyone has access to resources and community - but I have tried to remain focussed on things I believe to be within reach for everyone within this work, and necessary intentions to cultivate if we are going to sustain ourselves in the process.
Focus on the change closest to you
White supremacy, capitalism, oppression is the water we swim in. Many people experience this as incredibly overwhelming when they first realise that what we are resisting is everywhere, including baked into us on a cellular level. But for me it was weirdly reassuring to realise that every micro choice I make to change, to be better and do better was in turn changing the system. And as a carer that couldn’t always get to the protests, realising that activism was possible even in my daily choices, perhaps even more possible, was life-changing and practice changing.
When I first heard Margaret Wheatley speak at Meaning Conference back in 2017 about change through our immediate community, I got up and walked out and went home to my kid. Not because I wasn’t enjoying the conference but because I realised how right she was. Because I realised that I could make a choice right there and then to decentre this convening that was detached from my every day life, to rewire my relationships, to centre acts of care, and create the type of world I wanted to create through that choice - and for me that was a far braver step to take than all the different ways I’ve protested against injustice.
It is my belief that one of the reasons we are sinking under so much violence and disorder in the world is because too many of us are detached from our immediate community and our own inner worlds. As Adrienne Maree Brown says in Emergent Strategy “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale”.
Whether it’s progressive or regressive acts we all spend too much time acting elsewhere, while paying little attention to what’s going on right before our eyes. Powerful men seek domination over countries they are entirely detached from because they are entirely detached from themselves. But even those of us who feel we are acting from a more compassionate place within our work can end up focussing on changing the world, changing other people, without doing the work to change ourselves. Yes I will always stand up against the genocide in palestine and sudan. Yes we need to respond to the climate shocks in Somalia. Yes we need to be talking about and organising around global crises. But also if we don’t confront our own fascist and racist behaviours, transform the way our local communities organise, question how we spend money and how our relationships are structured, we are going to continue to fuel the toxic roots that led to these wider issues in the first place.
Attend to your projections
We are all detached from reality in some way. Being deeply conscious is a key act of resistance that anyone fighting injustice needs to be practicing. Too often in this work I have raced to dismiss someone, or raced to align myself to someone, because of what I thought they represented. In addition I’ve experienced more exhaustion and harm because of operating from a wounded place. We are never going to be able to heal all our wounds in our lifetime, but knowing that we all operate from that wounded place on some level is important to be able to keep doing this work authentically and thoughtfully.
I’ve recently started therapy again partly to help me in my work, like a form of supervision. Even though I’m not a therapist, I hold therapeutic and potentially transformative spaces and if I’m going to do the people in that space justice I need to know that I’m showing up with integrity and not clouded by assumptions shaped from my past.
We need to continuously clear out what we have been holding onto, letting go of what we think someone will say or be to make space for them to grow and show us something different.
Ask yourself how you might make it worse?
Another layer of consciousness that I don’t witness enough of within the social sector and activist spaces is awareness of the potential negative implications of our righteous acts. I heard a story from one activist in the co-op housing movement that he travelled to Syria to smuggle in small amounts of medicine while his partner and child stayed at home. He got arrested and not only did that leave his child without a father, add extra work for their co-op but it also created a whole extra layer of work within the community he was trying to help.
With the terror of the world at the moment I both know that more of us need to take bolder, more direct action, and that there will be many people that take thoughtless direct action because they wanted to ‘do something’. Even with smaller actions we risk not actually addressing fundamental issues, but instead just creating noise. For example I have a love hate relationship with boycotts - it is both a reminder that consumers can enact power within extractive capitalist systems, but also it can make people feel like they’ve done something when the change required runs so much deeper and when so many different types of harm are interwoven to create the system that we know. If a boycott actually works where will the money from that corporation flow next? How will people organise around the workers that have lost their jobs? How are we actively changing our consumption rather than just aligning to ‘better brands’?
Speak to your hypocrisy
Perhaps I partly don’t like boycotts because I also feel guilty about the habits I continue to not be able to change. When you’ve grown up with Mcdonalds as a treat when money was tight in your family, and then it accidentally becomes the go to safe food for when your autistic kids have meltdowns, it takes a lot to unravel the habit even though you viscerally despise it. For so long I avoided engaging in activist movements because there was a level of purity culture that made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough. It is a privilege to be able to disengage from the system entirely, not all of us can make those choices. But we can be honest about where we are on our journeys, and normalise the fact that we are all fallible human beings that have been conditioned into a certain way of existing.
I made a deeply important friend and collaborator at the start of the pandemic who lives in Vienna. As two autistic people with lots on, meeting each other in person once a year is really powerful and rejuvenating for us, and I believe good for the world more broadly too given the climate justice spaces we both work in as facilitators. But with my caring commitments and financial means it is not possible to spend a 24 hours travelling to Vienna via train.
Spending time on guilt due to this decision isn’t helpful to anyone. Instead I can name the hypocrisy of it and accept that I’ve made my choices for reasons that make sense to me right now. That might change in the future with more knowledge and more resources but right now it’s where I’m at and what I need, and I’m busy unravelling many of the other habits that are bad for the planet - like working at a local farm so that we reduce overconsumption of bad food from bad corporations as a family, and setting up a housing co-op to live more sustainably and in community.
Allow resource to flow
Our systems of oppression are all fuelled by capitalism, and different forms of oppression fuel capitalism. It is the most toxic cycle you can possibly imagine. But the accumulation of wealth and property, the entrenching of a scarcity mindset, the colonisation of people and extraction of resources are all things we can dismantle steadily every day in how we use our time and money. In addition, enacting our own micro-reparations for the ways society has profited off the culture, resources or labour of certain groups are also possible.
I’ve always held the belief that in order for money to be useful it should always be flowing, never stagnant. It becomes stagnant when it sits in savings or properties that aren’t lived in. It becomes stagnant when it is spent on accumulation of stuff that doesn’t serve a purpose. So when I spend money on myself I ask “how is this going to help me keep moving?”, when I spend money on an item or an experience I ask “how can I make this useful to others?”. And I prioritise opportunities to spend my money with people directly. Paying £100 a month for the Liberation Practice Field felt like a lot to commit to when I can’t always engage with all the content they produce - but it is helping to fuel Care’s work and I believe that needs to exist in the world.
The most exciting example that has been set to me is by someone from the co-op movement that loaned our co-op £10,000 for 5 years to help us secure our home, with the intention to then take it back out and loan it to the next co-op that needs it. This made me realise I could do the same with any money I put into the co-op, and that that £10K could produce so much value in the world if it just keeps flowing. It is an ethos that is underpinning how I operate with the funding I’ve been gifted from Thirty Percy - to allow it to flow into the work of other people and into the communities around me, and to give people an experience that encourages them to allow their resources to flow too.
Find your centre and feel it in your body
When we are in rough seas some of us can get swept up with the tides, while others can hold too tightly onto the shore. I definitely used to be the former and would feel like I was fighting against the broken system left, right and centre, and then became entirely useless to all of the causes I was working towards.
These days I’m grateful to have deepened my faith, deepened my sense of community and deepened my connection to myself because through those lenses I can move at the right pace of change and action for me. Within boxing my coach often reminds me that power comes from balance and speed, not from force. He also always says “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”. When I throw a punch right from my core, at a pace that’s smooth rather than rushed, while focussing mostly on my balance and positioning, my punches are faster and harder.
For me facilitation is what I bring to the world. I understand the world through relationships and drawing connections between everything. My community is mostly queer and neurodivergent - these are my anchors. Doing more work that aligns to these things holds me steady as I advocate for change. For instance if I can do work with lgbt+ migrants I am both responding to global issues and operating from a place that’s attached to my core. Or if I can help a climate justice organisation hold spaces that are more inclusive of people who struggle with professionalised contexts, I am contributing power to that movement through the skills and lived experience that keep me steady and rooted even when I am operating in unfamiliar terrain.
What's more is that, just like in boxing, when we are doing this work there is a high risk we are going to get hurt. If you throw a punch and it sends you off balance, you're going to take a bigger hit from your opponent. There have been so many times when I've thrown myself into this work and experienced more harm - both through new wounds and through retraumatisation. I'm learning to hold better boundaries so that I can stay on course, and choosing to fill my life with work and people that keep me balanced and sustain me in ways that all build towards my core purpose. And I’m learning to slow down and really feel what that feels like in my body so that my choices become less agonising and I can simply tune into the intuition that I’ve honed through this work.