2022 best-of: highlights of my learning journey
Desire, Accountability, Power, and Transformation
One of my favorite things about my chosen work is the ability to engage with a tremendous amount of wisdom from an incredibly diverse array of sources. Each year I consume hundreds of hours of articles, podcasts, books… often in dialogue with the brilliant people I am fortunate to have around me. My sister and I often joke that each year is a mini ph d in the art of transformation and belonging. I wrote nine posts this year weaving many of these themes as I wrestled with them in real time.
This annual reflection is my effort to distill a year’s learning into something digestible and coherent, and to point readers to my favorites in the event that you may also find them helpful for your learning journeys. I hope you will reciprocate, and share things I missed!
To make the list each piece had to shape or shift my thinking/behavior in some way: either helping crystallize an insight, affirm an intuition, challenge a preconception, or force me to unlearn a harmful pattern. Confession: I’m still working to integrate/embody all of these learnings… work in progress!
Key themes and learnings
From consent to desire. Definitely the deepest exploration for me this year. While my primary focus was in the realm of sex and sexuality and more intentional exploration of the erotic, it’s a deeply radical question that shows up fractally in all my domains of practice. This theme infused most of my writing this year; I unpacked it more fully here. It’s this question: do we know what we truly long for? What is preventing us from taking action?
Intent vs impact. An ongoing learning here, and a painful one. I had one particularly upsetting encounter this year where someone experienced harm as a result of my behavior, despite my positive intentions. And when I rushed to repair I made the mistake of trying to clarify my intentions before centering the impact they had experienced… with lasting damage to our relationship. I found this podcast episode really helpful as I was sorting through responsibility and accountability in this context. I wish I had encountered this insight first: “If you prioritize intent first it will interrupt and impair the healing and repair process.” Sigh.
From caretaking to caregiving. To me this is an extension of the inquiry I’ve been in around boundaries and interdependence: it’s about taking responsibility for what is mine, but no more. As someone with a lifelong tendency toward rescuing and saviorism, toward trying to take responsibility for other people’s emotions to prevent them from feeling their own discomfort… this is really challenging for me. This is the way I’m coming to understand it: I am willing to extend care to you (caregiving) as you sit with the impact of my actions. But if I am in integrity with my actions (e.g. no need for an apology or changed behavior) then I will decline to take responsibility for how you are feeling: I will not “take” care. This is the incredibly fine nuance of walking the boundary line: “the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (quoting Prentis Hemphill).
Taking up the right amount of space. This is a lifelong inquiry as I continue to search for right relationship with power, and in particular power as embodied in me (a large, white, able-bodied American man). This builds on the first three. My whole life I’ve been conflicted and hesitant about how to wield my power, in part because I’m so aware of how it makes others feel. But I’m learning to walk the line between caregiving/caretaking, and to act from intention and hold space for impact (every action causes impact… and yet act we must). I’m finally learning that it’s an abdication of responsibility—to myself and the collective—if I don’t wield my full power. Incredibly hard.
Building the capacity for transformation. john a. powell is fond of saying, “Meet people where they are… but don’t leave them there.” This is the paradox of acceptance and transformation that I’ll be exploring in my next post: we are perfect as we are… And we need to change. It is an individual AND collective responsibility to build the capacity for transformation… but not transforming isn’t an option. The learning this year, reflecting my commitment to “Forward Stance,” is to consistently extend (and endeavor to embody) an invitation to transformation… but to prioritize building with those who are ready. As Kate Raworth puts it: “Don’t waste time knocking on shut doors; work with people who want to act, because there are plenty of them.”
Best of the Best (if you only choose one…)
In all cases, these managed to weave together many of the themes that characterized 2022’s core inquiries for me.
Book: Betty Martin (with Robyn Dalzen) — The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent. Luminare Press, 2022.
I don’t make it through many books these days: I’m a little embarrassed that my Goodreads account says I’m “currently reading” 8 books. But there’s no question that this was the most powerful book I encountered this year. In a year spent exploring boundaries, desire, consent, power, leadership, embodiment, and the erotic — all understood as fractally related to politics and everything else — Betty’s book manages to weave it all together in a brilliant and accessible way. A taste:
The world needs people who take responsibility for what they want and who respect the rights of other people... We are hungry to connect with others in ways that are real and satisfying, that feed our hearts and inspire us. We need to be with others in ways that help us to be who we really are, complex beings who need each other and bring joy to each other.
Article: Maurice Mitchell — Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis. Convergence Magazine, 2022.
I highlight this one less for influencing/changing my outlook on a topic, and more because it’s the most cogent synthesis of many of the core ideas animating my work that I’ve come across. Moe is brilliant, kind, generous, and deeply committed to changing material conditions, and has earned street cred as an organizer for years, including now in his current role leading the Working Families Party. It’s a powerful and essential read for our movements.
Discomfort is part of the human condition and a prerequisite for learning. Violence and oppression are to be avoided but not discomfort. The ability to discern the difference is a form of emotional maturity we should encourage…
See as a center of your work the establishment and re-establishment of connection, meaning, and belonging.
Podcast Episode: Continual Becoming with ALOK. Finding Our Way podcast with Prentis Hemphill, 2022.
ALOK always impresses me: eminently quotable, and every time I listen to them speak I find myself needing to pause to let the wisdom land. So many gems here, and in dialogue with Prentis, themself an endless source of inspiration and insight. I love the invitation of living a nonbinary life, and Prentis and ALOK are majestic. A taste:
Gender is separating us from meaning and connection and truth… So the work that I'm doing to transcend the gender binary is not merely so that we can acknowledge and include non-binary people… The world I'm interested in being is one that asks, show me what you wanna be, experiment, figure it out… Let me witness your continual becoming, transition as a mode of continual becoming…
I'm not saying abolish romantic love… What I'm saying is democratize love. Love the earth, love the people around you. Love everyone. To just apportion love within the confines of romance is not liberatory. The purpose of love is to love so expansively and vehemently that you can connect with everyone.
Screenplay: Confederates, by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Nataki Garrett. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2022.
This was an absolute tour de force. After each scene I had to self-regulate my nervous system: shaking my body, taking deep breaths, unclenching my jaw. Hard-hitting, unrelenting: deep, complex, exquisitely nuanced exploration of race, history, intersectionality… and what it means to move through the world as a Black woman. I loved it.
Multimedia: No One Can Mess With adrienne maree brown’s Sense of Self. StyleLikeU, YouTube, 2022.
I don’t consume a lot of video content, but this spoke to me. Part of interrogating desire is interrogating the social formation of desire, and “desirability politics.” This for me looks like examining internalized fatphobia, and noticing—and attempting to transmute—how I react to bodies deemed “other.” adrienne’s presentation here is just incredible: I felt so much tenderness and respect for her courage and her groundedness in this video, as she slowly disrobes and owns her body and her sexuality. It’s a goddamned inspiration.
Song: Yola — Stand for Myself. Live at Artist’s Den, 2021.
I can’t listen to this without getting chills. Soul, passion, pain, and belonging.
It was easier to give in, than stand for myself
It was hard enough to go and live on
I was so tired, trying to belong..
But I was still a dreamer in the middle of the night
Best Articles
These are all articles that managed to weave multiple themes while speaking to core lessons I needed to learn, and am still working to embody. In no particular order:
Janey Starling — The subversive power of joy. Open Democracy, 2017.
adrienne maree brown popularized this idea with Pleasure Activism, and it feels absolutely foundational. I like that this article draws out more explicitly how joy is a revolutionary act: it’s about both resisting the world as it is and prefiguring the world we long for.
Holding onto and centering joy is a vital tactic for personal and group resilience, as well as political resistance to an agenda that seeks to enforce hierarchy and division through mass fear. Authoritarianism is directly incompatible with collective joy; it demands fear, obedience, hierarchy and an obsession with security and preparation for war. The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective joy takes people off guard and is one of the great equalizers of social and political struggle.
Jia Tolentino — Can Motherhood be a Mode of Rebellion? New Yorker, 2022.
Jia is an exquisite writer: a joy to read. And her review of Angela Garbes’ powerful new book is a great example of her gifts in action, speaking to what feels like a deep truth to me: parenting is a revolutionary act. (Or it can be a reactionary one: we choose). I love too that both she and Angela re-center parenting inside systems of oppression: it’s not an individual act, but one constrained and shaped by the structures we live within.
Parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality. It requires seeking alternative visions of security and opportunity for your children; it requires surrendering advantages, and becoming more dependent on others, not less.
Alanna Irving — No Boss Does Not Mean No Leadership. Medium, 2015.
Alanna writes with an impatient bluntness that I admire, without sacrificing care. Her desire for a better world, her relentless practice toward that world, and her refusal to accept the limitations of our current ways of being/working always inspire me. I love her writing on leadership, power, and organizational structure.
Leadership is a force that operates in a group, away from conflict and chaos and toward harmony and effectiveness. If the right culture and processes are in place, anyone can take acts of leadership.
Quanita Roberson — Brave People, Not Brave Spaces. Self-published, 2022.
Another practitioner who writes with enviable clarity and compassion, while not shying away from difficult truths. This short article crystallized something I’d been struggling with for months, about the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and structural forces when it comes to creating spaces of belonging.
We want to blame the "system" for everything not realizing that we are a part of the systems we are in. We want to blame other people when we are triggered forgetting that a trigger by definition is rooted in our past not in the present moment. We want to make other people responsible for our own liberation not realizing that if someone has the power to liberate you then they can just as easily take it away and that's not true liberation.
Bridgit Antoinette Evans — To Change the World, Transform Narrative Oceans. Medium, 2022.
Bridgit is my favorite practitioner of the art of cultural strategy and narrative within it; this essay is a beautiful description of how we we enact transformation at scale. An inspiring read from someone deep in practice.
To transform narrative oceans, we have to achieve a depth of narrative immersion such that people experience a fictional way of life as possible, and begin to express first yearning, then desire, and finally, demand for this fiction to be made real.
Rich Bartlett — Leadership as Hospitality. Self-published, 2022.
I love Rich’s simultaneously brash and self-effacing sharing-out-loud of his life and learnings. This piece is part of a compilation distilling key lessons from his experiments with microsolidarity (his coinage for how to build fractal community), and this line I just love.
Leadership is the capacity to make a compelling invitation.
Maurice Stevens — Contesting Catastrophes. Oppositional Conversations, 2021.
Maurice was a new find for me this year. It’s always so refreshing to encounter someone who calls it like it is, without shrinking away from the responsibility to make it better.
Sitting with ourselves together builds collective power that can ground the tension in a unity that is deeper and wider than that tension itself. “Holding” the tension together leads to the realization that tension doesn’t actually require resolution in order to move toward planning together.
Maya Binyam — You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed. The Paris Review, 2022.
I have so much respect for people who persist in the work of world-building in the face of gaslighting, oppression, and institutional resistance. Sara is one of my favorite feminists, and this interview is a great example of why.
Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people.
Katherine Milligan, Juanita Zerda, and John Kania — The Relational Work of Systems Change. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022.
This feels like a core insight the social justice world has finally landed (not universally!) in the last few years. There is no liberation without changing the ways we work, relate, and be together. Systems transformation requires that we also transform: individually and collectively. Nice to see this in a place like SSIR, nudging into the mainstream (though philanthropy has yet to follow in a meaningful way…)
Making meaningful progress on the complex challenges of our time requires totally different ways of working together that prioritize relational practices… These more radical and relational ways of working generally share five qualities: deep relational work, space for healing, inviting in the sacred, inner change that leads to outer change, and transforming power dynamics.
Aaron Goggans, Sandra Kim, and the Wildseed Society— How We’re Re-Thinking Spiritual Community - To Navigate These Crisis and for Our Collective Liberation. Self-published, 2022.
I have a bit of a crush on Wildseed, and the heart, brains, and spirit that goes into it. We need more experiments like this, and it’s a crying shame that they (and kindred efforts) aren’t better resourced. I’d love to see what might be possible if we funded collectives like this at a scale sufficient to free its members from trying to survive under capitalism, and they could actually unleash their full gifts.
We see community as a portal making space. We define community as a group of people with such important or valuable interrelationships that it is easier to have the difficult conversations than walk away. It's a space where we agree to labor together to root out domination from our praxis and replace it with more liberatory ways of meeting our needs.
Best Podcast Episodes
Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Confederates. The Archive Project, 2022.
Artistic director Nataki Garrett interviews playwright Dominique Morisseau about Confederates, and it’s… awesome. Such a delight to hear two Black women of their capacity/social location speaking their full truths to each other for us to listen in on… all-too-rare.
What's fundamentally inside of white patriarchal supremacy is the authority to define reality.
The Fluidity of Desire with Esther Perel. The Emerging Women podcast, with Chantal Pierrat, 2015.
I’ve read/listened to a lot of Esther Perel. Yet somehow this year was the first time I found this episode, and it’s Esther at her best: weaving the erotic into the personal and political, with her characteristic bluntness. It always lands for me as a powerful invitation, one I feel drawn to answer. Runner-up contender for best episode of the year: give it a listen.
Desire is the expression of the sovereign self. Desire points to free will. You can force people to do, you can never force them to desire. It is the ultimate expression of our free identity…
We are privatizing social problems and making the individual responsible for it… there need to be connective solutions for connective problems.
Alanna Irving of Open Collective: Distributed Leadership & Infrastructures for Commoning. The Frontiers of Commoning podcast, with David Bollier, 2022.
Featuring one of my favorite quotes of the year, which inspired both a newsletter post and a Conversation on Transformation (feat. Alanna!):
There’s no such thing as self-organization. There’s only unseen, unacknowledged, and unaccountable leadership.
Nwamaka Agbo: Redistributing Wealth and Power. Next Economy Now podcast, 2022.
Ahh so much vulnerable wisdom in this. We urgently need more leaders like Nwamaka, and this podcast shows both why… and why it’s so difficult.
We don’t know what it means to lead, until we have to make difficult decisions and take accountability and responsibility for those decisions… collective decision-making still requires that we make decisions.
How the left can govern w/ Gopal Dayaneni. The Half-Past Capitalism podcast, 2022.
Gopal is probably my favorite practitioner of the post-capitalist transition that we so urgently need; theoretically rigorous and deeply grounded and committed to practice. Incredibly articulate; a joy to listen to.
The problem of capitalism at this point is not primarily one of course of power, but the lack of available alternative ways to meet our needs. We are forced to comply without consent because we have no meaningful alternative… If we can organize to meet our needs, then we have a foundation from which to contest power.
The Persuaders, with Anand Giridharadas. Unlocking Us podcast with Brené Brown, 2022.
I loved this 2-part interview… even more than the book it was based on.
We are really asking tens of millions of people to have a different life conception of themselves, to sever themselves from certain sources of esteem that were really meaningful to them… a lot of people are going to need to go through a lot and be convinced and brought into a self-understanding that is as vivid to them and as convincing to them as the certainties they have now, however toxic those certainties are.
Open Deeply with Kate Loree. Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics podcast, 2022.
I really liked how tender and nuanced this conversation was, exploring topics that fly in the face of dominant paradigms. And I’ve really appreciate Kate’s contributions to this space.
The more you wake up, and come to question the dominant paradigm, the more you to have to up your capacity and your coping skills…
If you shame people for breaking from dominant culture, then you shame their sources of resilience and how they resource themselves, and can prevent them from healing… Sex activists and sexual therapists are always attacked, because they pose a threat to dominator culture.
Anne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism. The Ezra Klein Show, 2022.
I often find myself frustrated by mainstream conversations around authoritarianism, but this was a pleasant exception. There are points of disagreement for me, but in general I really resonated with her analysis and Ezra’s inquiries.
People also sometimes want something more. They want to be part of a movement. They want to be part of a big change…
The phenomenon of people being easily attracted to conspiratorial or radical movements that have a coherent ideology, and that are accessible online, and that seem to solve the problem of loneliness… The movements offer that kind of belonging.
Jamie Wheal: big thinker, flow seeker, maverick. Dumbo Feather podcast, 2022.
A few different people recommended Jamie to me, as someone deeply engaged in transformation at the intersection of sex, psychedelics, and intentional embodiment. I really appreciate his big vision: I love listening to people who can hold the whole without getting overwhelmed by it; a rare skill.
If you’re not putting roots in the soil, or intentionally building with your ride-or-die community, you’re missing the boat in this moment.
Change Everything. Scene On Radio podcast, 2021.
From the folks who brought us Seeing White, still one of my favorite podcast series of all time. This was the finale to Season 5 on the climate crisis, in which they ask—and attempt to answer—perhaps my favorite question of all, the one that occupies my waking (and dreaming?) moments:
How do we need to change as a people, as a society, a collection of societies? What’s the cultural transformation we need to make to live in good health with the rest of the natural world, and with each other?
And that’s a wrap, folks. I’ll be formulating my intentions and enjoying time with family and loved ones of the holidays, and hope you have the opportunity to do the same. I look forward to being back in touch in the new year, and to seeing those of you who are able to join our January subscribers’ gathering. As always, I welcome additions to this list: I’d love to hear what moved you or changed how you think and act.
First up in the new year (I think): exploring the relationship between shame, acceptance, and belonging :-)