Whenever I spend time with my friend Jacara, we end up talking about the different personalities and patterns that are rewarded by our capitalistic, U.S., and even our progressive or radical movement cultures. We are two people who quickly get wound up by our frustration with “the way things are”—not just because we don’t like it, but because it so often seems to keep people from imagining other ways things might be.
I have another friend who’s been betrayed by a culture and an institution that couldn’t, wouldn’t make room for her. I looked at her and basically said, “I think you have to create your own space and start your own things.” I partly said it because she’s excellent at creating spaces and starting things.
But that’s not an easy answer for everyone who doesn’t fit in—who’s too introverted, too creative, too thoughtful, too neurodivergent, too wounded, too disabled, too radical, too evenhanded, too analytical, too sensitive, and of course the list goes on.
The world deeply needs people willing to create their own experiments and claim their own space. But it also needs us to support each other, to organize ourselves as more than atomized units, and to develop the skills of interdependence.
For a while I thought we just needed the right language to be able to find each other. But language changes and is coopted so quickly now, you never know who is using and misusing words that once represented thick concepts and wisdom that could only be lived.
(I know I’ve been guilty of finding a shiny new word and running with it before I really understood its contexts and nuances.)
Somehow we have to find each other by practicing radical welcome.
And we have to respect the fact that it takes time to build—and test—the trust needed to grow new things together.
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