I was not very good at keeping accurate record of my time this week. I also had a conversation with someone very important to me about this general endeavor and they caused me to reflect on the overall structure and its revelations about and its impact on my privilege and mental health.
As a person, I am pre-disposed to extremes. There are many reasons for this and we can discuss them at some point but it does mean that sometimes I need to reflect on why I'm choosing the things I'm choosing. In this case it is because this project helped me to walk back my more extreme reaction to the immigrant concentration camps. It feels like extreme action has to be taken so I set extreme goals in order to honor those feelings I was feeling.
The time goals I made were not sustainable. Perhaps they would have been had my life been structured differently or had I been a healthier person. I thought that I had gotten around this by just having a tradeoff system for compensating failures with monetary contributions. Part of me still thinks this is a good way to proceed. Honestly at this point part of me feels like whatever works is fine. My support person pointed out that I have a very white tendency to rely on punishment and shame and transactions. They were not wrong. And this is perhaps unhealthy for me in addition to being problematic. But this tendency is also very aligned with the manifestations of my autism, anxiety and depression. I need to measure. If I don't measure then I won't know where I am. If I don't know where I am then I may end up in analysis paralysis, or depressive non-action, or some other pitfall.
My mom used to collect buttons when I was a little kid. I eventually inherited her button collection and one of the buttons that comes to mind right now is "Don't tell me to relax. Stress is the glue that holds me together." This is how I was raised. My family struggles with mental health concerns but the struggle is productive and well-supported. We also grew up in poverty. These factors come together in another button my mom had proclaiming that we "Put the fun in dysfunctional." I never felt the need to be normal, in fact that word had negative connotations in my home growing up. We were encouraged to be ourselves and adapted to our circumstances in a wide variety of ways. I feel very fortunate that I could find space for creating systems and making things work for myself, even if it relied on mentally manipulating and goading myself.
Despite my pride in getting where I am and having the tools at my disposal that I built over years of working with limitations and strengths of my experience, capacity, and being, I want to take seriously the ways that I am blind to the way whiteness played into that development. I still don't fully understand it but I want to honor the critique that has been given in this regard.
Interestingly this week I also listened to a very relevant episode of Best of the Left titled #1311 Our Culture and Our Economy are Making Us Depressed which got me reflecting on the ways in which much of our activism relies on the same workaholism and dehumanization of our time and energy to function. This is what I do. I set up systems of success and failure for myself to goad myself into min-maxing my time, attention, energy, and effort to a greater cause. I always set it up in a way to be sufficiently noble. Folks have a hard time critiquing me because it is for a good cause. This may subconsciously be by design. Make no mistake, all of this is very very white. I'm not through it yet and so I'm not able to explain it well. My lack of ability to explain it though just means I'm not likely to engage other white people directly about it unless they are no more confused about this than I am.
I was talking with another friend this week about this, and they brought up the 2005 graduation speech by David Foster Wallace called This is Water. We mostly talked about the initial story of an older fish swimming by some younger fish and saying "How's the water?" and one of the younger fish responding "What is water?" There is so much that we don't really see, much less deeply understand. And for many of us with privilege that is the case.
Anyway, all of these things have come together this week to make me reflect on this project and how to do it the best justice I can and less from a place of ego and less from a place of recreating the oppressive systems that permeate this culture, while also being true to the parts of myself that are true and valid and keeping in mind things I know to be true. It is true that making commitments and following through over time yields more benefit than a haphazard approach for me. It is also true that what gets measured improves. On the flip side it is also true that bean counting takes time and energy that could be better spent.
I'm going to continue splitting up my two commitments. Money commitments lend themselves well to efficient measurement. There is a risk of it seeming like bragging but I hope by focusing on a percentage that it will be seen as encouraging, not stifling. There is so much work that needs to be done and supporting the people doing that work is essential. Viewing it as a tithe is useful for me due to my previous religious background. Dedicating a portion back to my community separate from what is legally required by taxes and frequently used in ways that make the world worse. Time commitments on the other hand are difficult to track, easy to fall into negative mental patterns around, and discourages me from embracing my humanity in my projects. So numeric time accountings will cease going forward. I still have projects I want to take on and goals I want to achieve and I want to keep track of some of the work I do in order to encourage others to join me, but it will no longer be measured in hours.
So, what did I work on this week? Well, first I'd say that the mental, emotional, and community work that brought me to this re-evaluation, conclusion and adjustment is aligned with the general mission and perhaps is the most "showing up" thing I've done so far in this endeavor. In addition to that, I took some time to reloan some Kiva funds, worked on my collaborative community project with JAX, some online microvolunteering, and a bunch of podcast editing and production work. I'll be speaking more about the podcast in the next week or so.
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