Thread by @mckensiemack

Let’s talk about accountability. Let’s talk about the fact that there is no harm that can be neatly wrapped in a box with a bow or told so that it makes us feel good and comfortable. 1/

And if it’s doing those things, there’s truth missing. If it’s doing these things, we have an opportunity to reflect on why our takeaway from a person’s experience with harm is that we feel good or that we feel comfortable. 2/

We all experience harm and we all cause harm. None of us are immune. The process to seeking out repair, to acknowledging what has been done to us and what we have done to others is not linear, it doesn’t always look the same, and the folks who have been hurt don’t all... 3/

need the same things from us when we make mistakes. Being accountable means adapting to the needs of the person or people we have hurt. 4/

It means intervening in our tendency to try to center our embarrassment or our shame in someone else’s revelation of the mistakes that we’ve made. 5/

The difference between a just community where harm happens and an unjust community where harm happens is the willingness to accept accountability and to design protocols on paper that define how we will choose to be brave when, not if, but when we make mistakes. 6/

As individual people, who make up communities and organizations, it’s also deciding how we are approaching our own healing and how we are seeking to commit to caring for ourselves and healing ourselves from the harm that we have also been caused. 7/

Because harm left unattended, left unspoken, left pretended as if it never even happened, always comes to the surface and often it comes to the surface to cause even more harm. 8/

We can choose courage and it won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. And by choosing courage, we choose accountability. We choose harm reduction. We choose repair. We choose honesty. We choose justice.

That’s #BoundaryWork. 9/