I've been thinking a lot about what I learned or had reinforced in my life this year. I'm not into New Year's resolutions but I do like reflecting on where I have been and where I hope to go as we descend into dark, generative midwinter. 1/
1) I really had driven home how important it is in this political moment not to be reactive to (or even know) every twist and turn of every news story. You can get the work done without it. 2/
2) Focusing on the world we want to build and finding people already doing that work whom I can support, learn from, collaborate with has been invaluable. I've had hammered home that hope is less about my emotional state (often terrified) than my actions. 3/
3) Some big lessons this year have reminded me that your employer is not your family, and that the central goal of institutions and systems (and their human agents) is to perpetuate themselves. 4/
I actually don't feel betrayed by that knowledge so much as I feel that it clarified emplyer/employee relations in useful ways. Understanding that helps us move forward strategically and honestly. 5/
It's a healthy reminder that it is rarely a good idea to allow your work to define you, your value, your personal priorities. 6/
4) I've been sitting a lot with the knowledge that the future is truly unpredictable, and that the terror of uncertainty is something humans of every era have had to cope with. 7/
The very real human condition of needing to make plans knowing any moment something could upend them. 8/
5) For the past fifteen years I have thought a lot about the fact that as a culture we celebrate pain as more meaningful than pleasure. More worth attention, artistic treatment, more worth our time. I've thought a lot this year about how fucked up that is. 9/
6) I've been thinking a lot about our bodies, about how bodies hold knowledge, experience trauma, express pleasure, exist in social relationships, are granted and denied rights based on how we constitute ourselves and how we are constituted. 10/
Who is deemed a legitimate body, and why? What happens to those of us whose embodied citizenship is open to question or challenge? 11/
7) Another piece of knowledge that isn't new but has been cast in stark relief this year is that some people do not mean well. That some harms are not accidental and some roads to hell are not paved with good intentions. 12/
I don't need to withhold basic human rights from those people, but I can oppose them, fight to curtail their power, and not waste my efforts courting their favor. 13/
8) I have been valuing quiet times and solitude this year, remembering the gift of time to read, digest, reflect, and work silently with my hands. As someone in a public-facing job I can forget how much quiet time is optimal for my soul. 14/
9) I think I've made some progress in understanding how Whiteness operates in my life and the spaces and systems I move through. I realize the work will never be done. 15/
10) Part of this progress (+ a part of reflections 1-9 taken together) is a better, deeper, understanding that anti-oppression work, the work of making our communities + our world sustainable and sustaining, is a life-long project. We need collaborators and we need tenacity. 16/
11) I've grown more thankful of a childhood that allowed me to develop confidence in my own ability to learn, create, and adapt in new or changing situations, and to make change when something in my life is not working. 17/
12) I have been convinced that there is real and useful meaning in the term "neoliberalism". (Shocking, I know. 18/
13) At age 37 I am finally, however grudgingly, accepting that "Millennial" and it's many misuses and abuses are here to stay. (I'm happy about avocado toast tho. 🥑) 19/
