The past few weeks have been quite a wild ride.
So many little wins to celebrate.
So many tragic reminders that there’s a lot left to keep fighting for.
So many conversations I started walking towards that I had previously spent years walking away from.
Rilke’s words feel spot on:
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.
Here are some of the things I’ve been learning lately.
Finding your voice means rejecting your ego.
I always thought it was a complex mystical process, but really, the key is to care less about what others think about you and more about using your voice the right way.
It’s easy to confuse being outspoken with having a big ego, but the opposite is probably true more frequently. Our egos will cause us to be silent when we’re too afraid of what others will think of us if we were to speak up on a challenging topic.
I’ve been guilty of that. For years, the thing that held me back from being more vocal about things I knew were important was trying to remain favorable among a wide number of people.
Without context, data can mislead. Stats that reveal the impact of systemic racism are often used by separating the data from the context of American History.
It’s easy to think of numbers as objective, but without understanding that context, we’re easily misled. For example, the US holds 25% of the world’s prison population. Without context, you could assume that Americans are largely dangerous people. Instead, we have a prison system incentivized to be always full.
Think of yourself as a “work in progress” rather than a “good person.”
The latter leads to rationalizing beliefs that cause harm in many ways we don’t realize.
In the words of Iris Calpin, “the more tightly we cling to our identity as a good person, the more skilled we become at rationalizing our behavior, and the less available we are to examine the ways that we cause harm.”
This is part of the reason why so many “good” and “normal” everyday people have participated in things like genocides, slaughters, apartheids, and genocides. Starting with the assumption of our own goodness makes us think we’re automatically immune from participating in these acts of evil.
On the other hand, thinking that we’re constantly growing invites the question of what else in our lives do we need to reimagine.
