post-thanksgiving giving of thanks

This is kind of blog-cheating, because I posted this on facebook already. To make up for the kinda-cheating, I'm elaborating - a little - on some of these "i'm thankful for" bullet points (and, of course, editing out some of the identifying information).


giving thanks. 2009.
so, sure, thanksgiving's past is steeped in really f-ed up politics of pilgrims "civilizing" the native people they came upon when they landed on this country, and celebrating thanksgiving with pilgrim hats and fake-traditional native headdresses is beyond offensive. i could go on and on about how we celebrate a time that resulted in mass genocide of native peoples and their cultures. there's certainly a place for that.

but i'm not going to go there right now, because thanksgiving may have a f-ed up history, but it's become something very different. giving thanks is something i (we) should be doing every day, but there's nothing wrong with having an entire day devoted to eating delicious food and giving thanks for the blessings in our lives.

so, a completely cliche but also completely necessary exercise in thanks giving:

I Am Thankful For:

• the family that i've found in massachusetts. even when it's not easy, it's still the closest thing to family that i've got, and they're still a better family than i'd ever expected to find.
  (this was one i was going to elaborate on, but...there's not much more to say. surprisingly enough for this verbose girl, simplicity sometimes best exposes the depth of emotion.)
  
  
• northampton/home. i read tracy kidder's book, Home Town, a couple months ago, and i got wicked homesick. that "homesick" thing is kinda new. it's pretty amazing to have a hometown i can be homesick for.
  
  
• coffee. no, really. everything about it: the making and the drinking. i love making pretty and delicious coffee drinks at my lovely cafes (both home in northampton and here in kansas city), and i really love drinking it. i'm so thankful for this wonderful beverage and all of its incarnations.
  
  
• courage. that is, having the courage to extract myself from a family that was toxic. my lovely friend wrote this post over at feministing last week, about taking a risk and being prepared to be wrong, as she did when she left home before graduating high school. i'm thankful that i had the courage to take that much-needed step away/step toward the rest of my life.
  
  
• Reproductive health care providers (including abortion providers), and the political movement that helps them to keep their doors open. mostly, I'm thankful for their existence in general. but more selfishly, I'm thankful for the really satisfying employment that they offer me. the people i work with in this movement are really incredible, and the people i get to work with across the states of kansas and missouri are some of the best & most amazing people i know.
  
  
• eleanor maya (the cat). and, last week, emma (the denver dog). ellie makes my life in kansas city so much more bearable and less lonely. emma is...well, she's emma, and totally adorable, and totally a pup i'd drive 9 hours to denver to pet-sit anytime. (as long as it's at her owner-mama's house -- she would eat my cat if given the chance.)
  i'm thankful that ellie is exactly as cuddly and snuggly as i need her to be...even if that cuddle means i will forever have a light layer of cat hair on every item of clothing i own.
  
  
• pumpkin-based foods. like the beyond delicious pumpkin-apple-butter pie (with streusel topping) i made for thanksgiving this year, and christmas last year, and will make for pretty much every holiday it fits into. (from allrecipes.com)  pumpkin pies and pumpkin bread and pumpkin cookies and pumpkin muffins and pumpkin spice egg nog and pumpkin butter and and and... yum.
  
  
• related: egg nog.  it's now after thanksgiving, so i've now given myself permission to buy my first bottle of egg nog.  unlike most people, i never reach that "too much egg nog" state.  i'll continue to buy egg nog, at least a quart a week, until they stop making it.  this year, i'm SO SO STOKED to be living in kansas city, where i have access to the most delicious egg nog i've ever had, from Shatto Milk Company.  if i gain extra weight during the holiday season, it's not from holiday meals -- i eat pretty normally through the season.  it's from egg nog.  (straight up, no rum. rum only distorts and distracts from the deliciousness of the egg nog.)
  
  
• smith college. the education i got there, the connections i made, and the smith connection that continues past graduation.
  also: the financial ability to attend smith, thanks in large part to the generous aid package they offered me. sure, i'll probably be paying off student loans until i die, but i was able to get those grants and loans, and i was able to make smith college a financial possibility.
  
  
• and, of course, my friends. the people who make being in kansas city bearable, the people who make life in general so much better. from old friends that go back to preschool to the ones i just made out midwest/west (Denver). there are some really incredible people in my life, and i'm really grateful that they're around.

heal the world: on healing and (truly revolutionary) social movements.

in line with the things i discussed in my last post, i've been re-working a lot of the theories in my head, very consciously revising them. in a lot of ways, it's another revolution. but a contained one, a revolution of my own personal world.

which, i guess, is where it's got to begin. where the revolution's got to start.



this is still very much a work-in-progress theory, and i acknowledge that it's less than fully fleshed out. here goes, anyway...

i mentioned, in passing, that the inner bonding therapy that i've been doing has been making me re-think what a revolution should look like, what a healthier, just world would look like.

a woman i know wrote an article on the IB website entitled "Protest + Politics - Healing = No Revolution." to be honest, i'm not entirely sure what exactly it says, since it's only available to paid members, and i'm too poor to pay the $10/mo. but based on conversations i've had with one of our mutual friends, the woman who turned me on to IB in the first place, i think i have a pretty good idea. i mean, the title is pretty self-explanatory: a social movement without an emphasis on healing doesn't - and can't - spark that revolution that we keep talking about, keep striving toward.

the model of second-wave feminism seems so hokey and silly now; consciousness raising groups seem just like versions of group therapy, and have been, in popular thought at least, completely de-politicized. getting a group of women together to talk about how they can't get their husbands to respect them, to talk about how their male bosses won't stop harassing them, seems so antiquated. "the personal is political" is still touted as a feminist rallying point, but most feminists are hesitant to put too much emphasis on things that are "too personal," things that don't (seem to) affect the community at large, or things that don't (seem to) affect the political system.

but it's not hokey, and it's not silly, to emphasize personal healing and personal journeys. it's essential.
without first healing our individual wounds that have been inflicted on us / irritated by the hetero/patriarchal/white supremacist culture that we live in, we can't expect to heal the wounded and dysfunctional society as a whole.

what i mean to say is: activists who don't take care of ourselves, who don't heal our own wounds, have very real limitations to the amount of good we can give to the world. if we don't have love inside of ourselves, for ourselves, we can't possibly extend this healing love to the rest of the world. if we can't model what a healed, healthy person would look like, we can't truly envision a healed, healthy world.

which isn't to say that these two have to be mutually exclusive; focusing on personal healing doesn't necessarily preclude social activism. they can and should coexist; that coexistence, though, needs to be truly "co" - complementary, cooperative, co-equal.



a dear professor of mine, nancy whittier, is making (some version of) the following argument in her forthcoming book on the politics of child sexual abuse activism: a lot of CSA survivor activists bemoan the shift from an overtly political/protesting activism to that of a "therapeutic culture." that is, the shift from a primary focus on Take Back The Night rallies and more radical models of activism around CSA and sexual violence to a focus on individuals, on therapy, on groups of survivors healing together in relative isolation from one another. while this makes sense, on some level, to view as a loss in a lot of ways, it's a mistake to completely discount the "therapeutic culture" as non-revolutionary. if our identities and behaviours and beliefs are so often shaped by the dominant culture - something which is especially true for survivors of CSA - then trying to heal these harmful beliefs, trying to inject some kind of (non-patriarchal, non-hegemonic) truth and love into these identities and beliefs and behaviours is very much an act of resistance.


i think that a lot of times, love is diminished in the activist realm.
personal healing is seen as something you do individually, but not something that has an immediate or even important effect on feminist/social justice movements as a whole.
but truth is: without individual healing, political movements can't succeed.

and, further: integrating the ideas of healing into political movements is, i think, essential for a true revolution to happen. think about if our political leaders actually did their own healing work, and were full, healed, loving beings. think about how much more peaceful our world would be. how much more respect we would all have for each other. how much more love there would be. how much less oppression/hatred/violence/pain there would be.


and yes, we need community movements, and yes, we need larger political movements.
but we also need individual healing. we also need to emphasize that, to not discount the political impact of, say, a woman healing from sexual abuse.
and it's that individual healing that will fuel a truly revolutionary movement.
it's that individual healing that needs to form the basis of these truly revolutionary movements.


in short:
individual healing --> a healing movement --> revolution.



the next post in the works:
on being a political organizer and being emotionally healthy. on prioritizing your individual healing while still being an effective organizer. (or: on not actually needing to spend every waking hour on your cause, on not needing to use your cause as a distraction from the healing work you're not doing.)