what happens when we choose power
a stack of brightly colored notebooks, labeled with dates and titles on the cover and spine. archives, 2024.
As a doula, “I sit with people who do harm.”(1)
Sundays are for writing the personal with Cody and liberation book club with Christina. Somewhere many years ago, my twelve-year-old self delights in a full day dedicated to playing with words. It feels like my favorite parts of school.
We study Audre Lorde and Melissa Febos and Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery; we braid together a candlelit and tea-soaked hum of joy and grief, capacity and militancy (2), into the “skeleton architecture of our lives.” (3)
The rain drips against my windows; the wooden needles click in between unfurling strands of wool as we listen and talk.
I believe that most of us hold both privilege and oppression simultaneously.
I believe that many of us learn our hard lessons about power from the ways in which it has been wielded against us.
I believe that we don’t often have safe containers to consider the ways in which we might wield power against others.
And so I wonder what it looks like to question how we choose power.
I wonder how we choose power in our intimate relationships as well as in our structural access.
We see it in every data source, from the neighborhood stories to the nationwide polling. Who watches the kitchen table, a second scoop of rice at the ready as soon as a plate is half empty? How did the pundits analyze 2016 vs. 2024 exit polls, selecting the demographics to blame and demographics to ask to carry us, once again? How much of our taxes pay for genocides?
We point fingers — they choose power when they can.
But many of us — perhaps even most of us — we choose power, when we can.
The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. (4)
So I ask you, as I ask myself — where do you hold power?
Where have you turned towards power over, rather than power with? Where have you falsely believed privilege would keep you safe? When have you caused harm in that choice, and who felt the consequences of your choice? And how can you hold yourself gently in that inventory?
Audre Lorde instructs us: “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.” (5)
Often, it isn’t one that was ours to begin with.
Coalition building might require us to hold space for that in each other, but I believe we can also start by offering ourselves that “quality of presence.” (6) I wonder if this is how we “develop the full spectrum of capacity.” (7)
Rather than the desire to exploit, control, and direct others, [joy] is resonant with emergent and collective capacities to do things, make things, undo painful habits, and nurture enabling ways of being together… [it is] an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. (8)
Go gently. We are capable of terrible harms, as we are capable of the deepest care. Plumb the depths of both to learn what you are made of.
footnotes:
adrienne maree brown, in conversation with Care, 5 december 2024.
“It might mean the struggle against interanlized shame and oppression; fierce support for a firend or loved one; the courage to sit with trauma; a quiet act of sabotage; the persistence to recover subjugated traditions; drawing lines in the sand; or simply the willingness to risk.” — Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, p 25.
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” p 38.
Melissa Febos, Body Work, “In Praise of Navel-Gazing.” p 20.
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House.” p 113.
adrienne maree brown, in conversation with Care, 5 december 2024.
ibid.
Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, p 25.