I’m re-sharing an episode from the Notes from an Aspiring Humanitarian Podcast archives today entitled “Positive Vibes Only” as a counternarrative to pressure to succumb to toxic positivity and an affirmation especially to people with marginalized identities that it is okay for us to feel a wide variety of emotions about the challenges we face, even as we work for our own liberation and the liberation of others.
One of the things I know to be true about social justice work is that in order for us to show up as our authentic selves in the work for our collective liberation it is important to have relationships and communities that make space for the expression and affirmation of a variety of complex human emotions.
What I often see and experience in our spaces is a tension between holding space for hopefulness and being inspirational and allowing space for honest feelings of hopelessness and skepticism or pessimism.
Because we’ve had similar and different experiences and are situated differently in terms of our understandings of and relationship to power, privilege and oppression, we may each also have similar and different coping strategies and capacities for engaging with our emotions and the emotions of others.
As long as people try to come together and resist oppression that tension will always be there, but the thing that can determine if our outcomes are repetitive of oppressive patterns or if they are transformative is found in whether or not we are able to hold space for the fullness of one another’s feelings and experiences.
All oppressed people have experienced some form of gaslighting and have to reaffirm that our experiences are real. So holding that tension and making space for happiness and hopefulness as well as anger and skepticism is so important for establishing the psychological safety that we are rarely afforded by society.
From the podcast:
“In life and online, set your own boundaries. Use the block button. Log off. To the degree that you can, do what you need to do to protect your own mental health and energy in light of whatever discomfort you might be experiencing based on what is happening locally or nationally.
I think we can acknowledge the need to do that, while also recognizing that not everyone can “take a break”, or turn it off in the same ways, if at all.
Can we not tell people what is acceptable to share here? Particularly those who are personally impacted by issues that other folks are only exposed to on an intellectual level at best.
Let people rage and grieve and organize and heal. Let people tell their own stories. And when the day comes that you might need support or solidarity, may you be met by an individual or community who can hold space for, and express, a wide variety of complex human emotions.”
From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins-Jones
