How to Break a Vicious Cycle
When you're your own enemy, defeat is victory and victory is defeat.
Dear Reader,
I feel like I’m off track.
Just Progress is supposed to focus on positive change. But lately, I seem to be writing mainly story-of-my-life pieces that are at best tangents to the intended theme. Everything rattling around my mind has me all turned around.
That might suggest that it's time to pivot and explicitly change the focus to ideas that could change the world and how one might live a life aligned with these ideals.
Or it may mean I need to share what I observe, encounter, and learn about social movements through my actions and involvements, which also means that I need to reengage and get more involved.
While art and writing are themselves essential to progress, for this newsletter to be everything I had originally intended, I need to do more than I am at the moment. Without deeper engagement on my part, rancid feelings of imposter syndrome rise and riot in my gut when I write about ideas I haven’t enacted. My own limitations as a self-described leader hold me back from exploring the ideas in my head. It feels as though because I don’t presently embody praxis, the combination of theory and action, I can’t write about either.
Admittedly, if a friend was knowledgeable about a topic and told me that they felt unqualified to share their perspective because they hadn’t put their knowledge to the test, I’d tell them that theorists have always had as much of place in the world as practitioners. Yet, those exact feelings plague me and prevent me from exploring a number of topics I want to write about in this newsletter.
For example: the importance of bringing together community voices in climate organizing.
This practice is crucial for anyone aiming to orchestrate a just transition of the economy. The speed of change necessary requires as many people involved and onboard as possible. For a swift transformation to take place, communities must control the institutions that shape their lives. Community-control accelerates the pace of change and creates the greatest possible positive impact. To realize this, organizers need to bring people in and meet them where they stand.
Countless organizers have talked about the importance of this across movements for racial, gender, climate, and economic justice. It’s a narrative I want to amplify too. But one thing has stalled me from doing so: It’s not something I’ve practiced to the best of my ability recently.
This is evident in my role as the de facto chair of the community engagement committee for Seattle’s Green New Deal Oversight Board. The Board handed my committee a mandate in May to spend the Summer engaging with communities to share the Board’s budget recommendations, gather feedback, give them tools for pushing their priorities, and generally connect with the communities the Board serves.
Well, Summer is over.
And how many communities did we reach?
Exactly. Zero.
Over the past three months, I failed to organize one, single outreach event. I’m beyond embarrassed to say. Despite the fact that the Board serves BIPOC and other frontline communities in Seattle – communities I both care for and am intimately connected with – I didn’t do anything to introduce them to the Board’s work. Beyond that, I even failed to put together the one-pagers and slide decks assigned to me and the engagement committee.
To put it bluntly, given my recent track record, I feel like a fraud and a failure, an internal narrative that has only made matters worse. These feelings perpetuate a cycle of shame, self-hate, and self-conscious derision that makes me want to hide from the world. It’s a horrendous feeling to know you’re coming up short on the things you’re most passionate about and letting people down in the process.
Let’s pause and take a step back for a second though.
This cycle of shame is getting me nowhere.
So, why do I let it persist?
Well, for one, because I’m not as in control of my mind as I’d like to believe. None of us are. We’re all floating in a web of gray and white matter which has develop an idea of the Self to which it assigns both blame and praise. In reality, however, we are often the passive subjects of what transpires in the mind. Our brains receive inputs from our physical and virtual environments, and it fires off a response. After the fact, we take responsibility for our actions even if they happened without conscious consideration.
Interfering in the reception-reaction loop isn’t easy. To start, you have to mindfully monitor what you receive and how you respond. Once you’ve called attention to how you respond to certain stimuli, you can attempt to interrupt the cycle next time it’s triggered. That being said, it’s a difficult, imperfect process, but with enough intentional repetition, you can rewire your subconscious actions to create new patterns.
This is what I’m attempting to do here: Notice the cycles I’m caught up in, understand what drives them, and devise methods to mediate them.
One pattern I’m stuck in around the Green New Deal is putting my Board responsibilities out of sight between monthly meetings. Without a pressing deadline, I’ll ignore it until urgency forces me to tackle the task. That tells me that a critical change I could make is to impose reasonable intermediate deadlines, share them with another Board member to keep myself accountable and on track.
Another challenge is the virtual nature of the board. To date, we haven’t had a single in-person meeting. As a result, it feels somewhat impersonal, distant, and disconnected, like a recurring dream that occasionally seeps into reality. This allows me to deprioritize Board responsibilities when I have stacks of essays to edit, books to read, and client work to deliver on. To address this, I could give myself visual reminders of the Board work waiting for me.
But far above those two challenges, is the spiral of shame I need to free myself from. This vicious cycle paralyzes me when I contemplate the work I’ve put off. This loop shakes loose an avalanche of guilt that buries me neck deep with just enough room to breathe. Thus buried, my ability to act feels blocked, so the work is put off more and more. The continued delay only serves to send more snows of shame down until I find myself to be a fully frozen failure, unable to move, act, or do much of anything.
The solution to this is simple in theory, difficult in practice. The solution is forgiveness: the warmth of patience, lenience, and self-acceptance. The soft flame of forgiveness for my flaws can melt the ice and snow that block my path and bury me. These simple acts will get me farther than shame and guilt ever could. If I can’t give myself forgiveness for falling behind, I’ll never catch up.
So, with eight months remaining in my first Board term, I’m going to do my best to practice forgiveness and self-acceptance to help me tackle the backlog of work I have before me and advance ahead. As I march forward using these strategies to clear my path, change my behaviors, and create new habits, I hope it will help me to bring my ideas to bear in the work that I do.
Then, just maybe, my writing can fuel my actions and my actions can inform my writing, so both can improve the other.
This, my dear Reader, is what I will be doing in the weeks and months ahead. This is what I will do to stop myself from winding down a corkscrew to nowhere, and to instead become the practitioner of praxis that I know I can be.
With that, I leave you with this set of questions: Are you stuck in any vicious cycles? If so, what’s driving them? How might you change them?
Yours in Cycle Breaking,
Syris Valentine
Featured Article:
My article in Fix's "Climate Future Cookbook" came out just this last Tuesday. I know some of you already seen this, but for those of you who didn't, check it out!
(This is one of my best essays to date. It's definitely worth the read.)
To feed my soul, I went back to my roots
Meditation takes many forms. For some, it’s sitting cross legged with incense burning. For others, it’s kneeling in prayer. And for a few, it’s hauling hay across a half-acre while the still-rising sun strokes your shoulders. This was the first of many lessons I learned on my first day volunteering at Yes Farm.
. . . continued on Grist.org/fix . . .
In the News
Clean energy employment is on the rise and now makes up more than 50% of the global energy workforce
Hurricane Fiona made landfall over Puerto Rico and caused an island-wide blackout
Quote of the Week
To succeed, the movement needs a strategy appropriate to the scope and scale of the problem we face.
"No revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period."
- Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
Signing Off
Thank you so much, dear Reader, for reading through this week's newsletter.
Thank you for allowing me to be vulnerable with you about my shortcomings and the way I hope to fix them.
As usual, I'll leave you with the reflection questions posed above to think about going forward:
Are you stuck in any vicious cycles?
If so, what’s driving them?
How might you change them?
I wish you luck in breaking your cycles as I strive to break mine, and may our mutual efforts inspire each other.
Peace, Love, and Power,
Syris Valentine