alexandra_thorn

It's been a hell of a week. Given 1) my values, and 2) my understanding of history, I am naturally appalled by the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election. Like many others, I am also seeing this as a call to action.

There are some ideas I'd had a few years ago about better ways to engage with people that I never followed up with, and now I really wish I had. So, I'm going to try to pursue those now. Alongside everything else.

Small conversations for support and strategizing

My idea centers on community-building through small-group conversation, working toward identification of shared values and areas for action. I'm realizing now that another piece of this is to understand what others' needs are in order to help set priorities. A third goal is to start to build up mutual support structures, so that we are all less alone.

I want to start just by starting to have some one-on-one semi-structured conversations, possibly working toward and intentional conversations in small groups about values and what matters to each of us. I've started the process of finding people interested in these conversations, and am currently thinking through what kind of structure I will want to use. Probably a handful of guiding questions and let the conversation go where it will from there.

Let me know if you're interested in participating in something like this with me. Also feel free to reach out if you have similar ideas and want to bounce ideas off of each other.

Thoughts on conversation structure: values, safety, and feelings

As I've started to think through what the guiding questions should be, I'm realizing that there are several interrelated layers that need to be considered. Values are central to what I'm hoping to do, but safety is central to everything, and I think basic assessment of safety is going to need to be part of the conversation. Meanwhile emotions pervade everything: emotional safety is part of safety, feeling safe or unsafe strongly affects emotions, values inform emotional reactions, and emotions can magnify or distort feelings of safety and unsafety, potentially warping sense of risk.

Positionality, risk, and risk perception

There *are* real risks in the world today and will be more in the years head, but it isn't necessarily true that everything that scares us poses a genuine risk to our safety. And risks are different for different people. Social position matters. Race, wealth, connections, language, gender, gender history, citizenship status, ability status, physical health etc. all affect the magnitude and immediacy of any dangers.

Our reactions to events are affected by the behavior of those around us, and there is a natural tendency to cue our own behaviors off of the behaviors of those around us, but in reality our needs are different. The needs of---and dangers to---people with chronic health conditions are not the same as those to people in relatively good health. The needs of parents are different from the needs of people without children. Age matters. Religion matters. Marital status matters. Career and employment status matter. And the relative visibility of differences matters too.

The upshot is that some of us have more urgent reasons to take personal protective action than others. Some people have more critical needs than others, and also the thing that is most urgent for one person might be different from the thing that is most urgent for another. Is the highest priority to stockpile medication? To speak out? To take cover? To leave the country? Those answers won't be the same for everybody, and the ability to triage our *own* situations can help to make things safer for those whose critical needs are different from our own.

Time scales

It's also important to think about time scales. The world *feels* different right now, but political leadership won't change until the new year. Some concrete things are happening now in preparation for that change, others won't occur until the political transition, some of which will take time and others of which might not happen at all. And there is additional complexity because certain future events occur or not depends on the actions we take now and in the months ahead.

I've been thinking about these issues as a process my own feelings following the election. ( A personal story )

Depending on how things progress, it could become extremely important to continually ask ourselves whether we are in immediate danger. Sometimes we might be, and it will be important to notice. Secondary questions are whether danger exists in the near term (or longer term), and how definite it is.

Circles of care

With all of this in mind, I'm realizing that an important part of the semi-structured conversations I'm hoping to have could be to think about concentric circles of care. We can't attend to issues that matter to us in the broader world if we don't attend to our own immediate needs. Only then can we attend to those in our immediate vicinity, and to the people closest to us, and ultimately to society and the broader world.

So I think before trying to dig into questions about values, I'll want to ask people about their immediate situation. This might be as simple as a question of "how are you doing?", but trying to make it clear that this is not just as a courteous formality. I've heard a lot of talk in the past several days about mutual aid, and I think that tuning in to what is going on with others is part of this. If our goal is to help one another, then a part of that needs to be understanding what kinds of help others might need---to do what we can to ensure that it is safe to talk about what's going on with each of us.

A useful conversation structure might parallel the "loving-kindness" meditation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB#Mett%C4%81_meditation), which prompts us to first direct compassion and love at ourselves, and then toward those closest to us, working our way out to the world in general. I think it will also be useful to think about the "comfort in, dump out" model of circles of grief / ring theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology)). We all have work to do, but depending on our situation, the most important work might be simply to get through the day, or to ensure medium-term stability for our own households.

Navigating this space can be messy. It may be very important for those of us with relative privilege to do various kinds of advocacy work, and it might also be easier to do that work when we do it together with members of our communities so building those communities is crucial, but it's important that calls to action not put undue pressure on members of our communities are highly vulnerable, or who might be in chronic pain, or who are already doing a lot of work to support others. I've occasionally posted calls to action on social media with the unintended result of causing people more vulnerable than myself to feel guilty about not doing more. It wasn't my intention, but unintended consequences matter. It's important to be able to support one another's self care.

Ultimately, I think it has to be up to each individual to assess what kind of work they want to do and how much they are capable of.

Conclusions

Ideally, I'd like to structure conversations in a way that helps to identify both 1) what people need---how they meet those needs, and what ongoing or future changes worry them---which can help to clarify what kind of work is needed in the world, and 2) to help understand each person's values and priorities, how those values are reflected in their everyday lives, and any changes that they might want to make.

I think I'll be formulating questions that start with each person's immediate situation ("how are you doing") and that of their loved ones, and then proceeding to questions about values, hopes, and worries, and how we enact our values. Somewhere in there I'll want to also talk about responses to ongoing and anticipated change. It's all a bit of an experiment, but I think this is my starting point.