We Do Work Here: Healing Spaces and Our Best Selves

I have just started work at Sadie Nash for my summer job (also the place that I did my fellowship to create As[I]Am, which you should still check out!), and I have been thinking a lot about space. Not just in that dreamy way that you get when you're apartment hunting and you're thinking of all the amazing ways that you could create a space that feels like 'home' - although I am doing that too - but in the sense of all the intentional work that we have to do to create spaces that feel safe for some really tough conversations to occur.

In case folks don't know, Sadie Nash is a young women's leadership and empowerment organization that really takes to heart the idea that every young person is a leader. Right now. Not when they finish the summer program, not when they are given permission, but in their homes and communities as they are. We just simply give them the tools to enact that if they would like to.

But spaces, unlike the young leaders, are not immediately safe for those tough dialogues.

When I think about the place I work and places that I've worked in the past, it's with this idea in mind: we have to reframe a lot of conversations to make the spaces we're in - whether online or in the actual world - feel ready for people to come and be the best they can be. Through respecting others, through listening to others, we create spaces that can welcome in all that work that we have to do together. Why we don't get that in other parts of our lives?

It seems to me that the primary view of what will motivate people to be their best selves is giving them a task and telling them to shoot for it, whether those are skills or tangible accomplishments (jobs, earnings, education, awards, etc.). The other motivator is power, whether that's over another person or animal or object. Both of these things are necessary in some measure to survive and feel safe. But they can also mess up our treatment of others, create conflict and hierarchies, and just make people feel like they have to hide parts of themselves so they can 'focus on the goal' or gather more power.

Activist spaces can sometimes feel unsafe too, of course. That's where the work piece must be underlined. We do work here. We do the work of healing ourselves so that we can help heal others. A space is the just one of those ways we make this possible. In the next few weeks, I'll be writing more about healing work and how I think it plays a big part of the work I am and want to be doing - stay tuned.

Remembering: Narratives as Social Justice

There have been dozens of endings happening as of late. I graduated college, won a few writing prizes, met some unforgettable people, and settled into my first post-grad apartment. I launched an Asian American social justice online magazine called As[I]Am (check it out!). So many congratulations and thanks are in order! But for now, a quick "state of the nation."

Writers with stories feel like they're itching to get words on the page - even if they're the wrong words in the wrong places. Blocked writers, on the other hand, are too terrified even to set their fingers in motion to pound out those missteps. I've been oscillating between the two lately, thinking more than writing.

In the month preceding my graduation, a factory collapsed in Bangladesh. It was mentioned by the president of our university at commencement - a lamentable political one-liner that was meant to encourage us to change our world for the better, but to me fell short. It holds true that the media attention to this tragedy is important for activists to organize and for stories to be remembered. It is true also that for things to change, they must be challenged. But I saw in every piece of news coverage a new spin on something that made me incredibly sad. I sat uncomfortably with my privilege as a college graduate and watched the numbers of dead rise into the thousands.

There was the story of one woman who survived for more than two weeks. There was the story of the jailed local boss who was a pawn in the hands of larger corporations. And the question of why the government didn't request foreign aid. And the resulting benefits for garment workers worldwide. Stories and stories and stories, each new one drying up ink in my own pens.

I've been working for months now on a novel about Bangladesh and the United States and the complex ways in which they are interwoven through personal connections, not just politics and economics. Something about the factory collapse shook me. Whose stories are being told? How are we using them? What are they covering up?

I was stopped up for other reasons as well, of course. Art is not the same thing as news, and even if I were on some kind of deadline, it would have been pushed out by all the noise of my final month at college, the launch of my online magazine, or some other event. Thoughts and lost sleep may pave the way for good dreams, but maybe not good work.

As the media winds down about the factory collapse, I am interested to see how it will resurface again in my own stories. My empathetic heart won't release them. I know that they are only the most public part of a hundred other undeserved tragedies; in some ways, the novel I am writing is also a lament for them as well as a remembrance. And even though our stories' effects aren't tangible, like a donation or direct aid, I'd like to think that pounding out the words will honor the nameless victims beyond just a line in a commencement speech. They will tell us a little more about ourselves as media consumers, just as much as they will tell about the people involved. And they will make people like me a little more uncomfortable - so uncomfortable, in fact, that they find it not only encouraged, but necessary to act.