Author: admin

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What is in our Control?

Do you want something to completely suck out your energy and make you contemplate quitting?

Try to control things that are completely out of your control.

You will drive yourself up the wall.

One of the things that I have found to give me peace amongst chaos is to reflect on what I have control over and what I do not. What is out of my control, I need to wash it off and let it go.

When the feelings are intense, I find the only way to do this is to either write it down or draw out a mind map. But some visual representation that I can post where I work is a constant reminder that I have found to be incredibly helpful.

Systems are huge.

They are interconnected.

It’s incredible how some things that are so small can make a difference, and yet some things can be such huge successes, and the machine fights back.

Do what you can. Develop a plan for what you can control.

It’s those little step-by-step tasks that matter the most. But if you are involved in systemic advocacy, there are going to be a lot of people and a lot of relationships that you will not even have access to. You will be dependent on other people. Focus on you and the rest; wash it off. Do the ritual to end your advocacy for that day. Close the book. Blow out the candle. Turn on a 3 min guided meditation on YouTube and carry on. Do something you enjoy. These issues aren’t going away; it is a work in progress. No matter how hard you work, it won’t be solved today.

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How to use Rituals as part of your Advocacy

When I have had a heavy emotional day at work, I come home and immediately hop in the shower to “wash it off”.

One of the aspects that helps with advocating at work is separating work from home. It’s done in a different location. I am wearing office clothes. I am speaking with people who don’t live with me.

We can take that concept and those features and apply it to help out other people who need to advocate.

For some people, advocating can feel so outside their comfort zones that they don’t think they can do it. But hey… put on a costume “office attire” or work someone else, and it suddenly isn’t as personal anymore.

Sometimes, to step into the role, having a ritual can help. We can go to a second-hand store, buy a blazer, and when we write our emails, put on our “office” attire.

We can light a candle when we do our emails or policy research, and when we are done, blow it out. The work is over.

Have a shower. Just as professional athletes visualize their goals, we can visualize that the words that stuck to us during that meeting are being washed off. I always shower in the morning, so for me to shower at another time in the day, it feels like I am starting a new day.

What are some rituals or symbols you can incorporate into the advocacy that give you the mental break that it’s done and you can think about other things now?

When advocacy is intense, it is easy to just have it ruminate in your head over and over. Replaying meetings. Re-reading emails. But you need to give your brain a break and have a balanced life to bring some gratitude and joy in your life and in your relationships with other people.

So, just like how I can leave the office and it’s done.

I don’t need to shower anymore when I come home from work, but if I ever have a hard day, I know I have a plan and an option to reset myself. I know what I need and what works. That confidence of knowing that I can cope helps to build my perseverance and my capacity.

How can people who are advocating for personal reasons use symbols or rituals to separate their advocacy time from their life? How can you?

The smallest things that you do will build up over time. It can be the little things that make a big difference over time.

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Isolation and Advocacy

I have heard over and over from people, “This is isolating”.

I think one of the benefits of working in advocacy at an office is that you physically get the reminder every day at work that you are not the only one doing this type of work. There are team meetings to discuss strategy. When something goes right, you can celebrate with others. When you get the most ridiculous response back, you have others just as shocked as you are.

If you are advocating for your own individual circumstances, you are probably just advocating from home. People feel utterly alone in their experience. It’s heavy, and it is exhausting.

Here is the thing.

No one is out there looking for you. No one is going to find you and send you an invitation to join this great group of people who are experiencing the same shit.

If you want to feel less isolated, you are going to need to be the person who puts in the work of “finding your people”.

It is going to take courage and some persistence on your part.

Support groups can be hit and miss, but don’t give up.

If you are going to be in any sustained kind of advocacy, you need to find friends. Otherwise, your mental health will suffer. Period. And there isn’t anyone else who can do the work of maintaining these friendships for you, other than you.

You are going to need to put yourself out there and risk being rejected. Risk it not automatically falling into place from the start. You will need to navigate through the weeds. It will take time and work.

When I started my student placement, my husband asked me how it was going. I said to him, “I can’t believe I am saying this, but I feel like I found my people.”

Communities are out there. They exist. Get involved. I can guarantee you, you are not the only one going through what you are going through. You don’t need to do this and be alone.

I have had a couple of friendships in my life; if I didn’t have these people, I truly don’t know how I would have survived the BC Human Rights Tribunal for as long as I did.

You may think you can’t take on anything more, but by getting involved, it may just increase your mental and emotional capacity, as the weight of doing this alone will be lifted and you will have more energy. Isolation is heavy. We need each other.

You don’t need to do this alone.

Choose to find your people. Your brain and your heart will thank you.

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The Pace of Change

“Change never happens at the pace we think it should. It happens over years of people joining together, strategizing, sharing, and pulling all the levers they possibly can. Gradually, excruciating slowly, things start to happen, and then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, something will tip.” – Judith Heumann

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The passage of time and how fast things are resolved can intensify pain and trauma greatly. If systems were more responsive to people and resolution weren’t delayed, the harm would be mitigated for many. Bounce-back time for those involved would be faster. Systems know that delay is harm. It’s why they use it as a strategy, hoping people will leave and move on for their own self-preservation.

While moving the needle for systemic change is not going to be fast, harm is still occurring while we wait. That is the rip-your-face-off reality that we all want. Change to happen now. Out of desperation and triggered energy, we seek dramatic and dynamic advocacy “tricks” to compel people to make new decisions and change their behaviour. Thinking that if they surely understood what was at stake, change would be delivered.

And then when nothing happens or not exactly what we were seeking, we are lost and confused. We do not understand the planet we are living on and who we are living with.

Recognizing that time is not on our side, or that it is even going to be used against us, is a hard pill to swallow.

Accepting that we have no control over how fast the rate of our advocacy is accepted by the masses or even the group of people we need to influence, we need to melt into the present and just be still for a minute. This is where meditation has been helpful for me. Only even if it is only for a 3 min guided meditation on YouTube, the pause and breath work can slow down my own knee-jerk reaction nervous system and bring me back to reality.

I have to say, nothing has taught me patience like navigating the BC Human Rights Tribunal system. There was nothing that I could do to speed up that system. I just needed to wait. And so I got really good at waiting.

When we learn to accept that the work will never be completely finished. And even if it is, finished work is fragile. We are just always in a step in the right direction. It’s not like the finish line keeps moving because there is no finish line to begin with.

We aren’t going to be able to save everyone and stop all of the harm. Struggle and suffering is going to be a part of people’s lives regardless of what we do. It has always been and will always be. It’s just the level of intensity of struggle that we are fighting to reduce.

You can’t force people to learn or unlearn things at a rate that is faster than what they are capable of or what they are interested in doing.

You will drive yourself into a spin, and it won’t help you or your cause. If anything, there is the potential of you doing or saying things out of anger and frustration that will create more barriers and impact the process, so now things will take even longer.

You may not be able to press the fast-forward button on social change, but you can plant as many seeds as possible, in such a way that you build the most fertilized garden. So if and when people are ready, they will grow at the fastest rate, the most nourished rate possible. Focus on what you can do. And everything else…. Let. It. Go. Wipe it off. If you have to stand up and act out the motions of wiping it off you with grand sweeps. Do it. Your brain will thank you.

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” – Martin Luther