Welcome back! Rounding out this series on hope, we’re going to be diving into the liberatory practice of joy. We’ve talked a lot about leaning into mourning, of letting ourselves wound so we can witness, and not turning away from discomfort. And while I think that’s crucial to continually resist what I call “cop out privilege” - aka the kind of privilege that lets you opt-out of difficult conversations because it doesn’t directly impact you, the kind of privilege that let’s you opt-out of difficult learning, of really looking at the impact of how you're living in a critical manner, and opting-out of the pain of redefining what you think you know by claiming neutrality - Liberatory practice is also all about joy.

Because the point isn’t to suppress our experience of joy or peace when it shows up. Joy, peace, and happiness are actually really important aspects of liberatory practice, hope and dreaming. And it’s important for us to know that joy and mourning are not mutually exclusive; we can hold all of this at a tension with each other, as integrated with one another.

So let’s chat a bit about how we can resist cop-out privilege while still allowing ourselves our full capacity for joy.

Let’s first start off with questioning our understanding of happiness and the ideas we’ve been brought up to believe about happiness. I’m going to read an excerpt of Sara Ahmed’s critique on the definition of happiness in her book, Feminist Killjoy:

“[As Feminist Killjoys] we might do something different with our happiness. Like refuse to let it be our end. The English word happiness comes from the word hap. meaning chance. The word happiness shares its hap with the word happenchance and haphazard. But happiness seems to have lost its hap. Becoming not what happens to you, but what you have to earn. We put the hap back into happiness, taking a chance on it. We could be happy to be queer without turning happiness into a project of becoming worthy or deserving of it.”

“We might need to claim the freedom to be unhappy, in a world that assumes happiness as evidence of being good, or at least the freedom to remain profoundly ambivalent and unsure. Life is complex and fragile and messy, and so are we.”

“We need to shatter the illusion that happiness is inclusion…We don’t tone it down, straighten ourselves out, try to be more like you so that we can get through to you. We spill over onto the streets, fierce and fabulous, our protests, parties. We spill over, we spill out.”

So if happiness isn’t something we have to earn, if it isn’t something that tells us whether or not we’re good or moral, if it isn’t something that we have to hold on to at all costs, if it’s something that we can let happen to us, if we free ourselves from the idea that happiness is liberation or that happiness is earned and something we have to prioritize proactively getting, what does that open up for us? What does that open up for our liberatory practices?

As therapists, we know that we can’t just selectively numb one side of the emotional spectrum. And that it is in letting ourselves feel the uncomfortable, the painful, the gut-wrenching, that we also let ourselves feel the joy, the connection, and the healing beyond what capitalism tries to sell to us. So why would that be different when it comes to liberatory practice?

Not to mention the whole capitalism thing? It’s exploitative, it’s a scam, and it doesn't work anyways; the most wealthy people often have such an innate spiritual pain of being the epitome of an unwell society. After all, what is well in a world that is so unwell? What is healing in a world that glorifies the harm we work so hard to attain, only to have to recover from it?

If we can let go of our obsession to be happy, if we can let go of our narrow ideations of what it means to be happy within this colonial, capitalist paradigm, then perhaps happiness will happen upon us.

One of my favorite quotes from Audre Lorde is “I feel, therefore I can be free”.

At first I didn’t get it, I couldn’t wrap my head around how feeling could be liberation. But now I think what it speaks to is the process of living and existing under oppression. Because at the end of the day, if you are having a response to the system, the atrocity, the cruelty, then that means you are not consumed by it, and you haven’t been overtaken by it. It brings into consideration that feeling deeply and without the restraints of having to earn happiness, and without conforming to the societal norms of happiness that works to invalidate our humanity, that we are resisting the very systems that tries to disconnect us from our divinity, our humanity, and our interconnectedness.

If we think about happiness in this way, if we forgo the idea that happiness is the peace we must consistently try to attain, but instead think of liberation as peace, we might see that believing happiness to be peace is all but a process of numbing. A numbing that requires us to turn away, a numbing that believes that in order for us to feel at peace in our lives we need to remove all that has us feeling anything but happy.

If we let ourselves connect, instead, to the paradigm of liberation as peace, we might start to let the hap back into our happiness, to experience how liberation as peace includes happiness and joy as a pause for breath, a pause for hope.

Because joy, too is an act of resistance. And while happiness is not hope, there is an inherent hope when we choose to opt in, rather than to opt out, and sometimes happiness, joy, and peace, not only allows us an emotional latitude to opt in but also becomes a treasured function of our opting in.

In the pursuit of collective liberation, the happiness that happens upon me when I choose to opt in, often comes in the form of connection and knowing that I am not alone in this work. Whether that is through encountering thought-provoking ponderings that reads like poetry or being able to engage with a group of people who are all envisioning and working towards the same future, liberatory practice becomes joy. Liberatory practice is the antidote to apathy. It becomes agency and meaning, and connection, and purpose. Liberatory practice releases you from the narrow ideations of what it means to be good under a colonial, capitalist, racist, cisheteronormative, anti-fat, classist, and ableist paradigm and instead allows you to rest into the connectiveness of solidarity.

This work was never really a sacrifice. It’s a healing practice that allows us to come back to ourselves and each other. To look at a world constantly telling us we are not good enough and not worthy and go “this is a distraction”. This is a distraction meant to keep us profitable rather than imaginatory, to keep us exploitable rather than in connection with each other, to keep us apathetic and hopeless rather than resisting and dreaming up the world that could be.

This work is a healing practice that bids us to lavish in the joy of the little minute moments because we know the lineages of resistance that made them possible. This work helps us let happiness happen upon us as we connect with the communities that makes living worthwhile…

Because your hope will never be enough if the hope is just yours.

You feel powerless up against these systems, because the systems have a lot of power. It’s by design! But we are not powerless when we’re together.

And if mourning is what forges solidarity, then hope is being part of something bigger.

Vikki Reynolds talks about vicarious resistance as opposed to vicarious trauma. (The TLDR of the idea is that vicarious trauma assumes the folx we work with and their pain is what harms us. The folx we work with do not harm us. It’s the fact that they are suffering and we have no means, in our limited, individualistic, therapeutic profession to comprehensively address the root of the pain with the urgency that would honour its magnitude - that’s what harms us. I’ll link Vikki’s article in the email that accompanies this audio. If you’re not already on the list, head to www.reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get a copy)

In contrast to vicarious trauma is vicarious resistance - the recognition that the folx we work with brings about a resistance that we are also transformed by. That it is in the presence of such resistance that we build our foundations for hope. That it is in our being transformed that we expand our beliefs of what is possible.

As Angela Davis says in her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle:

“[Communities] are the people whom we have to thank for imagining a different universe and making it possible for us to inhabit this present. There was Claudette Colvin, too, who has a wonderful book, Twice Toward Justice. All of you should read it because Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus before Rosa Parks’ action. Claudette Colvin was also arrested before. You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history. That is why we like to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, who was a great man, but in my opinion his greatness resided precisely in the fact that he learned from a collective movement. He transformed in his relationship with that movement. He did not see himself as a single individual who was going to bring freedom to the oppressed masses.”

Community is essential to hope. Hope is someone believing in you when you don’t believe in you; hope is collectively carried, not a thing you have to conjure up in you in the midst of despair (because let’s face it, sometimes you can’t)

Hope is sharing what you do and seeing other people shift and transform in minute ways. It is having infuriating conversation after infuriating conversation and still managing to find away back to each other to witness a loved one coming closer to justice.

These conversations don’t shift the system, but it also kind of does.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, Disability Justice activist and lawyer says, “you can’t legislate morality”. You can’t just put big sweeping legislation and expect that people will just follow it without backlash. You can’t expect a big sweeping legislation will be put in place, without radically changing the world that we live in, the culture we believe as truth.

So how do we radically change the world we live in? Robyn Maynard talks about “changing the air” in the beautiful book that is Rehearsals for Living, building on the idea of Leanne’s work on constellations of co-resistance. I’ll read an excerpt here:

Robyn Maynard on Rehearsals for Living: “Changing the air is vital. It is a precondition to the possibility of systemic transformation; it’s integral to struggle; it helps us, as Toni Cade Bambara describes it, to “make revolution irresistible.” Audre Lorde says, “social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way.” It is a rejection of “the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living.” And this generative rejection, this demand for another way of living, is louder and more vibrant and more wide-spanning than I thought I would live to see, especially in these times.“

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on constellations of co-resistance: “I’m actually not interested in justice. I’m interested in Indigenous resurgence, nation building, addressing gender violence, movement building, linking up and creating constellations of co-­resistance with other movements. I’m interested in making sure the movement around Indigenous resurgence is not replicating gender violence by placing bodies at our center. I’m interested in making sure we are not replicating heteropatriarchy or antiblackness by learning how to engage in constellations of co-­ resistance. I’m interested in freedom and creating a social, economic, political, artistic, spiritual, and physical space for futures of Anishinaabe people to be Anishinaabe on our land, unharassed and undeterred. I’m in the process of writing a new book on resurgent mobilization and I’ve been thinking a lot about constellations within Nishnaabeg thought. What happens when we make a constellation out of, say, Audra Simpson’s work on the politics of refusal, Glen Coulthard’s work on recognition, and Jarrett Martineau’s work on constellated relationships in the context of my own work on Nishnaabeg resurgence? I’m trying to figure that out. To me, in terms of organizing, this idea resonates both within Nishnaabeg thought but also in the aftermath of Idle No More. It is clear to me that we need to think about what resurgent mobilizing looks like. What does solidarity look like within grounded normativity? How do we use Indigenous place-­based internationalism to build constellations of co-resistance with non-­Indigenous communities who are fighting different aspects of the same system? This idea that you can bring particular theories or concepts together fits so well with Nishnaabeg star mapping and story. I’d like to apply this on the ground in terms of organizing—individuals or small collectives (stars) organizing within grounded normativity and connected to other individuals or collectives (stars) through Indigenous internationalism makes a lot of sense in terms of creating doorways out of settler colonialism.”

Building on this and Mariame Kaba’s naming of “one million experiments”, I think perhaps hope is built from one million little experiments that we enact and experience and be transformed by. One million little experiments that build upon each other, not only opening doors we couldn’t foresee, but creating doors we couldn’t even have imagined.

And in referencing Disability Justice wisdom and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, perhaps hope is forging communal unlearning that moves at the speed of trust, to build relationships that have collective buy-in to our radical, liberatory politics, and recognize that the rigidity and dominance of the status quo is not just what sometimes steals our hope and joy, but is also what forges the tenacity of those who will facilitate its change.

And perhaps, at the end of the day, hope doesn’t matter. We can hold all of these things at once and recognize that hope is a luxury that veils more poignant questions of liberation

Questions like what do I need to unlearn and how will I go about doing so? Questions like how can I stay implicated in this work in a world that would much rather have me turn away? Questions like what kind of world is possible and just outside our realm of imagination? Questions like where can I fit into a social change ecosystem that makes use of my revolutionary power, that connects me to something bigger?

Thank you so much for being part of this hope, this dreaming, this witnessing, this resisting. To close out I’ll also link Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem reflection, which is an excellent next step to support you in this deep work.

This is the end of the series, An Expose on Hope: A Reflection Guide for When Liberatory Practice Feels Hopeless. If you have any feedback or thoughts that have come up as you engaged in this series, please connect! I’d love to chat about what has been showing up for you. And also, please stay tuned for the bonus reflection guide, Mapping Ourselves to Collective Liberation where we dive deep into navigating the most common traps when we do this work. It was built from the grief, joy, and deep learning based on real life conversations and experiences, so it’s going to be a juicy one! I am just piecing together the framework for that now and am so looking forward to sharing it with you.

An Expose on Hope: a reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at [email protected]; let’s co-create our resistances together.

In each audio we referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get on the list.

If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler, from Hong Kong, occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.

And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!

Welcome back! I’m so stoked you’re here and hope that the last two reflection guides have supported you in thinking deeper about hope. Today, let’s add to that and chat about the trap of empathy and how we can instead, turn our hope in to witness.

Sometimes the gap between hope and hopelessness, mourning and solidarity, grieving and collective liberation…it just seems too big.

Sometimes we respond this vastness by numbing the pain, to turn away, to tell ourselves we can’t witness these atrocities and still be okay in our world, in our lives, in our relationships.

But we are supposed to be in pain. We are not supposed to feel nothing in the face of violence. We are not supposed to cling on to quote unquote normal as if we have not been transformed by what we have witnessed. We are not supposed to go on unwounded and unfazed in our daily lives as if genocides are not happening around us, as if they were not happening in our names.

Our discomfort is not a sacrifice, it is an ode to our ethics. Our ethics are not a sacrifice, because our hope and our dreaming can only exist through the roots of our ethics. There’s nothing to hope for if there’s nothing we’re willing to fight for. There’s no solidarity, if we don’t allow ourselves to be changed in witnessing the violence against another. There’s no dreaming if we don’t let ourselves see how the world needs to be changed.

And sometimes, on our way to hope, solidarity, and collective liberation, we fall into the trap of empathy and this new word I learned from diasporic Palestinian writer Sarah Aziza, solipsism - that we can only see the world through our experience of it, that our experience of must be the most centered experience.

I’m going to read an except from Sarah’s writing called The Work of the Witness which I will link in the email accompanying this audio so that we can fill this with more context: (remember to head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope if you’re not already on the list for the email!).

Okay here we go:

AS LONG AS PALESTINIANS ARE ALIVE to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has [observed], empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”

Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.

Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.

Or, much better expressed in the words of my cousin, the pharmacist, (Translated) I continue to insist, we have not gotten used to bombing and we are afraid of everything happening to us. We have not gotten used to the sight of suffering. No, it always breaks our hearts. We have not gotten used to the massacres perpetrated by the occupation. No. For every martyr, there was a life.

Empathy, especially the empathy taught to us through the colonial imagination of psychotherapy, is not solidarity.

As Robin D.G. Kelley notes and as paraphrased by Travis Heath, empathy is seeing someone that you can see within yourself, whereas solidarity is seeing someone you can’t see in yourself.

Solidarity requires a witnessing, and witnessing requires a wound. So don’t turn away.

And if we were to build upon that and consider Tema Okun’s work on white supremacy, we can see that white supremacy tries to convince us we have a right to comfort and then that right to comfort tries to convince us that we must do everything to be okay, to be quote unquote happy, including turning off our compassion, turning off our ethics, turning off the discomfort that would move us into resistance because it might quote unquote hurt us too much.

But turning away rather than turning in doesn’t actually do us any favors. Staying ignorant when we already know something atrocious is happening doesn’t save us from living in a devastating world.

Not to mention, we are not entitled to being okay and safe and comfortable when atrocities are happening, in our names, for us to stay so. Compassion isn’t enough for us to rest into our self-image of what it means it live our ethics. Compassion is a wild card. It can lead you to the state of discomfort that moves you into action, aka. solidarity. or it can lead you deeper into complicity in the name of self-protection. So what does it mean for us, if our response to witnessing violence is that it hurts us too much for us to be continually exposed to its reality?

And what does it mean for us, if our support is predicated only on consuming the broadcasting of violence?

Quoting again from Sarah Aziza in the Work of the Witness:

“Ultimately, I posted the photo of my father, his face redacted. Not an appeal to, but an interrogation of, would-be witnesses; an attempt to turn the gaze back onto the spectator. What does it feel like to encounter even this small disruption in access to us? If it triggers surprise or frustration, what does that say of the viewer’s expectation, their intent? Is compassion for this boy conditioned on the legibility of his face? Sometimes, it is an act of power to withhold, to refuse to show. “They can’t see us,” I have often said, speaking of the masters of the West. What I mean is, “if they could see us, the current world order would collapse.”

Mia Mingus talks about a similar concept from a Disability Justice lens, which is the idea of forced intimacy. Forced Intimacy is the idea that disabled folx have to show all their cards in order to get the smallest ounce of access, of dignity. I think about how this relates to our solidarity with Palestinian, Sudanese, and Congolese resistance. How can we hold each other accountable to doing ethics, to work towards a free Palestine, a free Sudan, a free Congo, without needing Palestinians, Sudanese and Congolese folx having to continually coax us and remind us of our ethics, at great risk to themselves?

What are we willing to leave on the table, to hold our share of accountability in this moment?

What entitlements do we need to redefine so that our hope and our dreaming can root itself in this wound?

I want to be safe but not if it comes at the safety of other people. I will not play hot potato with violence.

Collective liberation is being able to root yourself in this fight to examine your complicities so you can continue to stay implicated.

It requires you to feel; it is exhausting, it is excruciating, and it is healing and connecting and liberatory.

So back to you, is there solidarity accompanying your gut-wrenching compassion? What’s your compassion leading you to?

In what ways do you allow your heart to break and soul to wound as we fight for collective liberation?

In what ways can you foster your hope and dreaming through your wound of witnessing?

I’ll leave you with a poem-ish? That pieced itself together in my mind as I was processing and writing this:

What a privilege it is to be fragile. What an ode to my humanity that this hurts me. May this wound lead to witness, may this mourning lead to active resistance, and may resistance turn hope into dreaming and liberation into reality.

This audio series is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at [email protected]; let’s co-create our resistances together.

In each audio we’ll be referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already, so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get on the list.

Our next audio in the series is all about joy as a liberatory practice, and the importance of collective hope in our work.

If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler from Hong Kong occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.

And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!

Hey! Welcome back! If you’ve been part of Reflecting on Justice for a while, you know I’m part of an abolitionist book club. Every month we discuss a book or articles or podcasts that explores the whys and how's of abolishing the systems that harm us. Of how we shift the world from punitive and carceral logic and move instead towards transformative justice, accountability and collective liberation. (And, I often write about and share these insights we conjure up at book club to our email community, so shameless plug to join our email list if you haven’t already!)

Anyway, hope comes up a lot in these conversations we have at the abolitionist book club, whether or not we specifically name it as that, the undercurrent of our gathering is all about sustained hope.

This sustained hope shows up when we talk about histories and legacies, when a participant shares how their work with folx on the death row is meaningful not because these folx were able to escape state-sanctioned murder, but that they experienced a community fighting for their humanity.

Sustained hope shows up when we share and remember our first-hand accounts of resistance, of organizing, and how the outcomes of these acts of justice has now, magnificently, become life as usual.

Sustained hope shows up when we share how much easier it is to talk about collective liberation at this point in time, like something in the air has shifted…however slowly, but shifted nonetheless

And it is at this abolitionist book club where I first pieced together the realization that liberatory hope is actually not hope, but a dreaming.

Let me explain:

I have never really been a subscriber of conventional hope. I always thought conventional hope was a risky gamble that would make me a fool if it didn’t turn out or put me in a place where I had to wait and be a passive recipient. That hope would always put me at risk of disappointment, of not being able to lean into the safety of the snarky, “I knew it” or “I told you so”.

Because a hope that is predicated on the possibility of an outcome is vulnerable. In order for hope as a feeling to exist, there has to be part of me that believes it can become a reality. Dreaming on the other hand, requires no such possibility. Dreaming is to think up something that doesn’t yet exist, something that by definition is outside the requirement of what can be considered a rational possibility. And ironically, I think it is in this particular irrationality, that we can find the resilience that hope needs to continue its survival. It’s the belief that everything is impossible till it becomes possible. That it doesn’t have to be possible within the context of current reality, for it to be the answer.

And is that not what liberatory practice is? The recognition that we are living in the imagination of colonial violence, of racial capitalism, of extraction and exploitation; and recognizing that we could also collectively imagine something different. That it is this recognition, this “outside the scope of reality” imagination that our ancestors had that built this reality we’re living in now. That I wouldn’t be here doing this if it wasn’t for their imagination, that if I could speak to them now, they, too, probably wouldn’t believe that this is the world we are living in.

So now back to you, take a moment now to think about whether or not your hope is predicated on the possibility of an outcome.

And if your hope was not predicated on the possibility of an outcome, could it still become hopeless?

Because if you really think about it, when we are existing in such oppressive systems, the point isn’t really to dismantle the whole thing in one fell swoop. The point is to try. And it is in the trying, it is in the act of resistance that is trying, where we find our ties to humanity.

We resist not because we “know” better will happen, we resist because we know we deserve better, and because there is no other choice.

Not trying is simply not the answer; ignorance and disconnection doesn’t make me feel any better about climate change, about genocide, about the lives we get to live on the backs of another. And turning away in self-protection simply disconnects us from our ethics, our communities, our world that could be, our humanity.

As Naomi Klein writes in her book, Doppelganger:

“For me, the reason to study and read and write about economic and social systems, and to attempt to identify their underlying patterns, is precisely because it is stabilizing. This kind of system-based work is akin to laying a strong foundation for a building: once it is in place, everything that follows will be sturdier; without it, nothing will be safe from a strong gust of wind. Yes, our world is still confusing after we understand this—but it is not incomprehensible.”

And what comes with the willingness to see, the willingness to comprehend? The willingness to dream and feel and hope. To try so that we can continue hope, to resist as we continue to dream.

As Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and activist for a free Palestine says

“I think some of us are feeling quite stuck in this moment, particularly as we are in the belly of the beast and witnessing the unimaginable. I think witnessing the unimaginable forces us to imagine the unimaginable so we can actually create something different.”

So if you let yourself dream outside the confines of what is possible, to lean in to the irrationality of the unimaginable, what becomes sustaining for your hope? What gets in the way?

No worries if that last piece about what gets in the way comes through as some form of despair because liberatory hope, living the imagination of collective liberation, dreaming outside the confines of rationality requires us to mourn.

In colonial society, we often think of mourning as something to avoid, something that we should work to end. Something to be put in the DSM and labelled as maladaptive. Something to move on from, to let go of, so we can keep on with our lives unscathed, and quote unquote happy.

I heard somewhere that “grief is love with no where to go”; and “what is grief if not love persevering?”

We grieve because we have loved, we mourn because we’re connected and we experience another’s suffering as ours. Grief is an interruption of a relational dynamic that holds us in connection with another. A relational dynamic that has to find another way to exist. Sometimes, it has to exist in the metaphysical, in a spiritual connection to a loved one. Sometimes, it has to exist as an action towards a vision that honors our connection. Sometimes, it exists as small acts of resistance that keeps us surviving. The small acts of resistances that doesn’t abolish all that harms us in one fell swoop, but keeps each other alive by rejecting the narrative of dehumanization and the politics that systematizes our abandonment.

It is in this process of mourning that we redirect the love we hold to build the connections that breeds our resistance. To paraphrase Angela Davis, it is in our mourning that we can forge our solidarity.

So when you think of mourning as necessary for solidarity, what changes for you? Does your relationship with despair shift? How might despair be what actually qualifies you for this work? How might your dreaming be rooted in your despair? How might your solidarity be rooted in your mourning? How might your hope and dreaming continue to be reinforced as you let the grief of interrupted love be directed towards actions of justice? In what ways are you going to nurture and cultivate this interrupted love into a hope and dreaming that stays alive in the small acts of resistance you’re committed to? How might your mourning-forged solidarity show up as you answer the calls to action for ceasefires, for ends to genocides, and for justice?

As Nadine Naber, a scholar-activist associated with INCITE, feminists of colour against violence, Palestinianforce, and co-founder of organizations such as the Arab women’s solidarity association and Arab movement of women arising for justice says,

“This is the time to be screaming at the top of our lungs.”

And as Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that mobilizes hundreds of thousands of Jews and allies in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle and a vision of Judaism beyond Zionism says,

“The only thing that must be more profound than our horror, more profound than our heartbreak, more profound than our overwhelm, is our determination.”

So back to you. How has witnessing the unimaginable, allowed you to foster change that has yet to be imagined? How have you been able to mobilize this imagination? What are you dreaming up to be possible, and how are you living in the imagination of that world, right here, right now?

This audio series is offered by donation, with 100% of the revenue donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at [email protected]; let’s co-create our resistances together.

In each audio we’ll be referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already, so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get on the list.

If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler from Hong Kong, occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.

And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!

Welcome! Thank you so much for tuning in to our work, an Expose on Hope: a Reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless. I’m Abby, my pronouns are (she/her) and I’m a cis-queer, straight-sized, neurodivergent, working-turned-middle-class first gen settler from Hong Kong currently occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples and spent most of my life occupying the Annishnabeg, Ojibwe and Missisauga of the Credit territories colonially known as so-called Toronto.

And this is reflecting on justice, a wealth redistribution-based educational community for therapists to unlearn systemic oppression, together. Our relationship to these lands dictates our commitment to addressing the ongoing impacts of colonization in our work and in our lives, and is why we created reflecting on justice to do this deep work together in community.

I invite you to take this moment to reflect on your relationship with these lands and what it means for you to be here. I will absolutely have a different relationship than you do, and I’d be so curious to find out what has sparked for you as you do this work. If you’re not sure of the Indigeneity of the land you’re occupying, please visit www.native-land.ca to find out.

Alright so let’s start with some context before we do our deep dive into hope:

It seems like in every conversation, in every class I teach, in every lecture I watch, there are questions about how we sustain hope and how we move through hopelessness. Questions about how we stay in this work when the problem feels too big, too reinforced, too powerful. Questions about how we save ourselves from despair and keep ourselves from drowning amidst all the ways our systems are causing us suffering, amidst all the ways our systems are privileging us at the expense of others.

And those questions hold so much weight - this work is hard, and hopelessness is one of the primary tactics deployed to keep us from our revolutionary power. This makes having a fully processed response to hopelessness foundational to living our ethics when our ethics are inconvenient, when they are painful, and when opting out would just be so much easier.

Because understanding systemic oppression is not hard, saying you are an anti-oppressive therapist is not hard, saying your values are in kindness and compassion, and even in liberatory practice is not hard…

It’s when you’re challenged to question what you think you know and how you live your life, when you’re called to live your ethics in a way that doesn’t come naturally, when liberatory practice requires you to leave something on the table, or when you’ve been doing this for years and years and years and you get hit with an unexpected set back without the support you need, or when you’re isolated time and time again in your work and life, now that’s when it’s hard, that’s when your commitment really needs to kick in.

And that’s when hopelessness tries creeps in too, the heaviness of “what’s the point”, the gut-wrenching “this is too big and pervasive for us to shift”, the resigned “this will never change” or the restricting “humans are fundamentally harmful and selfish” narratives start to take up more space than you intend.

If this resonates with you, please know that you’re not alone. And please know that you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. This reflection guide was specifically created because you’re not alone and because there is already so much wisdom out there that can support you in redefining your relationship with your ethics, in shifting your response to hopelessness, and in reframing what it means for you to hope.

And this is such important work for us to do. With genocides happening in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo; with clients sitting in front of you holding the impact of a cruelty too systemic for our therapy rooms to completely dismantle in one conversation; with Indigenous, Black and Brown lives bearing disproportionate amounts of violence on the daily; with Queer, Trans, and pregnant folx having their rights stripped away under the guise of “family values”; with sick and disabled folx being told their safety, access, and dignity are worth less than individualistic preferences and the ableist scraps that allow organizations to slap diversity and inclusion on their values statement; with our world struggling under the scarcity and exploitation of capitalism and the destruction of ecocide…

We need all the revolutionary power we can get, and we can not have you going around believing that yours doesn’t matter.

Before we jump right into building this foundation, let’s get familiar with where you are in relation to your hope and hopelessness. Feel free to pause this guide as you reflect, come back to this after you’ve gone through some of the material, or just listen through fully this first time around and let things unfold organically:

Starting off simple: As we engage in this work, how would you define your understanding of hope and hopelessness?

What is your relationship and experience with hope and hopelessness? How do they show up for you? What other words might they show up as? When does your hope and hopelessness, or however else they come up for you as, get in the way? When do they support you?

If/When you think to yourself “what’s the point?”, or “this is too big and pervasive for us to shift” Or any other question and statement that hopelessness likes to deploy, who / what does that question serve? What makes it possible for this question to be at the forefront of your ethics, to dominate and overtake your revolutionary power? And what stops it from doing so?

As you reflect on how these questions have landed for you, let’s start to explore how hope and hopelessness have been examined in some liberatory communities so we have a foundation to lean on as we deep dive into what it means to build liberatory hope.

Riel Dupuis Rossi, Travis Health, and Vikki Reynolds co-constructs the idea of a believed-in-hope:

A hope that is not a binary between winners and losers. A hope that is not grounded in optimism and positivity, but bred from a lineage of resistance to what is realistically experienced as terrifying. It is a practice of not stealing hope, as many institutions do, as a tactic to keep revolution at bay. It is “doing dignity” with people, to witness their resistance and hold them in their space of pain and grief rather than to perform pity or charity.

And then there’s one of my favorite poems, a poem I actually use a lot in my practice, sharing it with folx who host suicide as resistance to the increasing unlivability of this world.

Written by Caitlin Seida, this is Hope is A Sewer Rat:

Hope is not the thing with feathers That comes home to roost When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing With teeth and claws and Patchy fur that’s seen some s**t.

It’s what thrives in the discards And survives in the ugliest parts of our world, Able to find a way to go on When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as optimism, persistence, Perseverance and joy, Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path and bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird, Emily. It’s a lowly little sewer rat That snorts pesticides like they were Lines of coke and still Shows up on time to work the next day Looking no worse for wear.

Similarly, Leanne Betasamosake (beta-sam-o-sake) Simpson and Robyn Maynard exchange letters about resistance in the book Rehearsals for Living - one of my favorite books of all time by the way, highly recommended - naming that a question about hope is simply the wrong question, I’ll read a small excerpt of their co-creation here:

“We both know hope is a luxury; my ancestors have taught me that. My people got up and worked really hard all day with or without hope. My ancestors didn’t need hope to build resistance, to build Nishnaabeg life and imaginings beyond regulation. Our movements and mobilizations do not have the privilege of resting upon a fleeting emotion. The absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst. Tenacity, persistence, stubbornness, rage, resentment, pessimism and despair are all motivators. So are joy, love, attachment, care, truth, optimism, respect and reciprocity. So is the delicious soup in which all those exist at once. The tentacles of racial capitalism do not get to demand hope or optimism, or celebrate rage and pessimism or consume our trauma and tragedy, or transform me into “uplift”—what Saidiya Hartman calls “a translation of Black suffering into white pedagogy. What I can learn from my ancestors about “Armageddon in effect,” as Public Enemy says, is that we world-build anyway, as a practice, as a way of life.”

And finally, Mariame Kaba’s reflections on hope as a discipline

Here is an excerpt from an interview she did on the Intercept about dismantling the carceral state:

“It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle, that was what I took away from it. It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world. You know, that we don’t live in a predetermined, predestined world where like nothing we do has an impact. No, no, that’s not true! Change is, in fact, constant, right? Octavia Butler teaches us. We’re constantly changing. We’re constantly transforming. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily good or bad. It just is. That’s always the case. And so, because that’s true, we have an opportunity at every moment to push in a direction that we think is actually a direction towards more justice.”

Like I said, lots of thinkers and communities have been pondering about hope, and there’s a lot to digest here, so take your time with it.

For me, hope is pancakes. Yep, you heard that right, hope is pancakes, or perhaps more aptly, hope is being able to see time and reality as pancakes stacked on top of one another, rather than linearly. The fact is, you and I can only be having this conversation right now because there have been spaces of lasting, permeating resistance stacked on top of one another. Leaning into this reality of what is, creates spaces for us to think about what can be. And this version of what is? This version of building stacks of pancake resistances, allows us to honor and ground into the lineages of resistance before us, lineages of resistance within us, inviting us into a collectively held hope that we now have a responsibility to expand upon.

In that regard hope has always been a transient conviction for me; some might call it faith, some might call it naivety - regardless of the words used to name it, hope for me is simply envisioning a future that ought to be, and believing that it can be, a process of redefining the narrative of this hope over and over again as new information and new experiences arise. The vision of the future doesn’t change, just the details. Perhaps the when, the how, and to be honest, it’s most frequently the “how hard it will be” changes. But ultimately, it is simple, it’s directional, it is moving, it’s transforming, and it just is. It’s not based on the possibility of an outcome, it’s based on a vision. More on that later.

For now let’s rest on the idea that hope is a discipline and discipline requires a choice

Hope is not a feeling, it is an action, it is a choice. It is a choice you choose when probability is not on your side, when the odds are not in your favor

So, what does hope as a discipline mean for you as you engage in our work towards collective liberation?

And when you think about the pockets of resistances that made it possible to be here, the pancakes of resistance building on top of one another and shared across the table, what changes for you and your relationship to hope?

Why do you want to be choosing hope? What is your skin in the game?

Angela Davis talks about reframing the idea of locating intersectionality in bodies to intersections of struggle - what are the structural connections, the context of your struggles that tie you to the struggles of another? What are the parallels and common connections that bids you to choose hope?

Because perhaps hopelessness is a fork in the road, stopping you so you can make a choice, pausing you and beckoning you to examine your complicities.

Perhaps, hopelessness is a companion of realizing the gravity of the situation, a moment that we’re invited to pause as we redefine and intentionally reinforce our hope. An invitation that also asks us to realize the gravity of the resistance that has come before us, that comes with us, and will come after us.

So let’s get you there shall we? In the next 3 audios we’ll take you through examining liberatory hope as dreaming, how grief and mourning are required for collective hope, and why we need to engage in the important work of shifting from hope to witnessing. Finally, we’ll also touch on joy as a liberatory practice and the impact of collective hope.

In each audio we’ll be referencing and examining the work of liberatory thinkers and on the ground activists at the forefront of our work, so make sure you’re on our email list if you aren’t already so that you can get the transcripts and links to materials referenced. Head to reflectingonjustice.com/hope to get on the list.

This audio series is offered by donation, with 100% of the proceeds donated to supporting Palestinian, Congolese, and Sudanese resistance. This is my messy, imperfect attempt to have the examination of my complicities as a person occupying stolen lands in the global north, as a person who’s lineage was also directly impacted by the colonial violence that allows me to occupy this space, to be useful to the active resistance in one way or another. If you have any feedback, critiques, or suggestions please email me at [email protected]; let’s co-create our resistances together.

If you haven’t met me yet, I am Abby, a cis-queer, first-gen settler from Hong Kong, occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, in my work I am a clinical supervisor, adjunct faculty member, and practicing therapist and in my life, I spend most of my time building and learning all things justice-oriented and liberatory practice, living my best life trying to be a human database for this important work. I also have a thing for live shows, cute cats, good food and building mechanical keyboards, so hit me up with all your favorite artists, cat reels, recipes, and recommendations for tactile switches.

And this is Reflecting on Justice, your resistance besties, your community to unlearn with, and your co-conspirators for liberatory practices in therapy. Till next time, in unlearning and solidarity as always, take so much care, and I’ll talk to you soon!

Find Yassie at pssdcanada.ca, pssdnetwork.org, willowleafcounselling.ca

Want more justice-oriented conversation and insights? Sign up for our Unlearn with Us newsletter at www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist

Find Bhupie at www.prospectcounselling.ca or www.bhupiedulay.ca

Follow Prospect on instagram! @prospectcounselling

Want more justice-oriented conversation and insights? Follow us on instagram at @reflectingonjustice

Or sign up for our Unlearn with Us newsletter at www.reflectingonjustice.com/newsletter

In this episode, we talk centering knowing and truth as joy, racialized queerness, shame, and going back to basics. Find Xu at artfeelscounselling.com

Want more Reflecting on Justice? Go to www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free Intro to Justice-Oriented Practice Guide.

Find Ravin at @therapy.afterhours / @ravinaulakcounselling or https://www.ravinaulak.com/

Want more Reflecting on Justice? Sign up for our free justice checklist at www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist 

In this episode, we talk with Theresa about reclaiming spaces for folx to exist, including yourself, as justice-work; realization as radicalization; as well as the power of rest, community, and environment. Find Theresa at inpowercounselling.com. 

Want more Reflecting on Justice? Check out www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free intro to justice-oriented practice guide.

Our first ever podcast! Let's start questioning colonially developed "professional" ethics. Join us as we launch our Redefining Ethics podcast through setting intentions, energy exchanges, and personal stories of unlearning systemic oppression. 

Want more Reflecting on Justice? Check out www.reflectingonjustice.com/checklist for your free intro to justice-oriented practice guide.