Loving Revisions
"Love looks like accountability."
-adrienne maree brown, in Loving Corrections
I'm a super-fan of adrienne maree brown, returning to her books, Loving Corrections, Emergent Strategy, and We Will Not Cancel Us whenever I need to hold the fear, guilt, grief, or shame waves that arise when I inevitably make mistakes as I choose to participate fully in this world. As my anxiety grows from all the potential harms my work may cause as it's translated and released around the world, brown reminds me that there's a path forward when we mess up: the accountability of loving revisions.
"We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths," brown offers in We Will Not Cancel Us. "Not already free, but practicing freedom every day. Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other...and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggle in ourselves and our communities," she continues.
"I want our movements to feel like a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging," brown teaches. "I want us to grow lots and lots of skill at holding the processes by which we mend the wounds in our communities and ourselves."
So this section is entitled Loving Revisions in deep appreciation of brown's teachings, to create a space to receive feedback, reflect on it, and revise my work as an act of love towards each other and our collective. Imagine what courageous paths forward we could each create if we carried a process to safely repair and revise our missteps?
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The Relief of Accountability in a Scary World
If we can build our capacity to be accountable and repair our relationships, then our emotional alarms don't need to scream so loudly when conflict and harm inevitably occur.
When we feel the distress of shame storms arising as we show up fully in the world, we need the compass of our values to keep us moving in our chosen direction.
What is an expert? Can any one person have the authority to understand someone else’s experience? And does hiding my own vulnerabilities under the opaque polish of the "objective expert" make me any more trustworthy?