Leveraging empathy, and not being afraid to look

Gauging our relationships with enoughness and each other to bridge the distance of privilege and understanding.

Photo by Laura Beckel Thoreson

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I believe that every being on this planet deserves an abundant, joyful, and resourced life and livelihood. Full stop.

Do I think that will ever be actualized? No.

Please excuse my bluntness. As much as I might want it, it matters less to me that we’ll ever reach a total or even partial reality than it does to continue to choose to orient toward the idea that there are inherent rights of the people, animals, and ecosystems living on this earth.

I want to live more often as if those rights matter to me, because they do.

I know in a lot of ways what I’m saying seems like a lofty and kind of annoying proclamation, but let’s just suspend disbelief for a second and imagine if we as humans universally behaved according to this belief.

Now imagine if just a fraction of humans behaved according to the idea that people and creatures were inherently worthy of a well-cared-for, well-resourced life. That every person, regardless of status or ability, was simply meant to have enough.

What if only a few behaved that way? Even if it was only part of the time?

My guess is that, even if it only happened some of the time with some people, anyone who came in contact with those people would be lucky to do so, and better off.

I’d love for that to be extended to everyone, but I’d settle for just…more of us extending it to each other more of the time, myself included.

Of course, there are people already operating this way. I’m not introducing a new concept, and I imagine if you’re here it’s likely that some version of this is in your heart at least some of the time.

So let’s just consider this to be a reminder.

Maybe you engage with the news and you do not feel this way, but I genuinely feel like the majority of people on this planet want to feel a comfortable sense of enoughness and joy, and if we could wave a magic wand, most of us would grant that same comfort and joy for every other person here too.

On the whole, it’s not for lack of desire that inequitable conditions exist. It’s — you guessed it — the systemic forces that perpetuate and entrench us in cycles of lack and/or resource hoarding (you didn’t think I was just going to talk about magic wands, did you?)

There are so many reasons why you might or might not have access to a full abundance of resources, let alone a more basic foundation, and so much more of that has to do with your proximity to privilege than it does to your work or contributions.

That’s not to minimize the work that you have undoubtedly done to get to where you are. It’s more so to acknowledge the reality of the systems we live in and how they keep us swimming upsteam no matter what our efforts are.

I’ve been thinking about enoughness this month in particular after attending a How Much Money is Enough workshop facilitated by my friend

Nic Antoinette

at the beginning of June (which, wow, am I so grateful she’s bringing that back in an extended format in the fall, because we unpacked some of the good deep resource and money questions that I want to be able to revisit again and again).

Enoughness is something I think about a lot in general, and it’s probably evident by the fact that I’m able to spend so much time thinking about enoughness that I have some measure of it.

When you really don’t have enough, like in a material sense to meet your basic needs, then you’re probably so focused on keeping yourself afloat that you’re not exactly sitting around waxing poetic about the philosophical underpinnings related to privilege and consumption.

But beyond that point, when you’re somewhere past the lowest baseline for survival, being in continual cycles of having less than you need likely brings up one principle question over and over: “What is this bullshit?”

And: “It is clearly bullshit that I’m experiencing this and people I know are experiencing this and not enough people care.”

I think we often see so much community resource sharing and mutual aid happening within lower-income communities and communities with people of marginalized identities and needs because those cycles of not-enoughness generally hit those people harder and more frequently. At some point, there’s also an inherent understanding of the resources that can exist outside of just money, because when you have less (or no) money to give but still want to give, you find alternative ways that you can.

So when the blows come (job loss causing significant financial strain, health changes that affect the ability and/or safety to able to earn an income, not having adequate access to fundamental resources, housing instability, etc., or in more extreme but just as real circumstances, displacement, violence, or starvation due to genocide), the people who experience them deeply and more often know the full extent of that pain for themselves.

Because they know it and they’ve personally felt it, my guess is that most people who have been in significant hardship, financial or otherwise, know on a deep level how inhumane it felt for them, and how it would be fundamentally inhumane for others to ever have to face the same as they have.

That, or as it sometimes seems to happen, they manage to muscle their way out of deep financial straits and then cannot ever willingly look at anyone else in the situation they were in with equal compassion because it’s too painful.

Judgment happens because we’ve been there and we’re afraid of getting back there so we feel like we need to distance ourselves, or we haven’t been there and we’re afraid of the possibility so we feel like we have to distance ourselves.

Speaking in part from personal experience, the more privilege you have, the more divorced you are from the actual felt experience of being denied what should be free for human access.

It’s gross, I hate it, and I am not exempt from it.

For full transparency, I am a person who does have quite a bit of privilege, and because of that, it’s of course worth getting more nuanced takes from people with varied backgrounds and circumstances outside of this one. I’m white and college-educated, without student loan debt, with generational wealth and a significant (though limited) inheritance. I am a person who can, at least for the time being, work for an income. I work remotely, with no commute, with a flexible schedule. In my work, I experience a high level of safety to my physical person because I don’t have to go into a workplace where I might be exposed to airborne illness, and I don’t have to do physical labor that pushes me beyond the confines of my body (with the exception of, like, self-inflicted carpal tunnel and back injuries).

My income has been somewhat variable in recent years because I experienced significant trauma, grief, physical health issues, and personal upheaval that resulted in mental health collapse for the majority of 2021-2023, and the work I did during that time was either inconsistent or non-existent. But I was able to remain independently sufficient (more or less) due to the privilege of the inheritance from when my dad died in 2020. Without that, I would not have been able to remain living alone and probably would have had to move back in with my mom in Colorado. (I’ll surely talk about that time period in more detail eventually because it has informed my orientation around work and relationships of care and how I seek to build Rest Day with our team in very substantial ways.)

It’s not cute to talk about being in your thirties and the possibility of moving back into your childhood home due to all-around instability, but I bring it up so we have some idea of the relative “stakes” I was dealing with in one of my more recent times of feeling some not-enoughness and simultaneously how my privilege ensured I would get by with more than enough.

I have some marginalized identities, as well as developmental disability, trauma, and health needs, and I come from an upbringing that included penny-pinching, coupon-cutting, and thrift store shopping for a good part of it. So my identities and experiences allow me to get somewhat closer to a felt understanding of not-enoughness, and I have felt it in degrees throughout my life.

But unless the circumstances around my privilege change substantially in my lifetime, I will only ever be able to approximate the full extent of what it is to be truly without resources.

For people with all degrees of privilege, but especially the more we have, some of our relationship with not-enoughness is based on past experience, but a lot of it is around unactualized fears of losing what we have, narrativized warnings about what our futures could be if we don’t adhere to the standard modes of operating (ie. remaining in proximity to whiteness, patriarchal ideals, adherence traditional gender roles, job title, education, generational wealth and public status, ablebodied status, etc.)

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want those stories driving fear in my life, because I don’t want to be granted privilege based on those ideas. I am, but I don’t want to be.

For fears around resources and work, a pretty common coaching or therapy exercise is to follow a fear to its natural conclusion, which after some unpacking inevitably comes down to some variation of: “I am going to be alone on the streets with nothing and nowhere to go.” Usually the coach or therapist then verbally walks their client backward from that catastrophizing scenario to show how many steps actually exist between where they are now and what it would take to get there.

Only, there already are people who are living alone on the streets with very little to their names, and those people are not just faceless projections for grappling with our own privilege. People who are, as of this week’s Supreme Court ruling, at risk across our country of being criminalized for not having adequate access to shelter, even if there is no alternative option.

Maybe we do feel better in a therapy session when we realize our distance from the stories of ruin that capitalism threatens us with coming true — but I want to make sure we each know what that distance costs us.

You may not personally find yourself unhoused today or tomorrow, but according to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Urban Development, more than 18,000 people will enter into homelessness systems for the first time each week (via the National Alliance to End Homelessness). Maybe you feel relief that the number doesn’t include you, and I guess a part of me secretly does for myself too, but it feels worth thinking as if those statistics could include us.

Not “it could be us” so we should hold onto even more for ourselves in our savings accounts, but “it could be us,” as in: we are not so different.

People we don’t personally know who are experiencing difficulties (of all kinds) are still people, and they’re just as much living, breathing, feeling humans like we are. That should be enough of a commonality to realize if we felt what they might feel right now, then we’d want it to be recognized.

The cost of our distance is our empathy, for the sake of self-protection.

Distance allows us to normalize what is absolutely inhuman and inhumane.

All of us. I’m included in that.

The more resources we already have, the more likely we are to centralize fear and narratives around the potential for our own loss: “I am terrified of the possibility of having to viscerally feel what it would be like to not have enough, so I will do everything in my power for myself to keep that from happening to me.

It’s an understandable sentiment, based on human psychology and also the capitalist structures we’re all doing our best to navigate — but it erases externalities. It is a different thought than: “I have viscerally felt what it means to not have enough, so I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure this never happens to me again, or to anyone else.” Doubtless, some of you reading this have experienced real, acute, financial scarcity at one time or another, perhaps frequently, and maybe even currently, and you know this all to well.

There are degrees of what it means to not have enough, so pretty much everyone who didn’t come out of the womb with a silver spoon in their mouth can understand the concept on a personal level even if it’s not an extreme one.

But if you haven’t felt it lately, then consider getting in conversations that remind you. Consider entering interactions, with anyone, regardless of whether they look like they’re having a hard time or not, with the intention of being open-eyed, and open-hearted to try to feel what it must be like for the people who are in what they’re in right this second.

It’s too easy to forget, to look away, to be insulated. I forget all the time, sometimes willingly and willfully. I’m embarrassed to say that, but I know I’m not alone.

I don’t want us to forget and not try to remember.

If you’ve felt loss, if you’ve felt the realness of not having enough, you are the expert in your experience. And if you are someone with privilege, it is your job to listen and witness, follow the lead, and believe the people who are telling you what they need – without gatekeeping or qualifiers. It’s also your job to understand that people in need may not trust you to tell you what they need, and they have every socialized and state-enforced reason not to.

This isn’t an either/or dichotomy. Having access to material resources is on a spectrum, and as individual people, we may start somewhere more to the left or the right, but we still move back and forth across that spectrum throughout our lifetimes. A whole bunch of other spectrums exist too: access to less tangible resources like community belonging, personal actualization, creative expression, emotional healing, etc., and all of those can be connected to or completely separate from financial wealth.

It’s not an exact science, but I do think we can tell for ourselves when we’re in a time of need, and for what. You may have an abundance of financial resources, but currently seriously lack community connection and have that affect your wellbeing in substantial ways. That’s still a need.

It’s worth knowing that we can be in need and still contribute. If we didn’t, probably nothing would ever happen.

We all have needs, and they’re all worth being taken care of, but not all of those needs have the same primacy. For example, having the need for human contact during quarantine and having the desire to break quarantine to meet that need would be a valid thing to want, but that need wouldn’t come before the needs of older and/or immunocompromised people who could experience extreme health complications by being in proximity to a virus that could end their life or severely diminish its quality. Cuddling your boo is important, but not as important as, like, people breathing. You feel me?

In lieu of systems that will do it for us, resourcing ourselves as individuals and having resources at our disposal are ways we can leverage more power on behalf of not just ourselves so we can move toward the building of systems that will.

Resources mean money, but they also mean time, relational, intellectual, organizational, etc.

Leveraging empathy for change becomes a matter of consciously reorienting away from fears for ourselves that, at least to some extent, exist in the imagined toward the very true scenarios that are happening in reality, right now.

Fears about not enoughness are valid, wholly and truly. They’re worth being tended to. But fears are not the same as actualities.

One of the things we talked about at length in the money workshop is how there will never be enough money to cover every imagined disaster scenario for ourselves. We can pretty much always imagine a catastrophe in which we need more.

So instead of shoring up as much in our bank accounts as possible for the worst possible future, and putting ourselves through an unending exercise of futility and anxiety — what if we…didn’t? There will never be enough so we don’t have to try to get close to a number that doesn’t exist.

Our imagined scenarios aren’t nothing. We do need a level of security, especially as our systems of government do less and less to support us. But we don’t need to only keep stockpiling our money and our time and our energy for some solo exercise in survival based on potentials when actual realities exist. This is not batten-down-the-hatches and wait it out, and let other people figure it out.

We will not be able to do everything, or even a very small fraction of everything. But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing, especially if that’s driven by fear based in supremacy we don’t even want to be a part of.

So what do we actually do about it all though?

I mean, you tell me, babe. There are countless experts on wealth inequality, resource redistribution, mutual aid, and advocacy work, and I’m not trying to be one of them.

What I am trying to get at is that one of our most important resources to come back to again and again is our felt sense of understanding, to continually, gently become aware of where we’re putting distance between ourselves and other people and why.

None of us need to be experts for that; we just need to be willing, and we need to remember what we value.

Each of us needs to find our own right relationship with empathy, because it is humanly impossible to feel it all. I am all in favor of establishing boundaries. I am all in favor of finding and creating our own parameters for what “enough" looks like in the ways we give and offer support. I don’t think we can keep our wits or our hearts about us if we don’t. Compassion fatigue is real. Limited time and resources for support are real.

But we need to have a relationship with empathy to begin with, because I don’t think we’re ever going to make it to a different reality than this one if we don’t.

Close yourself if you have to, but don’t stay closed.

Harm will happen because we exist in systems that perpetuate harm and keep us complicit in harm no matter what we do. But what if each one of us did just a little, a bit more of the time, to perpetuate less? It’s not an either/or, and being inherently complicit doesn’t mean we have to willingly or actively cause more harm where alternatives might exist that are within our reach.

There are still ways that we can minimize that harm while still meeting our needs, and being mindful that our resources don’t come at the expense of our mental wellbeing or someone else’s at the same time. Undoubtedly I will talk about some of the concrete ways we can engage, but for our purposes in this moment, I just want us to remember empathy and remember it and remember it again.

I don’t want to talk about the concrete examples of what to do right now because I want to draw our attention and our awareness first. That is where all of the concrete actions start no matter what they are.

Anticapitalist ideas acknowledge that we currently live under capitalism and have needs that generally require money to meet them, and they allow us to consider the potential impacts of the ways we earn and exchange that money. They allow us to consider the resources that exist in our bank accounts, and get real with ourselves about whether and how much we spend has impacts close to home or halfway across the globe. They also let us look past our wallets to consider the resources that are sourced in other ways, and how we can give those resources to ourselves and each other.

It’s worth looking at money and our resources and our values from an economic justice perspective not just because that sounds nice, but because our actions have very real repercussions on our life, the lives of others, and the life cycle of the resources that are used in the process.

There’s no way to engage with resources perfectly because we’re in a deeply flawed system, but there are ways to do it while keeping a bigger (and more humane) picture in mind, even just a small percentage more of the time. When we let ourselves feel just a fraction more of our empathy, we become that much more able to look anyone in the eyes regardless of whatever distance they’re at.

I don’t care about 100% of the people on this planet acting one way 100% of the time at some point in a distant future that doesn’t exist.

I care about 1% of us acting 1% more like the futures of people we don’t know matter like our own.

All I’m asking is when we look away (because we will, we’re human, and there’s no way not to sometimes), we make choices that help us turn and look back.

Let’s keep looking.

Love,
Iris

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Resources and Inspiration

• In light of the Supreme Court ruling on the Grants Pass v. Johnson case this week, here’s a primer on What Communities Need to Know About the Criminalization of Homelessness through the National Alliance to End Homeless. It’s worth getting familiar, and then a good step one is sending a templated letter to your representatives in opposition to criminalization and in support of alternatives.

• One of my favorite recent reads was Falling Back in Love with Being Human by

  Kai Cheng Thom
  . I still cannot get over the full humanity and feeling of these love letters to transness, survival, breakdowns, healing, forgiveness, justice, and hope. I listened to the author read the audiobook, and got choked up at one point during nearly every single piece.

• I’m also in the midst of reading The Future is Disabled by

  Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha
  , and I cannot tell you how wholly I feel seen in my own relationship to disability, and the ways I relate with other disabled people in my life. I am both so hopeful and heartbroken and hopeful all over again reading each of these essays, and it makes me want to continue to orient toward futures where we continue to be the creators and the caretakers of each other.

• I’ve been craving some dedicated space for writing, so I’m very grateful for and excited about the timing of the co-writing container of Landscapes with

  Cody Cook-Parrott
  . As a person who both has what is at times very unruly ADHD and who largely spends time alone, I live and die by digital coworking, and the setup seems like a very generous one to hold space for my brain in a structured way (plus I cannot waaait for the visiting writer workshops).

• As someone who basically salivates over financial transparency (respectfully), I loved reading this mini-financial review by

  Jen Carrington
  . Jen was my business coach back in the earliest iterations of my self-employment in 2017 when I was a coach myself, and just as she did for me then, her approach still offers such a measured and gentle look at creating business in order to live well — with enough, with spaciousness, and purposefully without growth at all costs.

• In my continual pursuit of restructuring relationships toward belonging and satisfaction, I enjoyed this piece about platonic partnership and co-parenting with the folks from

  Emergency Contacts
  , as well as this piece about friendship by
  Anne Helen Petersen
  .

• Continual reminders that we are animals who need tending, despite (and because of), all we’re facing: How to resist authoritarianism without fully losing your mind by

  D.L. Mayfield

• For a little laugh: Love Island + politics, which tbh would still be better than what we’re in right now and that says something.

• This week, next week, all weeks:

  softcore_trauma

  

  A post shared by @softcore_trauma

What’s on your mind this week? Resources you’ve been reading, digesting, watching, etc.?

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About Rest Day Creative

Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned microagency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens that builds brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, artists, activists, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.

We create websites, copywriting, and visual branding, as well behind-the-scenes setup for businesses. We also create digital resources, including for branding, design, and cooperative work.

We’re in the process of restructuring existing structures into this new business from the ground up, but if you’re interested in learning more about our services, you can sign up here to know when we’re open for new clients.

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