#WeAreTheCultureMakers

[sistazai]

THIS! Repost @kelly.diels Back in the not-yet-famous day, brilliant writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reached out to a former boss (legendary editor David Carr). ⁠ ⁠ Coates told Carr he needed to write a piece because he was strapped for cash. Carr connected him to an editor at The Atlantic. Coates wrote a stellar 7,000 word piece for them. Rent was paid. History was made.⁠ ⁠ ***⁠ ⁠ ⁠I wish that more of us on both ends of that heart-y transaction would do that. ⁠ ⁠ I wish we could be clear about our need for cash AND creation and have it received without stigma. Without it being a statement on our worth as people and creators.⁠ ⁠ ***⁠ ⁠ Coates is a genius thinker and writer. Writing that article for The Atlantic wasn’t a gimme. It was a *culture-making contribution*.⁠ ⁠ Unfortunately, I suspect our emphasis on six and seven figure businesses and "getting paid what we’re worth" (ha! no market can bear my worth) makes it tough to admit we’re still on the way up. ⁠ ⁠ It’s like we’re not allowed to talk about the struggle until after we’ve passed through it.⁠ ⁠ ***⁠ ⁠ So if you’re on the rise, don’t think I’m judging ‘cuz you’re not there yet. Your income flow or lack thereof doesn’t tell me how evolved you are as an artist and a human. Feel free to tell me you’re great at what you do and that you need a gig to keep going. If I can connect you to one, I absolutely will.⁠ ⁠ I know my colleagues and champions and clients will do that for me, do. #WeAreTheCultureMakers⁠ ⁠ And that's feminist, culture-making practice we can build into our careers and businesses.⁠ #MoneyIsAFeministIssue⁠ ⁠ We can hire people when they need it most -- before their brand is tight and their sites are hot and their name-recognition precedes them. ⁠ We can hire them BEFORE they get famous (because that's how they get there!).⁠ ⁠ We need to keep them fed and safe and warm so they can keep doing and growing that thing our culture needs.⁠ ⁠ Our world needs Ta-Nehisi Coates. His editor saw that.⁠ ⁠ I see you.⁠ ⁠ PS I wrote this on my blog in 2016, and...still true. MORE TRUE.⁠ ⁠ https://www.kellydiels.com/hire-them-when-hungry/⁠ (link in bio @kelly.diels)⁠ https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb4TGtpLXzq/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thenycway]

We Are The Culture ✊🏾🖤 ****NAME DROP**** The release of the first diverse digital run magazine is imminent. Mid Strike Magazine is a diverse digital runners magazine which focuses on our run culture, our history and most of all our diversity. . For release info please be sure to subscribe to the link in the bio to receive an advanced copy of issue number one. . Welcome to the start of this marathon as we will bring so much insight to our stories, our passions, successes, our beautiful culture and most of all our journeys the right way. ThIs is Mid Strike Magazine. . Be sure to follow us on Instagram @midstrikemagazine and also like us on Facebook - Mid Strike Magazine. For other updates follow @newyorknycway @blackmenrunnyc @therunwave @dopeshoesb to stay updated. . #MidStrikeMagazine #msm #fortheculture #digitalrunmagazine #running #diverse #thenycway #fullofmelonin #releaseimminent #itsalmosthere #hustlegrindmotivation #wearetheculturemakers #runnerscommunity #runningmotivation #instadaily #read #digitalmagazine . I do not own the rights to this music. (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDB3eOmnYNF/?igshid=17ds97gunkk7o

[kellydiels]

what's missing from mainstream success formulas detailed in books by Ryan Holiday and Peter Thiel

***

this is from my most recent Sunday Love Letter. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

***

Right now I'm on a reading jag. I'm reading books waaaaaaaay outside my worldview. It's really useful; and it's not purely a literary counterintelligence exercise. Every thoughtful human might have insight I can learn from. Even an incomprehensibly rich libertarian tech founder/investor who campaigned for the devil might have things they can teach this inclusive feminist culture maker. In other words, I just finished Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

I also read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday (about how Peter Thiel conspired, successfully, to bankrupt Gawker Media; it's a rollicking good read) and Trust Me, I'm Lying, also by Ryan Holiday. Add to this mix, Anti-Fragile and Skin in The Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and basically I've been bodysnatched, send help.

Here's what's interesting about these books (which seriously, I did learn really useful things from): what's missing. What's not said.

In Thiel's book, for example, he writes a lot about the big thinking and big projects -- the space program that landed a rocket on the moon! -- that created huge technological leaps in our world. He sincerely values miracles (he thinks 'technology' is a synonym for miracle); he values nonconformists and people who've never fit in or been welcome in the mainstream world; he thinks something is systemically broken in the American culture and cultural imagination; he wants to create a culture where we invent things that make our world better. In this way, and in many others, I see so much common ground between my own culture making aspirations, my lefty feminist community members and colleagues, and Thiel. True story.

But when Thiel waves at and celebrates the last 30-40 years of intense, near-miraculous technological progress and productivity, he's leaving out something crucial -- and it’s what Anand Giridharadas writes back into the conversation in his book Winners Take All (it's really good, read it!):

"All around us in America is the clank-clank-clank of the new...But these novelties have failed to translate into broadly shared progress and the betterment of our overall civilization." (1)

'...three and a half decades worth of wondrous, head-spinning change [have had] zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans." (4)

"...the system -- in America and around the world -- has been organized to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world's billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else's..." (4)

I can see why people who mostly read books about success and business and The Good Life that are authored by the "winners" of our cultural lottery/system could sincerely be seduced by them.

I was -- and I came equipped with a systemic, counter-cultural, feminist analysis!

[side rant: Holiday's reading list on his website is revealing and disheartening. He’s underestimating himself and starving himself of the innovative insights that come from people who literally live outside the box. Someone please get him to pledge to only read people of colour and women for a year, stat. It seems to me that he’s intellectually receptive and a conscience-driven person (the early editions of Trust Me, I’m Lying notwithstanding) and reading excellence far outside his life experience and worldview would take his insights to a brilliant new level --

Holiday also spends some time in Conspiracy scanning the books in Thiel's home to get an understanding of his influences; it's an admission that who we're reading is what we end up thinking --

It’s so bizarre to me that so many of the people who value innovation and who *know* it comes from the weirdos and nonconformists overlook or devalue (often simply by overlooking) the intense brilliance that’s found in counterculturals and people with marginalized identities -- wisdom and insights that come from being on the margins and seeing our culture and social patterns in a way that people in the centre otherwise can’t]

It's really easy to not think about things that aren't being thought about.

One of the tasks of culture-makers, I think, is to constantly assess what brilliance and wisdom is missing -- and needed -- and reinsert who and what's missing back into our cultural narratives.

Because often what's missing is us.

And all the insights and wisdom we have to offer.

Absent from the narrative about how wondrous business is and the amazing things start-up culture has created in our world is a discussion of how sexual abuse and harassment and systematic exclusion are a feature, not a bug, of that same culture -- and how those biases get built right into the algorithms and platforms of the tech (miracles!) we're supposed to worship. (The book Technically Wrong is brilliant on this front.) Thiel, for example, talks about the traits of successful founder's but doesn't connect the dots to how a founder's bias (this is A Thing: Founder's Bias) gets built into the very products that are now structuring our brave new world.

That's because Thiel’s unit of analysis is business and founders. 

He may be concerned with The Common Good, and probably I'm a fawn prancing in a meadow with butterflies because I believe he sincerely is concerned with it, but because his unit of analysis is founders/business, he's looking at the conditions they require to create their version of that good...so that it facilitates more of their particular type of Common Good manufacturing.

It's a tragic, deeply political, narrowing of scope. You can't see what you're not looking for.

Ryan Holiday does this, too, in Trust Me, I'm Lying.

I have such a complicated imaginary relationship with Ryan Holiday. Again, this could be me frolicking in meadows with talking rabbits and charming insects, but I sincerely believe that he's grown and matured and is anguished by the state of our media and our culture -- part of which his book played a role in devolving (his most recent version of TMIL makes his regret pretty explicit). A few years ago, however, I hated this book and, by extension, him. I saw a twenty-something white man who lacked an understanding of social inequity and consequences publishing and profiting from a manual on how to manufacture outrage and manipulate the media. I saw that as a tutorial on how to manipulate people and our society. Which it is.

[Side rant: Using manipulative, disempowering tactics to influence the audience in order to sell shit is everything I oppose in my own work on The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. So I have super strong feelings about this book. And Launch by Jeff Walker. Even though I have no doubt Walker's a lovely person, I think the encouragement to use mental triggers against consumers is profoundly damaging to people and our larger cultural context; I also think it conditions the sellers and entrepreneurs to dehumanize other people in the name of profit. Which cannot be good for us.}

The book carried a warning, sure but it felt like Machiavelli’s disengenous warning about The Prince (Holiday references the same warning in Conspiracy so perhaps I’m correct to connect the dots). Back to my point. Holiday seemed to be warning us that media is corrupt and the system by which journalism functions needs to be fixed...but what that does, helpfully for his profile and the book’s sales, is justify deliberate media manipulation, not correct it.

His logic appeared to me to go like this: no, you don't have to feel bad about manipulating a broken system. It's corrupt. So go ahead and exploit those weakness for profit and pleasure.

The villain in Holiday's book was the corrupt media. By making it a villain, no one has to feel bad about whatever bad things they do to the villain.

Making the media system the focus of the book conveniently erases who gets hurt by wanton media manipulation: us.

Holiday's book basically helps its readers not feel bad about profiting from fuckery and deliberately fucking with their end user.

You know, people. Our society. Our democracy that NEEDS the fourth estate.

By leaving media consumers -- us, the general public, our society and our democracy -- out of the book and out of the equation, and focusing on ‘the media’ as a villain, his blueprint and tactics seem savvy and achievable. Though outrageous, the apparent do-able-ness of his advice (in the earlier editions of his book) is a function of what's left out of the book: the real victims. The damage it inflicts on people and our society.

Women in corporate spaces, for example, are acutely aware of how many women are not at the boardroom table (or on the reading list. Ahem). When my biracial daughters walk into a room, they count how many people of colour are present. How many white people or men do that? Does Ryan Holiday? Or Peter Thiel?

(I didn't scan for textual or physical absences until recently. I'm a person of a mostly dominant identity. I've rarely had to.)

When we don't account for what and who are missing, it's easy to get seduced by rah-rah-cis(!)-boom-bah narratives and formulas for success and want to replicate them.

It's really easy to get dazzled by the superhuman feats of invention -- PayPal! Tesla! Space-X! Facebook! -- and notice and celebrate the way they're tangibly reconfiguring the world and creating huge amounts of value (capital) and totally fail to miss the fact that this is not shifting the material conditions of most humans.

All the money and capital being created in the USA by start-ups-cum-institutions did not increase the salaries of most Americans. It did not improve our democracies or the quality or safety of our public spaces. (Temple and church and school shootings. Police shootings of unarmed black people. Pipe bombs being mailed to political figures in the weeks before an election.) Knowing how to manipulate the media for fun and profit did not improve the quality or strength of our fourth estate. Instead, it contributed to a context in which the president of the United States can declare war on the media -- a pillar of democracy -- and the 'truth' becomes whatever ranks highest on Google's first page.

All of this to say: definitely read outside your experience and world view AND read every context, every room, every group, every book (and book list) for who and what is missing. It changes everything.

It makes our tactics and formulas and reflections for creating cultural change better.

And I think that's what we need to truly make a better world, for all of us.

***

this is from my most recent Sunday Love Letter. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

***

[embodylovemovement]

#repost @kelly.diels ・・・ Yes, we want to avoid replicating the beauty-signalling tactics of a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. But nope, that doesn't mean you stop using photos + images of yourself. Personally imagery is an essential marketing asset. A Director of Marketing I once worked for, and who really knows her stuff, taught me that the first thing we do as marketers at any company – whether we’re selling plumbing fixtures or relationship coaching — is develop a well of visual assets (photos, videos etc). Our challenge, as feminist marketers often marketing **ourselves**, is to develop that well of images WHILE AVOIDING the conventional beauty-signalling that props up existing oppressive gender narratives. But that doesn’t mean no images. It means more **different** images. Important nuance: beauty-signalling doesn’t always prop up patriarchy or white supremacy. When women of colour, gender non-conforming people, fat women, disabled folks (and, and, and), are visibly revelling in their own skin, creativity and adornments, they’re often claiming an agency and space that our culture has systematically tried to deny them. Think for a moment what Frida Kahlo would do with selfies on Instagram! I’m willing to bet she would NOT be figuring out how to look “thin AF” in her photos. [sidenote: WWFKD — What Would Frida Kahlo Do? — could be the rubber bracelets we start wearing to remind ourselves of our mission.] Being visible as you are (rather than how our culture demands you be) is a feminist act… …and it helps you stand out in the marketplace. It’s zigging when the rest of the market (and our culture!) is zagging. So… Yes, use selfies. Yes, use professional photos. Yes, be visible. Let’s own our DIFFERENT imagery and use more of it, not less. #wearetheculturemakers #WWFKD #fridakahlo #feministimagery #feministselfie #feministphotos #ownyourimagery #thepoliticsofbeauty #beautysignalling #claimyourspace #takeupyourspace #feministmarketing #fatphotos #representationmatters 📸 @acloverandabeephoto [image description: Kelly Diels, a fat white woman with short blonde hair, is standing in an alley wearing a black tutu and a red cape] https://ift.tt/31o9cBY

[kellydiels]

Musings on ‘Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World’, by Anand Giridharadas

If I had to select a scene from a movie to summarize this book, it would be the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends discover what’s behind the curtain.

There’s no magic. There’s no wizard. It’s all an illusion.

Ditto, ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘social impact investing’: as the subtitle of the book tells us, it’s an elite charade.

Which is not to say we, as a culture, elite and non-elites, don’t believe it. We do. 

I do/did -- this has been my work as a feminist marketing consultant!!! 

Even as I’m nodding and agreeing with the pages in this book, it’s clear to me that I’ve now got to have some serious conversations with the woman in my mirror.

But that’s not my point, as I muse on this book. He’s right and he’s convinced and converted me. (I’ll probably do a proper, idea-by-idea book review of his book sometime soon.)

Instead, here’s what I noticed, as I read: that as Giridharadas chronicles the sincere ‘world-changing’ intent and language of founders and corporate leaders who are developing unmistakably commercial and profit-driven start-ups and businesses, he’s overlooking an important driver of entrepreneurship.

As a feminist marketing consultant, I work with the people who traditionally DON’T get their start-ups funding and even struggle to access bank loans or credit. Women and people of colour and gender nonconforming folks and people striving to emerge from intergenerational poverty (and, and, and). 

They are starting businesses not because they have lofty ideals and want to create a business engine to deliver on those intents (though that might be part of if) but because they have to in order to survive.

Entrepreneurship has been the lifeblood of marginalized communities otherwise excluded from the corporate careers and access to governmental positions.

This is not a critique of Giridharadas’ book, at all. It’s a noticing. 

As a culture, we most often explain entrepreneurship as something chosen  to have “more freedom over our time” or to “change the world” or to “make more money”. We don’t often talk about the systemic realities FORCING many of us to start businesses just so that we’re in charge of our livelihoods rather than being inputs in a system that’s otherwise hostile to our existence.

I chose entrepreneurship, for example, because it was the only way to escape the impoverishment that comes with single motherhood. It was the only way I could manage mothering AND working. 

At the time I became an entrepreneur, I talked about it with all the freedom/time language but the truth motivating my ‘choice’ was starker: there was no way, in the corporate culture I was in, for me to advance and grow my salary to one that was sustainable (I wasn’t even making enough to make ends meet) and also leave at 5pm on the dot to make sure I didn’t get fined by the daycare for being late. I was stuck and I was going to continue to be stuck. 

Starting a business was a risk but it was the only one that potentially ended with me having a thriving livelihood. 

The gender wage gap, the gender wealth gap, the sexism that made my ex refuse to pay child support for a decade, my absolute lack of resources (everything I had went to daycare and rent) plus a corporate culture that assumes careerists are men with partners at home to do the caregiving and builds expectations and hours around that sexist assumption...well, all of them intertwined to foreclose the possibility of a brilliant career and a paycheque that was sufficient. (not even huge; sufficient)

So I HAD to start a business. Or stay frantically treading water until I got too tired to stay afloat. 

A decade later I am able to provide, handily, for my family and extended family. That would NEVER have been possible had I stayed in my corporate role.

Trans entrepreneurs often have to start businesses because no one will hire them. Disabled folks or people living chronic pain regularly find that their choices are fixed incomes or entrepreneurship, because bosses and teams won’t accommodate their physical realities. 

Anand Giridharadas is rightfully, thankfully pointing out that founders of start-ups that go on to become institutions and and the 1% and the ‘winners’ of our current system have to invent a cover (often from their own consciences) for their business-building in order to give their work and their lives meaning. They have to cloak it in a world-changing rhetoric. 

What I want to point out is this:  entrepreneurs with marginalized identities ARE doing life-altering, community-changing work simply by refusing to be double-billed for their own oppression and creating the thriving livelihoods -- for themselves and their community members -- they’d otherwise be denied.

In a way, it seems that the more removed an entrepreneur or organization is from personal survival and on-the-ground community impact, the more elaborately inspirational and communal the mission statement, language and branding has to be...which, given the fact that I’m a feminist marketing consultant, again prompts me to have a serious sit-down in front of a mirror.

It’s easy to see the flaws in ‘their’ logic and ‘their’ business activities; but it’s important to attend to my own impact, too. 

And there are definitely points of logic and conclusions in this book that uncomfortably highlight the fact that I’m doing some of the things he’s pointing out, even as I thought I wasn’t. 

And of course I am. Our culture is thoroughly neoliberal and infected with the logic of capitalism, and I’ve been marinating in that for more than four decades. 

As I tell my clients all the time: we are all in the water so we are all wet.

But if the water’s poisoned, we get out. We stop drinking it. We find out where the toxins are coming and we fix it, at the source. We don’t throw some cherry Kool-Aid in it and call it Revolution Juice.

Which is EXACTLY Anand Giridharadas’ excellent point in this excellent book.

[kellydiels]

Musings on Feminist Community and What I Learned From The Correspondence of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker in the book Sister Love

I tend to romanticize our feminist community, like it's Santa Claus and delivers gifts for good behaviour.

In any community, however -- no matter how life-giving and righteous -- there is humanity. And we're not perfect. In any group of hundreds of people there are going to dangerous folks. There will be the con artist or the grifter -- they need communities of trust to run their affinity schemes. There will be a smattering of sociopaths (4% of the general pop) and psychopaths (1% of the general pop). There will be narcissists. There will be infiltrators who are reporting back to bad actors and institutions (seriously). There will be people at different stages of their healing and analysis. There will be groupies. There will be people who just want to grow their network and make future sales. There will be lovers who break up and ask us to break up with them. Ditto, friends. There will be deals and partnerships and projects that go awry (and that can be replaced or rebuilt, across time). There will be people who misunderstand each other and never quite clear the air but stay tender about it for...ever. There will be troubled folks you try to help and in return they run off with your ten-speed. Not because they're malicious. Just because the circumstances of their life implode and take them -- and your bike -- with it.

That's what happened to poet Pat Parker when she tried to be there for "Felicia". Parker's dear friend Audre Lorde wrote to her asking her to take care of Felicia, her "little sister" who was moving to the Bay Area where Parker lived. And shit went sideways.

As, it turns out, it was wont to do if Felicia was involved.

I read these snippets in Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 - 1989 (aff).

(h/t Stephanie Newman -- I learned about this book from her blog post about it.)

The book is a tiny volume of their correspondence, but the fortification -- and practical wisdom -- is HUGE.

Parker and Lorde talk about how to get published and get grants; what lists of addresses and phone numbers to compile and how to pitch (Lorde sends Parker a hand-typed list of bookstores that pay for readings with ticks beside the best prospects); how to protect writing time; what you need to know about taxes and running a freelance business; “the art of self-promotion” (as Mecca Jamilah Sullivan names it in her forward to the book); how to cook beets; how to talk to doctors; what gigs to take and how to protect yourself from administrators of federal grants; which fellow poets to be cautious of in social settings; why Parker is getting a bad vibe off "Ruby" who is trying to ingratiate herself with her at a party and name-dropping Lorde to her...

Lorde confirms Parker's instincts:

To answer some of your questions- Ruby is/was a troubled little sister (she's younger than she looks, who I thought I could help (when I was in the helping bag) I was wrong, altho I can't say I was defeated- she surely did give her a run for- etc. I think you hit the nail on the head- a groupie. But June Jordan and I were either too naive or too stupid to see it. She is among other things a pathological liar. (if you didn't notice). As you know, AQ [Amazon Quarterly] is no more. Lots of pain, can't discuss. (p. 46)

In this paragraph, Lorde is sharing her experience with a difficult community member who is using Lorde's name to build more connections in the community and validating Parker's intuition about that person. And in the next breath, she's talking about another breakdown: a magazine she was stewarding with two other feminists dissolved because of the breakdown in their relationships. Later in the book she would ask Parker what rumours (or lies!) Parker's heard about Lorde from those two people.

"Felicia" of the missing ten-speed also makes a few appearances; she's someone close to both Parker and Lorde and someone, apparently, who lives in the eye of a hurricane. After she passes through, Parker and Lorde always have to engage in post-storm clean-up. They trade stories about it, with compassion for Felicia -- and themselves. It's clear they love Felicia; and they know what comes with her and across time they find ways to maintain better boundaries with her. They're not judging her; they're figuring out how to protect themselves while staying in some kind of relationship with her.

In one sense, this stuff is gossip that doesn't have 'historical' import; we know who Pat Parker and Audre Lorde are; but we don't know who Ruby and Felicia are.

And strangely, this is the stuff I learned from the most and found the most affirming.

Like all of us, Pat Parker and Audre Lorde had to navigate trying relationships within a feminist community. 

They're helping each other do that. Even as they invest in the community and each other -- Lorde regularly sends Parker cheques and cash along with those letters, in solidarity -- and even as the community is how they survive, emotionally and financially, it's not an unadulterated love story. Community is always composed of people with mixed agendas, mixed personality types, uneven paces of personal development, unevenly matched contributions and investments. 

And so Parker and Lorde are swapping stories about how to deal with challenging personalities in positions of power -- editors, publishers, directors of grants. They're comparing notes about how to deal with their own growing profiles and power and the reality that they themselves can damage people in their proximity. They're also sharing confidences with each other about how Parker and Lorde can (and do) get used by people in the down-power position, comparatively speaking, who want to be in proximity to them for their own reasons. And even these lionized figures screw up and let people down -- often, each other. At one point, Lorde writes to Parker of her desire for them to sit down and have a frank talk to figure out why, despite their mutual love for each other, their respect, their commonalities, their decades of connection, and their mutual desire to be close friends, they have never truly reached the level of intimacy in their friendship that should have been possible.

Witnessing these brilliant poets talk frankly about the daily stuff of real life helped me contextualize a lot of things that are going on today. 

Reading Parker rage and rally to resist the US war machine in the 80s -- well, I saw parallels to the urgent times we're now in. Witnessing Lorde and Parker toggle back and forth between global politics and and how to navigate interpersonal politics and what vegetables to eat and what equipment to buy for their writing (a typewriter? A computer? A modem?) while writing and activating...

...the whole of it, the nitty-gritty of it, made me realize that although the context has changed, and many of our interactions are happening online, what we're navigating as feminist friends and feminist communities isn't really new. There are time-tested ways to steer the course, and they're not about tech solutions or complex schedules of moderation or guidelines; instead they're about experience and boundaries and iteration and sharing information and compassion and bodies of work + relationships sustained across time.

One of things I learned from this book and their correspondence that was so personally life-giving is that we can indeed be in relationship with troubled (but not predatory) and evolving folks {this describes all of us!!} -- but carefully, and with exquisite boundaries.

The other thing I absorbed from their correspondence was this: there's not anything new about interpersonal conflict and community. There's this implicit narrative in the air right now (always?) that there's something wrong with feminists because we have conflict. And while there are MATERIAL problems in feminist communities -- especially around implicit biases and dominator conditioning needs to be unlearned -- conflict itself is not a sign of defect. Conflict is inevitable if more than 2 people are in a room and multiplies with each added body. Wherever there are people, there will be mixed agendas. There will be different perspectives and dreams. Conflict in community - including in feminist communities - is not a sign of defect. It's a sign of humanity. What makes a community life-giving as opposed to degenerative and damaging is whether or not there are methods for holding or resolving conflict (h/t Holly Truhlar for this insight).

I saw this in Lorde's and Parker's correspondence. I even saw it in the way the book was published. There's a couple of places where Lorde speaks sharply about one editor, whom she otherwise clearly respects; that editor was one of the champions who helped get this book of letters published.

In other words: we don't have to romanticize each other or even like each other in order to recognize the value of each other's work. 

We don't have to be in constant harmony or consensus to be a community. And yes, sometimes someone is going to ride off into their future on your bike.

And sometimes, they come back.

Let's keep doing our work and keep teaching each other, either way.

----

this is an excerpt from my Sunday Love Letter that I sent on September 23, 2018. 

If you’d like to get my weekly newsletter, you can subscribe here: www.kellydiels.com/subscribe-a