Emergent Strategy and Emotional Integrity

There’s something that is sorely missing from our organizing efforts, and adrienne maree brown puts it really well in Emergent Strategy:

“While we often put our attention on the state and demand transformative and restorative justice, it is important that individuals begin practicing in our personal, familial, and communal lives—we can reach the people we need to reach, and measure our work by how our relationships feel...Eventually, transformative practices that begin small will demand new societal structures.”1

In short, reawakening the ability to feel together will set off a chain of events that liberates us.

“Reawakening the ability to feel together will set off a chain of events that liberates us.”

When was the last time you felt whole? When was the last time you were really feeling yourself? Was it when you were dancing with good friends? Was it when you were in your room, writing poetry, or walking in the rain with a friend? Was it when you just awoke from a beautiful dream, eyes still closed, sunshine beating down on you? That’s intrinsic value. Who were the last five people you really felt that with? Really connect with them and make space for them.

Intrinsic value is so important to name, and to feel together. We need to start small, we need to hold spaces for emotional integrity that don’t require a huge emotional and logistical compromise on the way there. We dilute our emotional selves by spending too little time with too many people, and spending most of our time on logistics. That’s why I pulled away from hosting at Photon Factory. I ended up knowing a lot of people, but not truly knowing anyone, or even myself. Especially as a tomboy of color who was not socialized to know myself or set boundaries, I got lost in contributing to someone else’s vision, without any forseeable return of intrinsic value for myself.

Let’s not glorify the dilution of our personalities. Let’s not glorify numbers and popularity.

It’s that uniqueness of emotion and perspective that’s beautiful. Find the handful of people that you can share that beautiful feeling with, and make space for them, truly. I know that in capitalism it’s hard to do, but having time for small scale beauty is just a matter of priorities. Do we prioritize breadth, or prioritize depth? Out of anxiety, celebrity culture, and the need to survive in capitalism, we prioritize breadth—and that dilutes us to the point of not knowing our emotional selves, or not sharing ourselves with more than one person.

The art of friendship is dying. We need to revive it, revive it to the point of excellence. Friendship is not just seeing each other and making sure the other is okay, but actually feeling something special together. We need to make the connection between relationships of emotional integrity and the fractal possibilities of liberation. A beautiful friendship is collective liberation on the micro scale. It’s where our unique selves can freely associate and emerge into new possibilities. With excellent friendships as our foundation, we can envision bioregional “friendships,” intercontinental “friendships,” and a global “friendship” that transcends our limited imagination of what collective power looks like.

I’m energized by building creative and constructive power, and then building outwards. Emotional integrity will create a platform for the imagination, as well as pull in the energy necessary to level up. Eventually, as adrienne maree brown said, “transformative practices that begin small will demand new societal structures.”

Let’s put more of our energy into beautiful friendships, with the confidence that those experiences will prefigure the liberated society we can not yet imagine.

1p. 133, Emergent Strategy, 2017.