Why Is Being Tender With Ourselves And Each Other Abolition Work?

“When our communities lean into values that honor ourselves, each other, and the natural world around us, we see that punishment culture only deepens harm.”

                       - bell hooks

Growing up in my house, in Richmond Va, which used to be the seat of the Confederacy, there was a lot of punishment. Sometimes it was physical, sometimes it was harsh words, sometimes it was no words. Often it was isolation from friends and having fun, I grew up internalizing and then externalizing some of these forms of punishment. One of my favorite forms was the withdrawal of my attention, of my presence. My second favorite form of punishment was revenge and sometimes I was just plain violent. I say favorite as a joke, because in the end I always felt worse after meting out punishment than I did before, which began a vicious circle that started and ended with me wondering what was wrong with me. I learned to punish myself with destructive self talk and the constant fear I was not good, or good enough. Until the day came when I decided I didn’t have the right to feelings if I couldn’t control them. Until I saw my anger as a danger to myself and others. Until I started to see myself as bad, as weird as undeserving. Until I was as hard on others as I was on myself.

When I began to soften, it was with the help of chosen family, good friends and a good therapist. It was going to workshops full of black women, where we were invited to cry, without wiping away our tears. It was seeing fat dykes “letting it all hang out, for all to see. It was being on the front lines with a bunch of weirdos and queerdos, as cops tried to hurt us and punish us for being eligible to them and daring to fight back and to act up, for being sexy and sweet in the face of social ostracization For daring to live in a world that wanted us dead. And lord have mercy, the cops wanted to punish me for being Black, fat, queer and angry.

I came to see that my work in this brutal world was to create spaces where people could bring their whole selves. Spaces that allowed people to tell their stories, spaces that allowed us to lay our weapons down. While I was no longer putting my body and freedom on the line, I was still an activist, an activist for love and care, for joy and desire and the right for all of us to exist in the ways we need and want.. I came to understand if we want to create a different world, we have to be different. If we want to get rid of all systems of oppression and domination, it has to start with us. We have to understand how we support and internalize those systems and how they shape what we believe about ourselves and each other.

So I wonder, if we can be more tender with ourselves, if we can be more forgiving and understanding of the stories we all carry inside us, of the histories forced upon us, if we could extend more grace to those who have been othered, dehumanized and locked away. My hope is, if we can stop punishing ourselves for just being human, can we also imagine something beyond carceral systems that do nothing more that perpetuate harm and nothing to heal individuals or communities? Maybe the first step is to get rid of the judge inside of us, to heal our own wounds, to see ourselves as worthy.

I work with individuals and organizations to create change, to shift ideas and to help us all imagine the world we want, need and desire. I use deep listening, dreaming, and conversation along with  my years of experience working with a plurality of people in their best moments and their worst. I believe the act of creation saves lives and helps us see pathways to a just and better world. Let’s see what we can create together.