This was a tough week to be a pipeline fighter. On Tuesday, in the middle of a pipelines communication storm, I ran home for breakfast (at 3pm!) and stopped to grab the mail. Included with the bills and the crap was a handwritten letter — from me, to me — from a conference I attended last spring. Here’s what it said, in part:
“You might always have a shard of dis-comfort within, a streak of freakdom that urges you to run. Maybe that’s your makeup, maybe it’s your basal ganglia. But — maybe not being so self-assured is exactly what is needed right now: a necessary part of the dismantling of power structures that would automatically grant people who look like you authority over others who don’t.
How about this for an experiment? Try sticking around, and accepting that you belong in the company you keep (fiercely lit, disturbingly smart, sweetheart revolutionaries). When you can’t find self- love, you can always love, and look up to, your projects and the peeps you’re teamed up with. If you can remove your own need for validation from what you are ‘doing’ in the world, you’ll stop holding back from giving all you’ve got. And you’ll stop holding others back from giving theirs’.
Do it when the alt-right are cursing you. Do it when you’re being called out. Do it better, because you have been called out. Do it when the demons in your sandbox are cataloguing your inadequacies. Rise and fucking shine anyway. Because the work is too important for self-doubt. Beautiful weirdo, you are plainly needed. In these troubled times you are being called upon to do your absolute best. I dare you.”
How’s that for a little ‘talking-to’?? Now: walk it.
In Art & Communications News:
A story about enemies & angels to burst your heart. How to survive information overload. The missing feminist Bible? What the other side of the echo chamber sounds like. How to talk about #NoDAPL. The agency I want to be when I grow up. 10 best books of 2016. AfroTrash: afrofuturist haute couture.
This week in Andrea Palframan:
Pipelandia or Blockadia? These are the choices Trudeau has left us with. So… we launched The People vs. Kinder Morgan and raised $40,000 for the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation’s legal challenge to this outrageously stupid pipeline and tankers project. No biggie ( : On Salt Spring? Join a Kinder Morgan Day of Action next Saturday Dec 10th: at noon, we march, then at night, we organize! FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/687571824753800/. Also: launched a pretty site about evolutionary medicine. The delicious OKA aftermath. And: seriously beautiful spirit wear.
Sometimes humble means cupping warm hands around your heart. Sometimes humble means taking a wrecking ball to your ego. Whichever way your pendulum swings, may it strike gold.
xo
Andrea