A Love Letter to My Fellow Mo-Fems

I just wanted to send off a quick missive to let you know that I see you, and I love you.

I see that you notice the damage that white patriarchy does to people of all ages, races, genders and sexualities. I see you working to build a better world, struggling to find your place, and worrying about the vulnerable people in our society.

I see you, re-writing lessons to remove damaging quotes, marching in pride parades, teaching your children to notice who needs help.

I feel the same pain of a society that often values power over humanity. A society that takes resources from native peoples and then calls them non-citizens, that uses the strength of immigrant labour to produce food as cheaply as possible and then denies them health and family, that allows men to harass women in the workplace in the name of creativity or idiosyncrasy – as long as it leads to profits.

I know that you’re doing the best you can, even if that sometimes looks like sitting on the couch with netflix and ice cream, or crying in the shower. It’s okay to have times like that, because sometimes your best is amazing. Sometimes your best is having a difficult conversation with your spouse about gender roles in your marriage, because bringing your whole self into the relationship is more important than sticking to the roles you expected to carry out when you were young and your eyes weren’t yet opened. Sometimes your best is drawing boundaries with your family, which is difficult and sucks. Sometimes it’s preparing for social events, to have the words and emotional bandwidth to explain why those sexist/racist jokes aren’t funny. Sometimes your best is making sacrifices to support other people financially. Sometimes your best is a blog or Facebook post showing others the gap you see between where the world is and where you know it could be.

I love to see so many of you living in that uncomfortable gap. We don’t fit in the new world, and it’s not easy to feel ourselves stretching to fit there. But this, I think, is what it means to work out our salvation before God. If we want to be like Them, to return to Them, we have to be able to feel what they feel. That surely includes a lot of pain and anger at injustice, but it also means feeling joy with those who are rejoicing, and building hope (and heaven) together.

I think about this Ira Glass quote pretty often, and it occurred to me that we can see social justice work as, ultimately, creative work:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

It’s okay for your intersectional feminist awakening to take a while. It’s normal to take a while. I see you, living in the gap between what you know can exist and what you’re currently capable of, and I love you. Stick with it, stay with us, keep fighting your way through. We’ll get there in the end.

And if you want to tell me what you’re proud of, or what you’re struggling with, I’m right here. I love you.