The Voice of Powerlessness
If you’ve ever moved through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way journey, you’ll know that Week Four (of Twelve) includes a task that frustrates many artists and humans hungry to get back to their most creative: a week with no reading. As I am currently moving through the Artist’s Way for the second time, it just so happened that my week without reading was this past one. I spent election week of 2020 not reading. I couldn’t open articles, pick up a book to distract myself. I expanded Cameron’s ask to include social media hiatus, so that I really would keep myself from reading as much as possible. It was achy and unpleasant, and Preston, my boyfriend, would be a rich man if he got a quarter every time I asked about election updates.
If there was one little voice inside that showed up in the midst of the empty, achy void over and over, and that little voice had a name it was this: Powerlessness.
Last Tuesday morning, the voice of Powerlessness came as a frightening memory of a day in 2016 when an absurd and dangerous man became the leader of the free world on the television in my apartment in Abilene, Texas and around the United States. Throughout the week the voice of Powerlessness reminded me of times when a loved one had passed: me standing holding my phone at 86th and 2nd on the Upper East Side of Manhattan after my precious grandmother had passed, or outside a piano bar after singing karaoke when I found out a good friend was gone. It reminded me of the overwhelm I felt as a gay teenager, afraid of what would happen when I am came out in my conservative Christian household. It reminded me of all the stories I’d heard of people a little like me or nothing like me— People who lived through powerlessness.
I knew it was important to gently and intentionally find my way through these moments. If I could imagine this voice as a friend and not an enemy, as something to be compassionate towards, I thought I might learn more about it. What I heard recurring was this message: Going to sleep is easier. These memories hold my identity. There is something here that reminds you of something you’ve known all too well at other times in your life: There is nothing you can do, so don’t even bother trying.
It is frankly cringe-worthy to hear some of these voices. I want to be a person who shows up, ready to do good work, who is confident in their identity and what they have to offer. And still, the voice of Powerlessness filled a space where the comfort of consuming other people’s power often resided. All too often, I know reading, digesting, consuming media allows me to temporarily subdue discomfort so that I don’t have to get to the root of anything. This voice coming up was a root voice.
I tried to sit with the voice of Powerlessness, to gather its iterations like actors on a stage, or storytellers around a fire. What were its origins? I heard some of the stories above- some others. I recognized that during certain periods of my life, these voices were the most reliable. Buying the voice of powerlessness led me to the safest option for the time.
As I moved through the last week, I also knew this: I am not powerless. Buying the voice of powerlessness as all of me was to dishonor, to dismiss and to shut down the parts of me that are powerful. And that shutting down does not hold, not for any of us. Even if it means sabotage or destruction. The dams break. The waters crash through. The storytellers no longer speak around a fire but howl into the night, hunting for a place to survive. Powerful parts in us will be heard. Just like the powerless.
So, I listened. I heard out these two momentous forces in me. I followed both rivers, with curiosity. The trail along those rivers was creating, I think- buying plants, designing and reorganizing my space, going on long drives.
I took action. On Tuesday, I voted. Everyday last week, I reached out to new people. I organized myself financially, applied for new work. I moved my body, meditated. I listened to a podcast and watched that incredible documentary, My Octopus Teacher. (Spoiler alert: When the octopus died, did anyone else sob?) I let myself get wrapped up in my new knitting passion. I taught some very excited and some very restless children halfway across the world. I wrote about the sunrise.
I saw another way. For all those times when going to sleep seemed the safest, another option. For all those times when a dam was breaking inside of me, a place to be heard. For all those times when impossibility persisted, the next right thing.
As I reflect on this week, with new hope for what is coming, and new passion for the work before us, I think I must honor the times truly and wholly, when I or when another was (or is) powerless. Additionally, I must honor truly and wholly, that though I have so much to humbly learn, I am more connected to my authentic, loving power than I have ever been. It is expansive and abundant and generous towards all around me. The goal I have is not to subject one to the other, but to allow the movement from powerlessness to power to powerlessness to power with more ease and relentless pursuit of justice and love.