What perspectives or beliefs is it time for me to release?
I spent the last week of June immersed in a Co-Active Training Institute Professional Coach Training that explored the power of perspective, play, and choice. How perspective can hold us back. And how playing with different perspectives can expand our awareness and capacity for action. In light of all that, the inquiry question I chose for this month was:
What perspectives or beliefs is it time for me to release?
I pulled the above Seven of Wands tarot card from Grace Duong’s gorgeous Mystic Mondays deck to help spark some reflection around this question (a practice that makes me feel connected to my grandmother, the first person I knew who studied tarot). And the phrase that stuck out to me from Duong’s guidebook was the question: “Am I good enough to be here?” I’ve also seen this tarot card associated with allowing oneself to be seen and being authentic — which feels a little on the nose in the context of launching a newsletter! And I’ve seen this card connected to resisting norms, the idea of “armoring up”, and calls to work with anger in more skillful ways.
Initially all of this made me think of the doubt I’ve experienced as part of the process of creating this newsletter — which quickly morphed into a side-quest Googling different takes on imposter phenomenon (ah, ADHD!). That rabbit hole led me to this article which talks about imposter phenomenon in relationship to patriarchy, capitalism, and systemic racism (“capitalism needs us all to feel like impostors, because feeling like an impostor ensures we’ll strive for endless progress: work harder, make more money, try to be better than our former selves and the people around us” — ooof!)… And it eventually led me back to thinking about a conversation I had at that recent coaching training about the assumption that “authenticity” should be something we strive for. In short: the idea of authenticity — that we should be some “true” version of ourself — troubles me when I think about neurodivergent practices like masking. Some neurodivergent people experience masking as harmful performance, as an “armoring up” required to assimilate and function within neurotypical norms. This resonates with some of my own experience of neurodivergence. Yet others experience masking as a valuable communication tool, and not necessarily inauthentic or even separable from who they are. This too resonates with my experience. Like most things, I think it’s complicated by context. Now I’m on the hunt for resources that explore the intersection between ideas of authenticity and neurodiversity. If you know of any please send them my way!
On a different but perhaps not unrelated note, the Seven of Wands also made me think about anger. Specifically, 1.) how much there is to be angry about in this moment — the urgent need for a ceasefire in Gaza and last week’s Supreme Court ruling being just the first two things that come to mind; and 2.) my ongoing preoccupation with what it takes to work with anger in ways that are (re)generative and skillful.
This passage from Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger — a book by Lama Rod Owens that I’ve been dipping into lately — really resonates for me:
“I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there.”
Most of my formative experiences of anger were of the emotion being indistinct from the attacks through which it was expressed. This led me to see it as dangerous. When I was a young adult, a therapist introduced me to the perspective that all emotions are just data, which helped me start to relate to anger differently. And now I see it as, among other things, a natural response to living and working within oppressive systems — and a response that is too often met with censorship or weaponized against the people most harmed by those systems (for example: tone policing, or the damage done by “angry Black woman” stereotypes).
I was once told that “anger is the emotion of dignity.” If this is true (and I believe it is)… If anger is how the body signals when our dignity, values, and/or survival feel threatened… If anger is a way to create room and space for new growth… Then I think a necessary part of learning and change work focused on social justice has to be building the skills to sit with and learn from anger — our own and that of others.