## Metadata - Author: [[Mia Birdsong]] - Full Title: How We Show Up - Category: #books ## Highlights - toxic individualism ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=127)) - By American Dream standards, a “good family” is an insular, nuclear family comprising a legally married man and woman raising biological children. This family is self-sufficient—and as such, functions as an independent unit. It’s toxic individualism, but in family-unit form. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=135)) - you can’t hold another person accountable. You can support someone’s accountability, but we hold ourselves accountable. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=318)) - Accountability is also about recognizing and accepting that we are necessary and wanted. It’s understanding that when we neglect ourselves, don’t care for ourselves, or are not working to live as our best selves, we are devaluing the time, energy, and care that our loved ones offer us. ([Location 319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=319)) - We belong in a bundle of life. We say a person is a person through other persons. It is not I think therefore I am. It says rather: I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share.” ([Location 328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=328)) - These ways of creating relationships, family, and community are, of course, not actually new. What is new is that people who are following unconventional paths are more public, are documenting their experiences, and are able to find one another more easily (thank you, internet). ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=342)) - People do not survive racism, xenophobia, gender discrimination, and poverty without developing extraordinary skills, systems, and practices of support. And in doing so, they carve a path for everyone else. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=351)) - The gift of Blackness is an expansive notion of family—family beyond blood and law, “play cousins,” and “fictive kin.” It’s finding home in multiple houses, defying patriarchy and marriage; it’s stay-at-home dads, and coparenting. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=354)) - “Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.” ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=360)) - There are folks who, at great cost, just by insisting on existence and self-definition, have created more room for the rest of us to be expansive and self-determined in our identities and relationships. We owe a debt to those who have challenged the norms our culture has defined for us—norms that limit who we can be, how we present ourselves, how we love, who we call family. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=364)) - As I wrote, I had the familiar feeling of struggling to reach past the edges of my understanding toward something more aligned with the truth I wanted to grasp and articulate. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=371)) - As with all things centered on people and relationship, nothing we create together with our whole selves, our baggage and damage, our dreams and passions, is going to be clear or static or definitive. Not only are there not limited ways of creating family and community, but there are not limited ways of staying family and community. It’s all mutable and evolving. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=376)) - FAMILY AND COMMUNITY can and should be where we find belonging, care, and love. But they are often also the source of our deepest wounds and our greatest damage. So, it is not without pause that I praise and celebrate family and community as safety and salvation. We all have the capacity to hurt as well as the capacity to love, we have the power to diminish and lift up, to harm and heal. And inevitably, we run the spectrum of these intentions and actions, often with the same people (on the same damn day). ([Location 408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=408)) - There are a variety of downsides to white supremacy for white people. There’s the proximate harm of having people of color you may love be harmed by white supremacy. There are also contributions from people of color we are collectively missing out on because white supremacy creates barriers for people of color’s brilliance. There’s the soul-deadening impact of having an identity that is predicated on the oppression of other people. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=455)) - What I feel at BWFC is an alchemy whereby we create more love and time and energy together than we hold individually. At our best, we don’t function based on reciprocation. It’s not about getting as much out of it as we put in. It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like we are spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=559)) - Through these women, my understanding of care—care of myself and care of others—has become void of the binary framing of this or that, input and output. Suddenly, care of others is care of myself. Care of myself is care for others. ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=566)) - part of what capitalism does is create barriers to self-awareness. And of the three—exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness—mindfulness is the most accessible to the greatest number of people. Almost everyone, regardless of economic situation, physical ability, geography, and age, can pause for a moment and take a breath to check in with themselves. ([Location 583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=583)) - If self-awareness helps us notice when we’re activated and running our old stories and patterns, boundaries help us take responsibility for all of that, and not take responsibility for other people’s stuff when they’re activated. ([Location 595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=595)) - Part of what systemic oppression does is limit the choices and agency of the people who experience it. But it also works to convince us that we have no agency and no choice. ([Location 610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=610)) - I find inspiration, strength, and clarity from these words from Audre Lorde, “The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last, you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=623)) - When one of us stops for a moment and thinks, I am going to make sure my partner gets the time they need and trust that I will get the same in return, we ease into abundance. We feel better about what we are giving and what we are receiving. We both get what we need. ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=649)) - The insular nuclear family, around which our personal life is supposed to orbit, is built from matrimony. It’s a reinforcing of the independent individual, recast as the independent couple. ([Location 657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=657)) - “Queer is about removing labels and replacing them with a question. It is a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics. It says, ‘I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’” ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=796)) - I love queerness so much as a beautiful and belligerent tradition of people whose sense of love and beauty and justice and art and adventure and family is too expansive for the examples that were set for us. But rather than keep quiet, we insist on something truer for ourselves.” ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=862)) - Our culture is made for, supports, and privileges the nuclear family I’m part of. Divesting from that privilege is important because it’s unearned and harms other people. ([Location 1104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1104)) - It’s people who are barred from entering “mainstream” society and have to build on the edges, who provide visionary, life-affirming examples of what’s possible. I’m not romanticizing the suffering, trauma, and bullshit that oppression causes. Nor am I suggesting that everyone who experiences oppression does, or should be expected to, create beautiful, future-facing alternative societies. But people in positions of privilege certainly aren’t doing it. The savior volunteerism, the accumulative consumption of wellness experiences, and those treks to Bali and Bhutan to discover purpose and meaning through other people’s spiritual practices generally miss the point. I love time spent in the woods or days lying in the sand as opportunities to breathe, reflect, be present, and decompress. But the places we go to escape the distractions and obligations and stressful busyness of our everyday are not where we build our lives. And it is in the mundane, the hardship, and the realness of life that what we’ve built is tested and refined. ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1112)) - For decades, Black families have been described as “broken.” This is in part because of the misogyny that insists that children do best when raised in a home with two, “opposite-sex” married parents, not just with their mother. There is plenty of data to dispute this claim and the biased research behind it. ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1154)) - Black people in America have been separated—stolen across an ocean, sold away from our people, pushed from home by everyone’s hope for us, snatched up by police and locked in cages, detached by assimilation to education and labor systems, taken by Child Protective Services, abandoned because of unhealed trauma—a million devastations and hearts rended. When our deepest bonds are attacked, there is horrendous damage, there is suffering that is inflicted upon generations of people. But our love, our bond, the things that make us family, that allow us to make family, are not broken. When we are separated, we remake family. We take in those who come to us. We reconfigure with those left behind. ([Location 1181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1181)) - “My family origin, for the most part, was chosen. It wasn’t just blood. As I got older and my politics became sharper, and as I continued to get older in my spirituality, being very intentional about choosing who is in that inner circle became a big thing.” ([Location 1190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1190)) - So many of us struggle with feelings of obligation toward people just because we are related to them. This sometimes compels us to stay in relationship with people. But we do not have to stay attached to our given (as opposed to chosen) families. What Rebecca, and so many others, model, is that we do get to choose. And those commitments can be as deep as we expect legal or biological commitments to be. It’s really up to us. ([Location 1403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1403)) - In an article I published a few years ago, “In Praise of the Auntie,” I wrote, “Aunties are the rule-breakers. When they come over to babysit, the fancy dishes come out, the kitchen becomes a playground, and screen time and bedtime extend. They go on adventures, take my kids to slightly inappropriate movies and shows, and they expose them to new music.”3 But, in my experience, aunties (and other nonparenting caretakers) also see children as whole people in a way that parents don’t. It means they can engage with kids as they really are and see what they are capable of. The mirror they hold up allows kids to think more deeply about who they are and extend themselves into the world more. ([Location 1536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1536)) - “In my ideal world, I would have a few other people who are totally okay with just showing up. I have a few friends like that. They might text me when they’re outside the house, but they’re basically literally showing up at my doorstep.… Or they’re like, I’m five minutes from your house, what are you doing? I really love the friends who are kind of less boundaried in that area. I do think that being able to surround yourself with people who are willing to insert themselves into your life—the people who just show up—is important.” ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1542)) - What Naomi, like so many of us, is asking for, is for people to be close enough to us that they can anticipate our needs, know what we want, and take their place in our lives. But it also means that many of us have to let go of some of our orientation toward privacy and seclusion. ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1550)) - “There’s labor involved in people articulating their needs sometimes that is exhausting when you’re already down. And I think without taking people’s autonomy or initiative away from them, I am trying to be more specific in terms of how I offer support to people. ‘I want to come and do your dishes and throw some laundry in. Would that be okay with you?’ Or ‘I know this is really hard. Can I maybe look into where you could get some resources for this?’ Or ‘Can I take your kids? Because I’d really love to have them today while you go do something for yourself.’ ([Location 1587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=1587)) - Sage Crump recognizes the ways in which American Dreamism tells us to be independent and demonstrate strength by doing it ourselves, so she is working on it for herself and others. “Showing up for people I love in my life is a really core value for me. That’s where the work is—being so present, being aware, and looking for where you can support, so people don’t have to ask you. Because, you know, asking is hard. We’re already battling so many different ways we are told we are not enough. We are so practiced in this idea of self-reliance.” Like Caroline from Chapter 5, Sage thinks it can be really important to give help without being asked. “I feel like showing up for folks, like 90 percent of it, is proactive. Because the majority of asks will never happen. ([Location 2051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2051)) - Food is where we meet, where we build, where we struggle, and where we survive. —PEOPLE’S KITCHEN COLLECTIVE ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2152)) - People’s Kitchen Collective is, among other things, an antidote to pain and an incubator for care. ([Location 2294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2294)) - This event was the culmination of a yearlong series called “From the FARM, to the KITCHEN, to the TABLE, to the STREETS.” Every event included delicious, meaning-filled food, readings, performance, and political education. ([Location 2369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2369)) - “The farm exists both as a place of liberation and trauma, simultaneously. ([Location 2372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2372)) - At this meal, I learned the practice of everyone at a table taking collective responsibility for making sure that all of us are served. (Saqib told me, “We serve food family style because it’s not about you, the individual. You eating is contingent on everyone else eating.”) ([Location 2380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2380)) - They helped us all understand that everyone was welcome, but that welcoming people is active, not passive. And that our orientation toward the people who would be eating the meal was, “We do not serve you, we are being of service to you, as you are being of service to the person sitting next to you.” ([Location 2389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2389)) - “Everything is a gathering and a calling home. I want people to know they are welcomed and, more importantly, expected.” He does not say he wants people to feel expected, but to know they are expected. I love this openhearted stance alongside the call to show up. ([Location 2406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2406)) - Saqib, Jocelyn, and Sita show me that we can truly welcome people to our literal and metaphoric tables while also insisting they have good table manners. Good manners is not about being polite. It’s about gratitude and recognition of all that led to us being at the table. It’s about sharing in the labor of making the table a place for all of us to be seen and accepted. And when we transgress—when we offend, neglect, or fail to show up well—we must clean up our mess by being accountable and working to do better next time. We can expect people’s presence and also expect of them behavior that contributes to everyone’s sense of welcome and belonging. ([Location 2410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2410)) - We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. —GWENDOLYN BROOKS ([Location 2420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2420)) - “Real security is not locking up more and more people,” scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore told us. “Real security is knowing that you will have shelter, that you will have food, that you will have beauty in your life. That you have a future, that your family has a future.” ([Location 2424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2424)) - Further, abolition is not just about the absence of policing and prisons. It’s about the presence of systems and cultures of support that actually create well-being. ([Location 2431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2431)) - Ruthie’s words that day in 1998 introduced me to something I didn’t know I was looking for—another version of life that says my safety is grounded in positive things like care and love, and that I have a responsibility to not abandon others to struggle on their own. It said that all of us are deserving of the things we need to live. We don’t have to earn it, and we can’t unearn it. ([Location 2438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2438)) - There are people practicing the philosophy of abolition in their daily lives, making real what they imagine, and creating practices based on an understanding of safety grounded in mutuality and care that says none of us is disposable, all of us should get what we need to live, and that the only way you do that is in connected community. ([Location 2444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2444)) - Mia Mingus, a TJ practitioner and disability justice advocate, describes transformative justice simply as a “way of responding to violence and harm that doesn’t create more violence and harm. People have called it a way of getting in right relationship with each other, or a way of making justice together.” ([Location 2566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2566)) - As Ejeris Dixon, a renowned transformative justice educator and practitioner, explained to me, TJ is an approach that “recognizes that interpersonal harm is rooted in oppression and works to change conditions that create, maintain, sustain, and support oppression, exploitation, domination and harm.… [It] works to meet individual needs for justice (safety, healing, repair, connection, accountability) while also working towards a long-term vision for liberation.” ([Location 2571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2571)) - At the time, I didn’t wonder why I did that, but now I think it was part of my deep desire to practice an ethic that says if I want to live in a world where we show up for others when they need it, I have to do my part. Now that I’m older and my politics are sharper, I imagine that my approach would be focused on helping the muttering man as well as the man in the suit. ([Location 2794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2794)) - All the horrors we face today will only be solved if we understand that we are all in this together. We are most moved toward action by our relationships with others. But we aren’t all going to have relationships with people who are, today, to paraphrase Baldwin, paying a great price to raise our consciousness, forge a better America, and save us all. Yet we need to show up anyway. We need to develop a sense of belonging in and to the world that tells us other people are ours to care for. ([Location 2813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2813)) - I think about the relationships I’ve outgrown—because of my personal or political evolution—and how living in cities has meant I could let go of those relationships and form new ones. Whitney makes me wonder if that was the easy way out. I don’t think relationships need to be held on to forever just because they exist. Plenty of us have rightly freed ourselves from old relationships because people just couldn’t accept who we are. But maybe I’ve been too impatient and unforgiving when people who love and care about me are moving at a different pace or in a different direction. I wonder who I’ve left behind that I could have brought along. I also wonder who has let me go because I couldn’t see their growth or was lagging behind. I hope I can get better at offering more patience and grace to my loved ones, as I no doubt need that myself. ([Location 2878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2878)) - This is a question I want to ask myself and my own community more—what conditions make us feel full and fed? Creating community is creating culture—practice, ritual, social norms. What does that creation need to look like so we are not just filled up when we are depleted but live a life that is less depleting? ([Location 2904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2904)) - Living in my bubble is important for my well-being and it’s the place we practice world making—creating some version of the future world we want to live in now, in the present. Living into the future, creating the culture we want with the people closest to us, is a declaration of love and commitment. I still spend time working with people who are less like me in identity or ideology or understanding. But my armor is lighter because I’m stronger. It’s like my people helped me discover my superpowers. It makes it possible for me to do the work I’m called to do with people outside my bubble—revealing our often hidden connections. We are living in a contradiction—we are made for interdependence, connection, and love, but part of a culture that espouses the opposite. Creating and keeping what is counter-culture requires vigilance. We stumble, backslide, and forget. There is a tension between existing in one world while trying to live into another one. That place in between them is full of friction. But like so many change processes, the thing we are trying to get to holds the key to getting there. Reclaiming and reinventing family, friendship, and community is a process we do with our family, friends, and community. ([Location 2913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2913)) - Finding and strengthening connection is a craft, not a science, but there are common denominators, patterns, and guideposts. And I think that if we look inside ourselves and those closest to us, we will find that we have most of the tools and materials, and can figure out how we might put them together. Maybe it is not even something we need to construct. To paraphrase an idea from john a. powell, who leads the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute, we don’t build connection because we are fundamentally connected. I find that perspective reassuring. The American Dream makes us complicit in building barriers to our fundamental connection. It tries to keep us apart by telling us that we are out here on our own. That means our work is to become more aware of what’s already there and peel back the delusion of separateness to reveal our interdependence. It has weighed heavily on me since I started writing this book that we are living through a time of great polarization in the United States and in other parts of the world, and the very present impact of climate change and fascism. When I hear about the number of species going extinct, the melting of the polar ice caps, the victory of yet another fascist leader, attacks on democracy, brazen displays of racism, or the passage of a discriminatory law, I sometimes think, Well, humans, we had a good run, but I think we’re just about done. And clearly the earth will be better off without us. It’s hard to keep the fear, anger, and frustration from making a home in me, leaving me despondent, bitter, and mean-spirited. And yet I ultimately always circle back to hope, because shit, what else is there? If we give up, we definitely lose. Trying is the only option. ([Location 2929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2929)) - We don’t get to the future we want by following a linear path plotted out from point A to B to C. The future we want is a spark inside us that says yes to joy and laughter and pleasure. It says yes to creativity and art and music. It says yes to transformative healing and care, and I am because we are. It says yes to vulnerability and our collective well-being and love. The more we fan and feed it, the more it sustains and grows. It lives in us and then we live in it and——the future is here. We get to the future we want by practicing it now. ([Location 2965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2965)) - A culture where liberatory joy, love, and belonging is foundational is powerfully attractive to those who want it. And it’s threatening to those who don’t. ([Location 2974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2974)) - I know that the way to create the world we want, and the one we owe those who come after us, is only something that can be achieved in community. I am excited by a future in which all of us is cared for and loved so deeply that we give freely of ourselves to others because we are fully full and fully fed, and we know that our well-being is dependent on the well-being of those around us. I also know that while I keep circling back to hope and doing my part to build that world, I also fear what’s coming. Massive change is happening and it will be inevitably increasingly hard and painful, and many of us will get lost along the way. The only protection against the worst-case scenario is also in community. We need each other. Either way and always. ([Location 2976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QHT64F3&location=2976))