What is Your Work?

how thinking about privilege has gotten me stuck, and how I'm getting unstuck

I have a story for you. It’s the story of what I’m calling the “privilege vortex,” which has, especially in the last six years, sent me in endless painful circles. The circles start with all the ways I am privileged, and therefore feel disqualified from struggling, or from having problems, or from feeling that there are significant things stacked against me. I feel disqualified, in fact, from anything but a paralyzing sense of responsibility to atone for my privilege (whatever that would mean). That’s one end of the vortex. And the other end is the visceral sense that there are things stacked against me, and that taking my struggles seriously is important, and amounts to more than just complaining.

I could go around this loop for the rest of my life without getting anywhere. What drives me around is the sense that I have to be either privileged or disenfranchised, either responsible or struggling. What frees me from the vortex is knowing that I am both at the same time.

The vortex tells me my life is the sum of a string of numbers, with the things that are stacked toward me bearing “plus” signs and the ones stacked against me bearing “minus” signs. There’s an instant sum, it says, and if the sum is positive, then I should feel guilty in proportion to the size of the sum; and if it’s negative, I should feel angry in proportion to its size.

But there is no sum. The particularities of a life don’t cancel out that way.

I am both responsible and struggling, at once, all the time. My work is to struggle valiantly, and to recognize my responsibilities and discharge them to the best of my ability. And because this is life, the struggle and the responsibility will often be tangled up together, and so the work will sometimes consist in trying to figure out what to do with the tangle, whether it has a purpose at it is, or whether it needs to be unknotted and rewoven in a different pattern.

[photo by Meadow Anderson]

And of course, I’m not the only one with this kind of vortex. Everyone has their own version. Whatever you have going for you, you’ve also got problems, real ones, and sometimes the problems come directly from the advantages. My newsletter is now called “What is Your Work” because that is the question that I’ve been asking myself, the question that helps me move from paralysis into meaningful action.

By “your work” I mean not just “the” work of building a more just world. Knowing “the” work is not always helpful to me when I feel paralyzed. There is so much good work, and so much of it is difficult, consuming, and time-intensive. I can’t do all of it, and it can be hard to know where on earth to start. But I believe that responsibility is specific to me, and human-sized: that my work fits in the twenty-four hours of my day, and that except in situations of extreme crisis, it fits while also letting me get the sleep my body needs. The world is a mess, but that does not automatically mean my work is the work of martyrdom.

All of this sounds like I’ve been sorting these questions out by myself in my little overheated brain. That, however, is not the case.

Imagine the vortex as a thing that’s happening in deep space, a wild figure-eight infinity shape fueled by the two gravities of feeling guilty about my privilege and feeling trapped in my struggles, and by the little anxious rocket boosters on the bottoms of the feet of my space suit. The vortex continues, speed unabated, because there is no friction to slow it down.

Now imagine something coming into reach that is not me, and not one of the poles of my vortex. Something that lets me off the ride; something stable I can hold onto. Maybe it’s a small spaceship; maybe it’s an unusually well-behaved asteroid moving on a much bigger orbit. Whatever it is, it has one of my friends on it.

And they give me a ride to somewhere else. They give me a break from my vortex. They give me enough distance from the vortex that I can examine its mechanics from outside, and begin to see the endlessness of those mechanics, and the fruitlessness. They show me that there’s an off-switch on the rocket boosters. They tell me about their own vortexes. Astonishingly, they claim that I have helped them out of some infinity shape of their own, even though I was helpless to get out of mine. I couldn’t stop myself, but somehow I was still a stable thing for them to hold onto.

One particularly relevant constellation of spaceships and vortexes was convened by my friend Heather. If she agrees, one of my next newsletters will be all about her; but for now, I will just tell you about one phone call. It was almost exactly a year ago, near the end of the summer, when Heather called and made a proposal. “Look,” she said, “I want a flexible job that makes good money. And I have a lot of skills, especially around leadership and being a decent person and making relationships work. And I know a lot of amazing women who have a lot of skills that are different than mine, but also relevant to all those things. I think if we pooled our resumes, I could totally get us into Google or Apple or wherever, as consultants, and we could make money and help people.”

She was telling me this, she explained, because she wanted to give it an actual go. And she’d picked a lineup, her Ocean’s Four: Chelsea, an environmental activist; Virginia, a therapist; herself, a pastor; and me. Was I interested?

“Yes,” I said immediately, in spite of the fact that I was trying to write a book, raise two girls, keep a household running, and stay sane as a high-octane introvert. And also in spite of the fact that Heather had given me no more information than I just gave you, and I had not spoken to my husband Jim about how this might fit into our lives.

You will have to wait for another letter to find out what makes Heather this compelling. But our foursome began meeting on Zoom, and after introducing ourselves (Heather knew everyone, but some of us had not met), we began making a plan for a group we called “Do the Work,” which was about helping organizations (businesses, families, churches, whatever) to relate effectively and nonviolently.

The “Do the Work” spaceship is currently docked for repairs, while Virginia homeschools a son and starts a business, Chelsea practices and guides meditation, Heather gets trained as a mediator for Utah’s courts, and I write my book. If it starts flying missions again, I’ll let you know.

What I want to do with my writing has its roots in what motivated my dissertation (on the French philosopher Simone Weil and the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, and the way they can teach us to pay attention to suffering). But it has also been fed by many conversations with many friends and family members, and by Do the Work. All these things are in process, and I am writing this newsletter by myself, at least for now. But it feels important to start off by saying that the ideas I’ll be talking about here are both “my” ideas, and very much not “my” ideas. The sources I’m drawing on are not all easy to quote or attribute, but I’m with theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who says, “If you think you’re being original, that just means you forgot where you read it.”

I want to ask these questions out loud and in public for a number of reasons. One is that while I have journeymates already, I am looking for more of them, and for a wider community of others with whom these questions resonate. Another reason is that I believe this asking, and thinking, and making, is an important part of my work. I want to make that work available to others, and to be a companion on others’ journeys, or maybe even a kind of midwife for better answers to the question of what your work is, where you are, right now.

Another reason to ask these questions in a public space is that I want to be part of a conversation that is not an endless rehearsal of the privilege vortex. I want to extend what Do the Work has done already and may continue to do. I want to get out of the kind of conversation I have had too often, the one that is an endless back-and-forth of calling each other out, where each calling-out is like a chess move, aimed at putting the other person in an ultimate checkmate. Sometimes the checkmate is proving the opponent’s not woke; sometimes it’s proving the opponent has privilege she’s not aware of; sometimes it’s proving her motives are less noble than she makes out; sometimes it’s proving her ideas would not actually work in practice. But the effect (intended or not) is too often to disqualify the other’s perspective, to shame them and shut them up. Shaming and shutting people up does not lead to communication. It doesn’t lead to healing, or coherent action, or a just world.

If you’d like to be in on my attempt to get out of the vortex and actually go somewhere, let me know, and let’s see what we can do together. If I recently added you without your permission, forgive me, and please unsubscribe if you want out!