did we ever change the world?

i had so much anxiety and pressure building inside me to make a difference. in my teens, my twenties, my thirties, my heart would pound so loud from loneliness — the loneliness of being in love with the wrong person, in the wrong city, the wrong friend groups — that i would go to a demonstration or a march and yell so much my throat hurt the next day. one time i got really into giant puppets — there was a puppetry troupe in my city that made them and stored them in a crazy dusty unsafe rickety Boston attic — and i helped them make some puppets and wore one to a New Years’ Eve party with a lot of people i’d never met. the puppet was seven feet tall. i cannot recall what it was — some type of dragon, maybe. i made an impression. i sweated inside that thing. the floor was white and black checkerboard. i swanned around in my puppet and let people laugh and then i fled.

i had it on good authority from my parents’ whole generation that changing the world had to involve organizing somehow, direct action somehow, big unions and big platforms and big movements. i had to become part of the flow of history and be part of bringing about more peace and more justice. i got jobs in unions, organizing, protesting, teaching adult literacy, teaching ESOL.

i loved the teaching. but there was a hollowness to it all. the structures i found myself in weren’t generative; how mysteriously unfeeling and even downright abusive they turned out to be. even the people in power over me, my own bosses and supervisors, seemed dragged down and defeated by the impersonal, stratified, inevitably hierarchical structures like nonprofits and unions that were supposed to be the vehicles for social change. dimly, behind the sounds of my noisy ambition and the softer sound of my heartbeat, there was a question: did i want that future for myself? a future in which i would put all of my intellectual and physical gifts to the wheel of perpetuating these structures? i could become a labor economist, someone who conducts research studies and supports the movement with data on the workforce and economic trends large and small. i could have become a teacher.

“you want to make ART…for the labor movement.” my boss stated in a flat tone of deep disappointment, probably seeing her time mentoring me flashing before her eyes as the dream of producing a more effective organizing and teaching cadre lay down and died in front of her desk.

i didn’t have anything to be. not even a self. not yet. i tried on wanting things like you would try on outfits at the mall. nothing really seemed like me under the lights, and i was far from home. did i want graduate school? maybe. art classes? definitely. sculpture? sure. photography? also yes.

meanwhile i slipped away from myself more. this was numbness. i was struggling just to feel something, and it helped to be able to make things. i had a housemate at the time who was also an artist, who had a large white nearly-deaf cat named Norman and who invited me on vipassana meditation retreats.

i never went.

this is not a chronological account, but it is an account. i built one career, then another, out of hope that leftist political and social justice movement organizations could change the political context enough to give policymakers an excuse to do the right thing. but policymakers, my dear, sweet, younger, passionate self, are not there to do the right thing. they are there to do the expedient and less costly thing, preferably the thing that will allow them to get back to the business of monetizing their positions. grassroots organizing may change some of the context, it may strengthen communities and make them more resilient to external shocks, but it will not, in and of itself, result in sweeping political change. was there ever truly a revolution? i couldn’t organize or teach or write my way into one.

but i mean there are a lot of interior projects to be done. there are selves to build, transitions to make, life changes to shape. those things absorbed me for the last 20 years — having babies will turn you inward and make you

want to seize your agency on the scale of one-to-one, on the scale of the intimate violence of being invisibly tethered. You are not going to bring that baby to Mexico or Morocco or even to a national park. there will be no photographs of you holding your baby adorably on an airboat in the Everglades. You are going to do what your baby, then child, needs. And you are going to do it relentlessly.

(do you want to know a secret? when someone expresses anguish at not being able to have children themselves, i find it to be similar to someone expressing a wish to go to war. Why would you enlist, when there are so many varied ways to help in the effort? Be a villager for a kid, be their fairy godparent, their cranky uncle, their well-tended and wealthy aunt. When I was thirteen months pregnant (really 9 months, but it felt like 13) with my first child I was on a walk in Chicago near Humboldt Park and beamingly happy and a woman of around 55 stopped sweeping her front walk and turned to me and said in Spanish, Is this your first? Only have one. Do not have another one. They will take everything you own, break the bank, and leave you with nothing. Then she looked down. I am not making this up. I could not be more in love with both my children. They are each a whole world. And. This parenting gig has cost me everything, it has cost every parent close to me everything as well. If it isn’t happening for you in the way that you wanted, I would really recommend finding someone else’s kid to hang out with. I’ll be happy for you, the kid, and the kid’s parents who get a night off.)

i suppose i have some things to grieve. we all do, at 52.

today i was on a national call with organizers and activists and leaders of the Jewish Left, of varying degrees of radicalism, and we realized in one heave of breath that we occasionally talk about how to change things, but never learn the stories and losses and wins and journeys that we have in our work. it’s exhausting to keep pushing, pushing forward, against the relentless headwinds of authoritarianism, and never pause to take stock, to examine the plants we’ve grown before they’re plowed under and made again into soil. I don’t know what any of the folks on that call have accomplished or tried or put into practice in their work. If we don’t even tell each other what happens, we’ve lost historical memory in our movements. We’ve lost the work if we don’t remember it to each other.

I feel like I have said goodbye to so many groups and comrades and editors and teachers and mentors and organizations. Each one radiating a love like nothing else. There is that. I don’t know what to do with that.

And the truth is that we have failed to work together toward a common vision. it has been for decades as if we are afraid to ask each other our visions for fear of what? they would mismatch? Occupy, the Movement for Black Lives for a few moments, the Water Protectors, the anti-carceral abolition movement, these movements have formed around a shared vision. the context, the possible world, has changed as a result.

But the vibes of these last three years have been cursed! Have they not? Has anyone else had the experience of your team or family or organization’s cohesiveness being eaten away by internecine conflict and deep divisiveness, seemingly for its own sake? Or for No other reason than someone was aggrieved and would not listen to anything that didn’t amplify their own grievance? Over and over, we fail. Working together across differences used to be the Left’s superpower. But we’ve been cowed by oligarchy and fascism and the loss of civil liberties that seemed to vaporize in a few instants. Organizations and families and teams will not protect us from harm and hurt. They often perpetrate it, in fact.

I don’t know the way the world changes. I only know it does. glacially and volcanically and tectonically. And my life is only going to be a single dot, a pinpoint across time that fills in the pointillist image of the world to come. So i might as well tell my stories, and grieve, live quietly and try my best to work with others, and love like there’s a war on. it’s what you’ll find me doing on any given morning of the winter, getting up without fail to wake up my kid so he can be off to catch his bus to school, walking hunched and steam-breathed into blue dawn. And climbing back into bed to drift more easily into the day under the covers, letting my boyfriend re-settle his arm across my sternum, and looking over his shoulder at the light coming into the trees.

xo,

Mariya