Antidote to Disempowerment Toolkit

By: Emmagoldman

Are you pissed off? I certainly am. Sometimes I feel like I have no power —no say about what happens in my family, the US government, or in the world. I hate it. I hate feeling like a flyspeck, a cog, a statistic, a demographic, or a social security number. I feel like my voice is about as loud as an ant’s sometimes, and frankly, the thought depresses me.

However, the amazing thing about ants is that together, they kick all kinds of ass. Ants can destroy house foundations, build enormous hills, and kill and harvest the bodies of animals much larger than themselves. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true: the biomass of all of the ants in the world outweighs the biomass of humans. We can squish a single ant with our big human fingers, but if all of the ants in the world decide to swarm us at once, we’re history.

The best antidote to the feeling that my voice is going unheard involves a recipe like the following, with the ingredients and method described below:

Antidote to Powerlessness Recipe:

• 1 Chunk of Figuring Out Who You Are
  
• 1 Vat of Dreaming + 1 Smidge Organization
  
• A Few People You Trust + Baked Goods
  
• (Time + Focused Rebellion + Thick Skin) – (Insecurity), for Gluing it all Together
  
• A Renewable Source of Personal Energy for Mixing
  
• Smash it all Together and Join Your Fellow Ants
  

Figuring Out Who You Are:

Start by asking yourself possibly uncomfortably-honest questions, then memorialize your answers. For me, the best format in which to do this is by writing in a private journal. This way I can mull over my personal thoughts and revisit them again, without the performance anxiety that comes with public formats like blogs.

Before starting, I like to spend some time either making a journal or shopping for one. This way, I can both stall for time to wrap my brain around my list of uncomfortably honest questions and make my thought process a bit more ceremonious.

Once you have your journal, start addressing the hard stuff:

• Where do you come from—which region, gender, race, class, and religion? What is your family like? How does your identity give you a unique perspective?
  
  
• What do you value? What makes you feel alive about the world around you?

  You could: Make your own journal Make a handmade journal out of a hardcover book Decorate an ugly composition book

  What makes you feel crappy?
  
  
• What can you do right now about the bad stuff? What kind of tools do you already have in your personal set of resources to attack the crappy things in your life?
  
  
• In which ways do the ways in which your life is personally crappy tie into the ways that life is crappy for large groups of people? How are they related? In which ways do they overlap?
  
  
• What’s the good stuff in your life? What do you have going for you? Think hard about this one. The list might be longer than you think, and more difficult to identify than the hard stuff.
  
  

• Write down everything that you want to change about your life and the world, then start to narrow it down. What can you change over time? What can you change right away, locally, in your life and in your community?
  

• Set a timeline for yourself, and find ways to stick to it. Jot down your commitment to sticking to your plan in your journal.
  

• Is it your family, your friends from school, or friends in another state? Pick the 3-5 people who you trust the most and tell them about your plan for personal or local change, and ask them to hold you accountable for it.

• Ask your closest people for their help. How can they help you make the change you want to make? What kind of resources are they willing to share with you to make it happen?
  

Baked Good Baked goods help solidify relationships.

A gift of buttery, sugary, and chocolatey goo speaks directly to the generous and illicit part of a recipient’s soul. When you ask the people you trust for help, following up with a nice cake, pan of brownies, or plate of cookies helps demonstrate that your request is in earnest. Baking also provides a meditative respite from all of that rigorous self-examination.

For a truly serious antidote, I recommend baking from scratch. It’s not as hard as you might think. If you can follow the directions on a tube of cookie dough, you can follow a recipe.

Here are the best sources for recipes:

• Oldsters. Ask a grandparent, an aging aunt or uncle, or even an old person in your apartment building for some recipes. While you’re at it, ask for a bit of advice about how to make your small personal or local change. Listen hard. Make sure to reward your oldster with baked goods first, especially if you’re using his or her recipe.

• Go to the library and look in the cookbook section. Any general cookbook like The Joy of Cooking will contain some great recipes for cookies, cakes, and brownies. While you’re at it, browse the stacks for books that might also be relevant to the change you’re making. Take a look at the African-American history or Women’s Rights section. You might find something useful here to go with your cookbook.

• When all else has failed, make your way to the internet. I find that Epicurious is one of the most reliable cooking sites on the web, and also, The Joy of Baking.
  

(Time + Focused Rebellion + Thick Skin) – (Insecurity)

• Time: enacting your change might take a little time. Be patient, but make sure you’re still moving forward. Don’t let anything stop you, but know and prepare for the reality that people are inherently resistant to change.

• Focused Rebellion: You may encounter some naysayers on your path. You may even get a negative reaction from your family or from a person you trust. Make an honest assessment of whether or not the naysayer is contributing useful information to you. If not, respectfully ignore it and carry on.

• Thick Skin: If you are put in a position in which you have to ignore a naysayer, you may have to forcefully ignore them, and put on a thick skin in order to do so. Does a deep part of you know that the right thing to do is to make your change? If so, thicken your skin and carry on.

• Insecurity: Taking on a project that enables personal or local community change will probably bring up a lot of insecurities. However, making change also develops confidence. In other words, press on! Don’t beat yourself up for being insecure at times, but keep nudging yourself forward.
  

• Making change saps a lot of energy, but it also creates energy. Make sure you know how renew your own resources. What gives you energy? Spending time with people close to you, swimming, hiking, eating a good meal? Make sure that once you start pursuing your change that you spend time renewing your personal source of energy. This is what will keep you going in the long-term, and therefore, it’s a requirement for any type of change-making.
  

Smash it all Together and Join Your Fellow Ants

Once you get some practice making a small change, you’ll be ready to do it over and over again until you make a bigger change. Along the way, you’ll probably find other people who are similarly interested in fighting the crap that has afflicted their personal lives and communities in a practiced, considered way—like you’re learning to do. When the time is right, you’ll be ready to join your fellow ants and kick ass on a large scale—you’ll be ready to move mountains.