Art by Micah Bazant in collaboration with Mariame Kaba and Interrupting Criminalization. ID: illustration of a broken open blue crystal geode against a black background with blue sparks. White text reads: “When something can’t be fixed then the question is what do we build instead.” - Mariame Kaba, Aboliton Organizer
Ever dropped out of college? Me too.
Broken off an engagement? Yep.
Pulled your child out of school mid-year? Uh-huh.
Interrupted yourself in a meeting to change your pronouns, again? Sure enough.
Ever strongly held one opinion, only to realize it was in conflict with your principles?
Ever ferociously defend an institution one year, only to vehemently condemn it the next?
Yeah, I get that too.
It can be tough on the ego, to tally up our false starts, U-turns, and the do-overs we need. We would love for others to think we have it all together, to not show the vulnerability of feeling we were wrong, that we changed our mind, that we failed. Even in, perhaps especially in, spaces where we're trying to get free together, where passions run high and the only thing stronger than the opinions is the coffee.
Why oh why can't our journey to liberation be one glorious run, the banner of freedom waving high above our heads as we cry out, victorious, at one with our community and our earth?
Sigh.
Recently, though, I keep coming across another way to frame our flops and fiascos. The dominant culture - that culture created by capitalism to keep us all producing and consuming in ways that benefit the wealthiest - seeps in everywhere, including our inner thoughts and imagination, even when we are committed to dismantling those systems. When we push back on the "one right way" - when we quit the job, change the life plans, join (and quit and then join again) the local abolition efforts, or when we spend some time staring out into space - we are giving ourselves a chance to reimagine. We are learning about our own tolerance for that discomfort. We are exploring possibilities and seeing how they feel. And this may be good practice.
Experiments
“We need a million experiments. A bunch will fail. That’s good because we’ll have learned a lot that we can apply to the next ones.” - Mariame Kaba, Abolition Organizer
Mariame Kaba frames radical imagination and abolition practices within the framework of experimentation. Experiments are always more about learning than they are about the results: there is really no failure when something is an experiment. When abolitionists push back against the practices of punishment, violence, and isolation, it's less about the results they get and more about what was learned. What worked? What didn't work? How can we talk about it?
What did we miss about truly being human, something we can't see through the dominant cultural lens?
Abolition experimenting can be practiced on a very small scale, every time we walk away from something that's harming us or others, no matter how normalized it is.
It would be easy for someone on the outside to point out and criticize the inconsistencies of each of our journeys. The dominant culture has coined derogatory terms for people who frequently evolve their sense of the world and their place in it: “drifter,” “waffler,” “lost,” “unreliable,” and more.
But when we think about these phases of our lives as experiments, that frees us to see the learning involved.
Decades of Experiments
When I look back, I can name experiments from each decade of my adult life:
In my 20s I started and then ended my career as a white schoolteacher in a diverse school - I could sense the harm I was causing without being able to put my finger on it. After I left the field I took improv classes. I felt myself moving from obligation and punitive rules into creativity and spontaneity. Improv communities felt exciting and encouraged me to trust in something I couldn’t necessarily see, a flow that would help me connect to the other players on stage and enact spontaneous ideas on the fly.
I spent my 30s experimenting with truly consensual relationships, especially with children around learning. I began the decade as a fairly conventional parent, enacting a lot of adultism, and ended it as a radical unschooler, collaborating with my children rather than dictating their choices. This collaboration applied to learning, food, bedtimes, and more. I drew deeply from the community wisdom of more experienced unschooling parents whose children were grown.
But I soon found I was unable to function in situations that re-create adultist dynamics such as a tight schedule, yelling, or restriction rather than problem-solving. It closed some doors, even where exciting work with youth was happening.
In my 40s, disillusioned with some of the toxic positivity that I encountered in white-centered unschooling forums, I experimented with depth psychology, symbols, and mythology. I worked with dreams, as well as Tarot and astrology. I wanted to access the source of imagination itself. I might have stayed in this realm indefinitely, writing and performing poetry in largely white-centered spaces.
But then my 50s hit, during the explosion of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and the election of Trump, and something that had been bothering me about my previous experiments finally clicked - all of them pointed to the ways I participated in white supremacy, ableism, patriarchy, and more. I could see how these oppressive systems were a necessary part of capitalism, of turning us against each other in myriad ways of control and aggression that hid behind a façade of normal everyday life.
I felt myself activated to question and dismantle old ways of being in order to learn about new ones. Imagination took on a new meaning, a way to imagine next worlds. Radical imagination, as Angela Davis implies, means getting "at the root" of things, under all the pretense and lies, and imagining a new organic growth.
Again and again, my feelings of discomfort with the dominant culture led me out of the mainstream and into Weirdsville. This was not one glorious run, but a series of experiments, falls, and re-inventions.
Jax* of All Trades
Many folks don’t know the full saying is “a jax of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
“Jax of all trades, master of none.” ID: Ames wearing a wide-brimmed "jax of all trades" hat with flowers
embroidered on the brim, standing in front of greenery.
Each of us has a different story for our different phases, no matter what decade of life we're in. Yet there may well be similar themes that run throughout our experiments:
Curiosity about liberation in different forms: personal, family, friendship, social, cultural.
Wondering if there is space for the depth of our feelings and a fuller experience of life.
Exploring our body's experiences of discomfort with the dominant culture.
Reimagining how we could live in community and in our own skin.
Each experiment, even the failures, saved me in some way, as they may well have saved you. Time and time again I broke out of a shell that was being programmed for me, and I broke into a new sense of how I inhabit this body in this life at this time, a new practice of living.
Maybe you’re feeling a shift coming, a wrapping up of one experiment, a willingness to reflect and learn. Maybe you feel ready to jump into another experiment. Maybe you aren't limited to one place in the world, but are part of many. If you would like to talk to someone who understands in a judgment-free zone, someone who can be excited for all your experiments, I have free discovery sessions to find out if we're a fit to work together.
*Jax: in the tradition of queering language, "jax" is a nonbinary term for I've coined for Jack, as in "Jack of All Trades."