©LeisaHammett.com Harpeth River/Hidden Lake State Park
Last Wednesday, while patching together a quick, late lunch of leftover black bean soup, homemade herb bread and a tossed butter-leaf salad, I listened to a YouTube video recommended by a friend and former coach. The woman featured in the video was a controversial activist. I found parts of her message difficult to digest. A number of things she said, however, were insightful. One of them was her story of awakening from being an angry activist. She said activists have a lot of parental woundedness.
Oh. Wow.
That fits with the Enneagram 8 profile. Yours truly. We’re the ones with the cape, flying in with a sword to rescue the underdog. In a Narrative Enneagram workshop, I learned that our types generally are formed by childhood wounding. In my case, I felt bullied by an older sister and my father. I learned to react with spit flying, fire-flaming eyes and stomping tirades. (Which would be certain to incite snickers. Even years later in college—I’d painfully learn.) I formed an armor of anger and used it to not only protect myself but to project that protection onto others I deemed, in codependency, needed my rescue.
But, this post is not about the Enneagram or past wounding. It’s a story of evolution from angry activism. My coming-to-Jesus moment came over beans and rice tossed with Braggs and toasted tof post Saturday morning yoga class with my friend, author and podcaster Paul Samuel Dolman. Paul’s an Enneagram seven. He lives in a state of bliss and, at least used to be, so blunt it was sometimes bludgeoning. He knows his intuitive power with words this way and he knew precisely what he was doing to me that day two decades ago.
I’d invited him to lunch because I was curious just what made this man tick. In sharing my…”story,” I launched into a contorted brow, clenched jaw angry diatribe about THE INJUSTICES OF THE WORLD TOWARD INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES LIKE MY DAUGHTER!!!
I paused after a proclamation and looked at him. He looked back. Deadpan.
WTF?
I’m not sure when I got it. It wasn’t that precise moment and I don’t recall how many days, months or years before I woke up: my wildly dispersed anger would solve nothing. It would only create distance, isolation, tension, resistance, and maybe. maybe. move the needle a wee, teeny smidgen.
Hear me out. There is a place for righteous anger. And, it’s only recently that I truly discerned the difference. I muddled the meaning of righteous anger in my head for years. What did it really mean? What was the difference between toxic and righteous anger? The answer finally came soon after I published the blog post before the 2020 election about my state of non-reaction. I woke up a couple days later just. *angry.* Angry about the voter suppression happening in black communities. About the ridiculous, blatant gerrymandering in my own home community. About the Republican system hell-bent on oppressing precious freedoms of American minorities. At this writing, it’s unconscionably happening with the Georgia runoff….
That. is righteous anger. We can look to the masters: MLK, Gandhi, even Jesus. In their earthly forms they experienced anger. But they channeled it from spit-flying toxic activism, *which poisons one’s own self,* to righteous anger that creates change.
I think it was about the time of Paul’s deadpan reaction to my angry monkey tirade that I truly grasped the transformative power of my personal pen. I learned school administrators loved paper and proposals. I mentioned in this post that during Grace’s school career, I wrote a series proposals to the bureaucracy that would result in change. Blah-blah. I’m using that as an example—not as an ego chest thump—to demonstrate anger at injustice, as a personal transformation from angry activism into modalities that result in change. The Black Lives Matter protests this summer are a perfect example. We needed/need to be mad. All of us. Finally, our wounded culture broken open and became vulnerable enough, ala COVID, *to begin* to get the message. (Those who refused and still refuse to understand are still blinded by their personal privileges of skin and class and concentrate on the minority examples of anger gone off the rails. Although we do know much of the later was White Supremacist infiltration.)
Globally, especially nationally, this has been a season of awakened anger. Righteous anger—sometimes misguided into toxic anger, yes. We need that righteous anger, seasoned with as much love as possible, ala the previously cited masters, to transform the oppressive patriarchy. These last six months, mostly, out of necessity, I’ve stayed in my own lane*—disAbility rights, protecting my own “home,” which has been ample work during COVID, and deeply mining my own shadows where I have been unknowingly complicit in propagating racism and propping up the toxic patriarchy.
In referencing staying in my own lane, my attempt is to say that I was overwhelmed in combating our own injustices amplified in the disAbility world during coronavirus. That said, Black Lives Matter movement is everyone’s lane. Just as what happens to one, happens to us all. All matter. Injustice to one is injustice to All. We are interconnected. Thank you COVID for putting the spotlight on how the suffering of the one affects the lot.
I’m not sure how to end this post. Perhaps it is to leave it hanging. Because. We are all hanging in a limbo state right now. Hanging in the imbalance of lives dampened down into, in some cases, near silence because of how COVID has put the kabash on our usual noisy existence. Hanging because we don’t know just how long this damned virus is going to last. Hanging because. We clearly have not learned all these turbulent times have to teach us. Are you listening? Are you learning? How are you transforming? How are you awakening and transforming your anger into righteous indignation? This. is an enormous global wake up call, my friends. Do. Your. Work. There’s always plenty to do within and all around us. The work. is never done. —xxL
