Category Archives: culture

The Complexity of Allyship

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Oh friends. So much is going on. How are you this week?

When I posted about white male allies last weekend, it was not just because of International Women’s Day. For the past couple of weeks, the romance audio community has roiled in allegations and discovery of unethical and predatory behavior by one individual, a male narrator and producer, against women–authors, narrators, and fans alike. My new friends and people I respect and admire have been triggered, shocked, saddened and enraged, as well as attacked and dismissed for their experiences. It’s all so discouraging, so human. The allegations are numerous and consistent. Some of the person’s defenders are aggressive and do not refrain from ad hominem attacks against those who have spoken out. Comments on all sides have escalated and people are suffering.

This post is not about parsing allegations or judging a perpetrator. It’s an exploration of the complexities of effective allyship. It’s a lot more complicated than my post last week makes out, though the central values and tenets are simple and fundamental.

Messaging with a friend a few days into the controversy, I asked, “Wondering how any male narrators would be willing/able to step up as more visible, direct allies? This is always such a big ask… I would never want them to put their own careers or personal lives in jeopardy from any backlash or get entangled in unproductive arguing… I guess it’s a question we can all ask ourselves—how we can make the most effective positive difference in our own way, given our own circumstances… how much we are willing to risk, etc…”

So, what are the questions to ask when we consider upstanding and allying?

How does this affect me directly? Indirectly?
How do I feel about it?
What do I think about it (because these are different)?
How does this affect people I care about, whom I respect and admire?
How does this affect all of our relationships, professional, personal, financial, and other?
What do I not know?
What do I need and not need to know, to act?
What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?
What am I willing to do?
What would I be trying to accomplish?
Do I have the bandwidth/reserve/resources?
What is my role here?
What will it cost me?
What will I be risking?
What is the worst-case scenario if I act or don’t, and how likely is it to occur?
What would that be like, could I handle it?
What are the consequences for others if I act or not; could I cause unintended harm?

What core values of mine, of the community, are violated here?
How can I best uphold and live into those values in this context?

What other questions do I need to ask?

Not all the questions above can be answered quickly or completely.  Emotional overload can lead to knee-jerk reactions and do more harm than good, increasing the likelihood of regret and damaged relationships in an already fraught situation. The way forward is often unclear at first.  So we must slow down, think things through. In the interim, silence may come across as indifference. Anything said or done, or not, may be criticized; no response is 100% ‘safe.’ Each of us handles stress and conflict differently. We must remember not to judge one another about how we engage–there are many ways to upstand, each partially ‘right’, and also likely incomplete.

Allyship carries cost. The first costs of thoughtful, intentional allyship are emotional and mental.

The next costs are relational, and then reputational, financial, professional–myriad. The more visible we are, the greater the potential risks of taking a stand, staking a position. If we hold a designated or implicit leadership role in the community (and I would argue that we all/each lead in some way, know it, like it, want it or not), our choices and their potential consequences are that much more complex. For someone whose livelihood depends on maintaining relationships despite conflict, costs can be high in multiple ways. Choosing between one’s ethics and paying the bills never feels good, and we never know when someone may be in that situation. We must all decide for ourselves, in real time, the risks and costs we can bear. Not everyone stands in a position to decline work or dissent safely. Conscience and context often conflict. We each make our own decisions, and in the end, we must live with ourselves—our choices, our relationships, our regrets. Judging others for doing differently from us serves no useful purpose.

Some have asked, “Do I have a right to speak here? Is it my place to say anything?”  What if the problem doesn’t involve or affect me directly?  What if I’m just butting in? I wonder if this is the question that distinguishes an upstander from a bystander?  

The list of questions above, considered thoughtfully and with core values in front, can guide us to the words and actions that feel most honest, authentic, grounded, and appropriate. In my mind it all comes back to relationship. As an ally my job, my role, and my ultimate objective is to uplift and uphold my loved ones in distress. Allyship, to me, means showing up with openness, empathy, compassion, kindness, and respect. It means validating someone’s emotions and experience, regardless of my opinions about the situation. It does not mean prosecuting without evidence or attacking on someone’s behalf. In the short term, real allies breathe, hold space, and stand in solidarity. There is a closeness, an intimate proximity that includes eye contact, erect posture, and a deep, resonant presence. I’m here for you. I see you. I’m in this with you. Even if we are not physically together, true allyship can be felt this way across great distances. In the long term, allies work for systems changes that benefit us all. If we start here, tapping into our capacity for deep Agape love, then the words and actions are more likely to come from a place of real connection.  As fellow humans, I think we do have this right, and it is our place. We are called to care for one another.

You are not alone.
I see you.
I stand with you.
We are stronger together.

Costs of allyship are real. When we bear them together, the more of us upstanding in concert, we each pay a little less. We all benefit. Allyship is leadership with presence, openness, groundedness, kindness, and love. It shows up as integrity, accountability, and respect.

Practice giving grace. We are all humans, here doing our best. We all fail. Forgiveness and accountability are not mutually exclusive.

I know this post is already long, so I appreciate that you’re still reading.  There is more!  I write to clarify and document my own thoughts and opinions, to record my own process, so I may look back and see what progress I might make.  If any of it resonates with you, dear reader, then that gratifies me.

Compassionate Accountability

I believe the people who have spoken out.  I believe they were manipulated, taken advantage of, and harmed.  I do not believe, however, that the person they accuse is evil, or in any way deserves to be threatened, dehumanized, attacked, or harmed himself, in any way.  He is human, just like the rest of us.  One of my core assumptions about humanity is that we are all here doing our best.  So how is it that some people’s best is so hurtful to others?  How are humans so loving and so scary, so constructive and destructive at the same time?  It’s too big a question to answer; we can only live it, as Rilke says.

As some have pointed out in the past week, ‘hurt people hurt people’.  I believe this, as it often explains so much.  As a fundamental perspective, this default stance in the face of harmful human behavior holds our minds open to empathy, compassion, and forgiveness, which are what heal us, perpetrators and victims alike.  We are all the amalgamation of our past experiences and those of our families of origin, traumas included, over generations.  We all have our triggers and reaction patterns, established early and evolved over a lifetime.  Severely dysfunctional behavior patterns root deeply, and the inner work required to modify or moderate them is arduous. I can hardly imagine how anyone could do it alone—heal and overcome, learn to lead with love and vulnerability—this is not do-it-yourself stuff, my friends.  And yet one of the first things we do to hurt people who hurt people is isolate them.  We judge, shame, dehumanize, and ostracize them, among other things.  How could that possibly help stop them from hurting more, both themselves and others?

This is not to say that aggressors should not be held accountable for their actions and harms.  Accusations and evidence must be aggregated and assessed objectively, thoughtfully, and in context.  “Innocent until proven guilty” is another useful premise from which to proceed.  Easier said than done, though, no?  How many allegations does it take for accusers to be believed, for any of us to act on their behalf, to upstand, defend, and advocate?  And what actions do we take? 

Once again, I go back to the list of questions above.  I need to be still, sit quietly, and settle into my own inner knowing.  After tending to the affected, how do we address the alleged perpetrator?  Separation and protection of victims from additional potential harm comes to mind first.  But here is where we must beware of that fundamentally high-risk divergence—encircling victims in love and compassion, and basically throwing away alleged offenders—ejecting them from the tribe, irrevocably, physically and socially.  The latter, while immediately gratifying, is counterproductive in the long run.  In the end, some felons forfeit their right to live freely among us.  Even then, however, their right to be treated humanely and with dignity is still innate and should be held intact.

Imagine confronting the accused calmly, kindly, and compassionately, and also firmly, calling forth their better nature to own their actions and the consequences thereof.  Picture having fortitude and magnanimity, enough inner peace ourselves, to stoically withstand their defensive backlash, however vehement, grounded in solidarity and allyship not only with their victims, but with the part of themselves that also hurts.  When I think about this, about the magnitude and depth of pain on all sides, the immensity of it all feels almost intolerable.  No wonder we short circuit to ad hominem and violence.  The overwhelming distress and anguish of holding others’ pain as well as our own, of being with all the darkness, wading into the depths—this is a cave of emotional and mental stress that few of us are experienced or trained to navigate.  And yet, I think it is where we must go, a journey we must take, to get past the oversimplified, binary, save the victim/punish the villain dichotomy.  I know some who have the skills, who embody this ethos of messy shared humanity, and who can teach and lead us, by example more than anything.

Hurt people hurt people.  How can we help one another hurt less?  

What does true allyship really mean, and how can we each and all achieve it?  For me it is both acute and chronic, simple and so complex:  It is about universal love.  In each new situation when people are hurting, I can take it slowly, ODOMOBaaT–one day, one moment, one breath at a time–to determine how my allyship manifests best, appropriate for context and aligned with my values.

This narrator/producer controversy feels like an earthquake in the romance community.  Or maybe a typhoon?  Some felt the tremors, saw the cloud formations long before anybody else.  Now it has hit, everything is shaken, and lives are altered.  Here in the immediate aftershocks, we must take care of the wounded.  First responders have mobilized, and some can only yet self-protect.  We all must take care of ourselves first.  Next, we sift through the rubble.  Everyone is affected, though differently; our losses are unique as well as shared: relationships, valued possessions, assumptions of safety, trust, and connection.  Emotions spiral, opinions fly, conflict escalates.  The more deeply we can breathe, the more slowly we can speak and act, the better we will all be in the long run.  With time, clearer, less loaded assessments may occur.  Systems, guidelines, recourse can be revised for better transparency, accountability, and equity.  Here we risk overcorrection, a hyperreactive response, all well-intentioned, and also counterproductive.  Crises will inevitably recur, and the cycles persist.  Alas, that is how we humans do.  How wildly imperfect and eternally exhausting. 

How else can we go but slowly, one step at a time, and together?    

I have included below some ally statements that I admire.  Please help me hold the romance audio community in peace and light.  And wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, whomever you’re with, I wish you what you need to stand up on behalf of those you can help.

Watch Andi Arndt’s full video here; listen to her describe so adeptly the responsibility of artists who use psuedonyms.

Watch Sean Crisden’s Instagram video here; subscribe to his YouTube channel here. He is preparing a round table discussion, which he specifically states is meant to include a divergence of perspectives. I will try to participate in that.

Watch this heartfelt video by author Cheri Champagne, describing how she is affected by the narrator/producer’s actions, as well as by the backlash against him and his company. The ripples reach far and wide. Thankfully, the community is rallying and hopefully all affected can come through with the least possible damage and trauma.

The Knock

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“I wish for more doors to open for you than to close or stay closed.”

I love middle age. At this point in life, I have accumulated enough experience to have earned real expertise, solid street cred in my domains of study and work. And yet, there is still plenty of ‘runway’ to do cool shit! That’s assuming I don’t drop dead tomorrow, of course. But even this, the keen and escalating awareness of my own mortality, makes my potential feel that much more exciting and acute.

I have had conversations with multiple friends about this lately. Many of us, especially in medicine, have lived what I would call a social norm-driven life: College, med school, residency, practice/research/academics, leadership. Date, marry, have kids. Launch kids into the same social norm-driven life. Color inside the lines, even if it’s not totally our nature–often not even noticing or questioning whether it’s our nature or not. Huh. Not good enough anymore, I think.

So much emerges now about the vastly, truly wide diversity of human nature, such as gender and sexual fluidity, psychology, physiology, and sociology. Narrow social norms taken for granted by generations, at least in the Western, ‘developed’ world, dissolve and disintegrate under scrutiny exponentially faster, it seems. It feels understandably scary in so many ways, for so many people. We have never been here before, never faced this much newness of both magnitude and volume, in the history of humanity. Anything new is uncertain, daunting. This much new is mind bending. I think we can figure it out, though, just like humans always have. If we can practice effective self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication in the face of high anxiety about the unknown, great things could ensue… though this is a great, big collective ask.

…So, what is this super cool shit any/each of us can do, whether we have lived a mainstream life thus far or not? As Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Some of us hear the Knock–a call, a whisper–to do something different, something new, something heretofore unimagined. For me it’s Book (well, I have imagined it for nine years, but hey, some of us also move slowly). For others it may be leaving an office job, exploring new creative outlets, pursuing long hidden or newly emergent dreams. Regardless, there is energy here. I have described it as pushing outward, broadening myself against the walls of a box within which I had not noticed I lived until now. The status quo feels newly small, constraining, unsatisfying. What I understood previously as black or white, open or closed, good or bad, right or wrong, feels ever less clearly dichotomous. Not only do I now perceive the gray, I feel pulled toward it. Touching it, experiencing it, feels liberating, expansive, an existential education that I could only think to seek by having lived this long a certain way.

The call, however, can come with no shortage of ambivalence, even conflict. For those who live with underlying depression or anxiety, this tension between the relative safety and security of the status quo and the freedom and exhilaration of answering the Knock may exacerbate symptoms significantly. When questioning my friend on the phone today about how she feels in her body when imagining the new thing, she could hardly attain, let alone stay in that sensation. Rather, her mind skipped ahead to potential negative outcomes, focusing on uncertainty and risk, bypassing said freedom and excitement. The status quo confines her, body, mind, and spirit; she feels it. Her dissatisfaction with it grows, causing agitation. I could also feel the tumult in her voice, like a roiling swirl of motion without movement, a frenetic vibration seeking resonance. I could only sit with her, from a thousand miles away, holding space. I could relate, help just by validating, even though I could not solve.

At the end of our call, I thought of the door analogy. Trying new things does not have to be all or nothing. We can go slow. There may be many doors to the new place to consider. We can check each for heat, sounds, vibrations from the other side, see which are un/locked. We can turn knobs and open slowly, peeking inside, possibly anticipate what we may find. We can back out quietly, leave it, come back later. No need to kick any doors in, potentially hurting others on the other side or causing recoil that slams ourselves in the face. We can examine potential costs, benefits, intended and unintended outcomes. And we can trust ourselves to handle whatever results from our deliberate and thoughtful decisions and actions. We can be mindful, intentional, honest, and authentic. This way, we will have less to regret, no matter what happens.

The Knock is Possibility. It is a signal of hope, light, and growth, both an uplift and a deepening. Sometimes we hear it only briefly before other sounds drown it out. When it recurs, however, I advocate for listening, following, finding its origin. We are only here for a short time. Fear and anxiety can be overcome; we can find our way to brave, new, big, wonderful things. There is no rush. And it’s probably better if we go together.

Strong Opinions

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Hello friends! How was your weekend? I feel positively *stimulated* and I revel in it. A little giddy, a lot joyous, a ton connected. …Sometimes I wish for a better word than ‘connected.’ Tied? Bonded? Entwined? Hmm…will keep thinking on it.

Lots of questions on my mind tonight about opinions. Let’s see where this goes, eh?

Thinking about people who express opinions often and loudly. Rather than describing them as “opinionated,” which sounds judgmental and negative, I want to say they “hold strong opinions.” But are these the same thing? I think not. What do you think? What is the difference; (why) does it matter? Mostly I wonder what moves someone to be loud and fast with an opinion.

Is loud the same as strong? If not, what does loud correlate with? Reactivity? Agitation? Judgment? Sensitivity? What else? When and where do we get loud about our opinions? What is the context? What is the pattern? What is the effect or consequence?

What makes an opinion strong, by nature/definition? Does it have to do with generalizability? Universality? Salience?

What are my strong opinions? How do I hold them? How do I project/apply/fling them? How else do I handle/manage them? How does this affect my relationships, with self, with others, and between others who know me? I have a feeling they’re all emotional in origin… so best to be aware of this and acknowledge any and all rationalizations—understand and accept them as such, manage them. Then understand the same possibility in/for others. This softens both my own opinions in general, and also my opinions about others’ opinions.

How do others know what my strong opinions are? How does this affect our relationships?

The older I get, the more I feel ok to have no opinion on many things, and mixed feelings, partial opinions, incomplete thoughts, and vague ideas on many others. The greatest benefit of this is that I can enter and exit any conversation with minimal attachments and maximal learning. Staying open and slow in my opinion formation helps me interact with information and people with ease. It facilitates connection and understanding, fosters learning. The longer I have no or only a loose opinion, the longer it remains so, until it’s not, and then I can commit and stake a claim with confidence and conviction. Things stay interesting after that, too! I have acquired engagement skills in discussion and debate to emerge from those encounters also better for having had them. It’s especially rewarding when relationship is strengthened through disagreement, which often happens when strong opposing opinions meet, no? These days I feel excitement and anticipation, rather than fear and loathing, at this prospect.

Honesty matters in here somewhere. It’s important to distinguish between opinion and fact, fact and truth… No matter how much I wish for my opinion to be a true fact, in the end I must admit that it is only my opinion…or my belief, which is probably an entirely separate and intertwined concept? Religion comes to mind… must tread carefully, repsectfully here. Who are our role models for this? I personally love Father James Martin, SJ.

Integrity and core values… Conviction. Consistency. All in service of relationship.

End goal: Live in peace in order to die at peace. How do my strong opinions matter here? I think it’s about assesing them often, holding myself accountable to my core values of honesty, integrity, openness, kindness, and connection. How do my opinions, strong or otherwise, help me show up to make my best contribution to those around me? How can I hold opinions, beliefs, convictions, etc. that will help me have the fewest possible regrets at the end of my life?

Sometimes there are too many questions to tackle or answer in a single blog post. They are always worth asking and documenting, though. After almost nine years of blogging, I have learned that the best questions come around again and again, and even if I don’t answer them, per se, thinking and writing through them makes me better. Thanks for coming along!