A Sacred Venting Space
We all need one for resilient community spaces
✨ Thank you for joining the community craft conga line that is GROUP HUG. So glad you are here. ✨
One time I was fourteen years old and thought the height of cool was an Open Mic Night. Unfortunately for me, my tiny hometown was like the town from Footloose but with no spaces for music and even pimplier teens you would definitely not want to watch an entire movie about.
To realize the musical utopia we all wanted to live in, a small group of us started a club called R.O.C.K. (I am not joking) which stood for Renegade Officers of Connecticut musiK (I am so sorry I am not joking) and had our first meeting in my living room. The room felt electric with our fresh belief and teenage moxie. My mom quietly excused herself to the grocery store because she couldn’t stand to watch the hippie kid put his bare feet all over her couch pillows. We sang a collaborative opening meeting song (note for later: why don’t all meetings open with SONGS?)
And then, as you can maybe guess because we were a group of twenty teenagers trying to accomplish something for the first time, stuff went haywire and annoying. We barely made it past the first “agenda” “item”. There were factions who wanted metal shows and others who wanted acoustic jam sessions. ACOUSTIC JAM SESSIONS! One of my co-conspirators just left in the middle of the meeting to lay in my front yard. I was so annoyed with him.
I instant messaged my rage late into the night to my best friend. I was so let down. And, weirdly, I felt rage about my rage. I felt guilty that I was complaining about it.
It felt like another betrayal of the dream; like if I had to talk this much about it, it was another failure all its own.
Sometimes, the things you say when Talking About It, or the fact you have to talk about it at all, can foment this sense of finality. Like, isn’t the beauty of utopian alternative spaces that you don’t have to have several hour long conversations with people about how that utopia is letting you down?
To this day, it is hard for me to shake the guilt of having to talk so much about any space I’m in trying to do something different – whether it’s a workplace with a spicy theory of change, volunteer-led governance groups, or even collaborating with friends to put on freaky little events.
Last week I shared Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s words about how bonkers high our expectations can be in organizing spaces: “In organizing, we sometimes expect people, including ourselves, to shed the habits this society has embedded in us through sheer force of will, when in reality we all need practice.”
While their essay is specifically about movement-building and organizing spaces, I found this following section broadly relevant to almost any space I’ve been in with other human beings:
This is not to say that we should seek no respite from the messiness and occasional discomfort of large-scale movement work. We all need spaces where we can operate within our comfort zone. Whether these take the shape of a collective, an affinity group, a processing space, a caucus, or a group of friends, we need people with whom we can feel fully seen and heard and with whose values we feel deeply aligned. In such a violent and oppressive world, we are all entitled to some amount of sanctuary. Many organizers have tight-knit political homes, sometimes grounded in shared identity, in addition to participating in broader organizing efforts.
It made me think of every time I’ve gone over the events of a fraught meeting – maybe one where the cis men in the space took up a lot of time or said something that rubbed me the wrong way – with my friends who are women, non-binary, or trans.
Giving ourselves grace in community spaces has always been a big belief of mine, but reading this lit up something else in me; that talking about the challenges of being in space together might be a sacred, essential need for us to keep engaging in community as a lifelong practice.
If we don’t allow ourselves the permission and space to process, we’re reinforcing the idea we show up perfectly to these spaces. Perfectly formed, perfectly trusting, perfectly resilient and thick-skinned.
What if a space to process the complexities of doing things with other people was treated as sacred, not a failure? Not as a guilty byproduct, but as a reality of engagement. Not as a sign of failure but a tool for staying.
Okay I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING – kinda feels like there’s a line there, Elise! Like there’s a version of this that can feel a lot like marinating in your own pain, talking just to talk, that navel-gazey type of gabbing that some devious lizard part of your brain knows it’s doing just to gossip bond with someone. And honestly, that version has its place too!
But I’m interested in exploring this line. I want to spot its contours and shadows, make it explode with nuance, so that we don’t miss out on a tool to make community spaces more durable. I want to understand the qualities of a Sacred Venting Space and know what it isn’t. Maybe it’s something like this:
Talking Just to Talk
Super emotionally activating; high highs and low lows, that pressing-on-the-bruise feeling where the pain gets returned to again and again
Lots of speculation or assumptions about intent
Snowballs more resentment over time, becomes its own story
Never makes it back to direct dialogue, accountability, or shifts (even if that shift is leaving the space itself)
Sacred Venting Spaces
Help us articulate and understand our emotions and the nuance within them
Oriented towards possibility; possibility of empathy, understanding, changes to be made that make it easier to stay in space together
Build shared pictures of what happened with people you trust, fill in the gaps and add gradience to our assumptions
Teach us something too; help us recognize our own patterns of response and feeling and challenge us to grow in ways that excite us
The short version is: a Sacred Venting Space has a possibilitarian posture and allows you to explore a future where you continue being a part of community space by processing it all with people you trust. Even if your “continuing” is at the broadest, most zoomed out level, like not abandoning every volunteer-led space for the rest of your days just because you had a challenging time in one particular space.
What do you need to talk about? Who do you trust enough to talk about it with? How are you interested in using these conversations to grow your own relational skills? How might you imagine addressing any of it directly in the space itself and the people in it? What do you need to stay?
By allowing ourselves more room to feel with each other, better understand our experiences with each other, and ultimately articulate them, we build more resiliency in alternative spaces. These spaces are beautiful because they’re attempting a different way of being together. And that will be hard. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, or that we have to be superhumanly strong to endure them, or that we’re failing if we have to talk about them at all.
What if you shared this with someone you want to be in a Sacred Venting Space with?