Believing in myself as much as I believe in others

1 part ego to 2 parts belief

✨ Thank you for reading GROUP HUG! I am so glad you are here.✨

tandem bike metaphor hits at the end

Doing anything with other people requires us to sit in a delicate contradiction: we must believe we have something precious to contribute, and that none of it matters if it’s done without each other.

This is one of those things that seems simple enough, a 🫡yup got it kind of tea bag wisdom, but it is actually hilariously hard when you look at what this means in practice:

I have incredible energy to begin but shouldn’t start something from scratch that already exists
I have good ideas to contribute but they maybe have already been tried before
I have so much to teach but so much more to learn
I want to dive right in but cannot take up too much space because others have so much goodness to share
I want to learn to do more but other people are already skilled and can help
I have an abundance of time and skills but if I do too much, it creates a vacuum where others cannot also support at the same pace
I have these specific skills to offer but something else entirely is needed

What a delicate ratio! If either side is thrown out of whack, we find ourselves in one of two hyperbolic snakepits:

• What could I possibly offer that would be helpful? (lack of belief in self, lack of self-awareness of skills or pathways to contribute)

• What would they ever do without me? (lack of belief in community and other people, overbelief in self)

When I have felt myself shunting between these extremes – Wow I am awesome and this would all fail without me // I could never do this by myself maybe they don’t even need me – it’s almost like I can feel my ego getting dizzy. But in a good way? It has only ever worked for me when I allow myself to dance between the two at once. The trick is to never get your foot stuck too deeply in either hole. I gotta believe in myself as much as I believe in others.

And maybe you’re like: wait, the self-hype is not the issue here! We shouldn’t spend more energy fluffing our egos! Especially when it comes to the collective! I think this wishes we were in a different starting place than many of us are.

Consider the rollercoaster of beginning to get involved in any group effort, like a volunteer group, service organization, or organizing collective: You have to hype yourself up, get brave, and reach out to someone or attend a gathering or fill out an interest form. This takes guts. It does! Even if you are the humblest person on the planet, even if you hardcore believe in the intact strength of whatever group you are joining, this requires some amount of belief that you have something to offer.

But then this self-belief must be immediately folded into the collective. A total confidence in others. A curiosity about who’s already there, what they’re great at, and what they care about. If we’re lucky enough to stay involved, this pattern will repeat again and again. We lead a project or take on a task. We run an event. We find ourselves in a position of organizing others.

Belief in the self, belief in others, repeat x1000000 until some new belief structure is born.

I think this is why the caricature of the newbie is the way it is: someone fresh, overeager, and prone to jumping into too much, too soon. Overshooting and reeling it in, again and again. Or maybe they never reel it in, never understand why their immense effort keeps slamming into walls, why nobody ever seems to help.

It’s a deeply intuitive dance between where you are needed and where others already got it. But it’s clunky as hell when we’re just getting started:

• We overdo it // We hesitate and hold back

• We propose things that have already been done // We never share our ideas

• Suggest things way out of scope // Play it too safe

• Sign up for everything // Sign up for nothing, assuming others can do it

• List our skills like a job interview // Hold our magic too close to the chest

I have been all of these selves. I have SENT MY RESUME to an extremely scrappy volunteer organizing group that couldn’t care less and I have held back from signing up because I didn’t think I could be useful.

I think of it like echolocation. You send these signals out there, dialing your ego up and down, slowly building up the true picture of what is needed.

Or maybe it’s like riding a tandem bike; you know your effort matters, but you couldn’t both get up the hill without each other. You can sense, by the extra resistance, when a little extra oomph is needed from you. You can feel the lightness when the other person is pedaling your weight. Together, by some wild intuition, you move as one.

or simply click that ₊˚.⋆⁺₊💜₊˚.⋆⁺₊ at the top if you indeed liked it, we always appreciate that here at group hug hq!! love to you all

• DMV at the library – loved this story from my town and want all services everywhere all the time

• every day is all there is – this piece by Sarah Thankam Mathews hit on something in my heart and was one of my favorite post-election reads

• There are still three workshops left in Mariame Kaba’s “How Do I Take Action Where I Am?” series – one is tonight!

• There is a Civic Organizing office in Boston that pays you to have block parties?

• …and if you want to know about more goodness like this, register for Joy to the (Civic) World: The Role of Fun & Joy in Civic Life organized by Sam Pressler of Connective Tissue on 12/17

• Why mending in community matters – LOVED this retrospective-style lookback at a mending club in NYC. It’s a nice way to close out rather than just letting the lessons fade away (a case o’ the community nuclear semiotics??) and it inspired me to do something similar at the co-op for stuff still in motion

• Why we need soup and pie AND action, all at the same time

• Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication, a gorgeous workbook offering critique and a revised path on the NVC framework

• Have you thought about public access television lately? The co-op got to make a segment for a new show hosted by our local anarchist bookstore (a sentence!) and learning about the public access tv process (i.e. you can just ask to do a show and they will probably say yes) is so sick

• Our co-op is hosting our annual fundraiser and as my main community and mutual aid home, I gotta shout it out!!!

• Sometimes, when i look deep in your eyes, I swear I can see your soul

💜