Today I want to talk about power and disempowerment, and the harsh realities of reform.
If you want to go become a nurse or an educator, there's demand for it. Same thing, broadly speaking, with being an electrician or programmer. And most of these jobs are done under someone else's authority, following rules you yourself didn't sign up for.
What if you want a job changing the rules though?
Changing the rules is often a brutal, ugly, drag-out fight. Institutions, broadly speaking, don't pay people to hold them accountable or have opinions about how the world ought to be run. They pay people to "play the game" and only nudge small edges.
Society mostly does not support adaptive reform or change, and in fact outright punishes it. As the saying goes, "the first one through the wall always gets bloody".
And I think I'm writing to mostly say this - speaking out against the status quo more often than not punishes you.
When we talk about external determinants of mental health, that is one of the ugly modern truths that is waved away and, in my view, grossly underemphasized. Or, at worst, dismissed as either untrue or framed as a challenge to nobly and enjoyably overcome.
This a community full of disrupters, with a mix of success and failure stories. On average though, I'd say that failure is more common than success. That is a structural and cultural level problem.
I'm tired of waving that fact aside. I'm tired about not talking about that issue specifically as a barrier. I'm tired of a world where I see a hundred things wrong that are clearly fixable, and where no support is being given to go fix them.
I'm tired of being scolded for a "right way" and a "wrong way" to approach reform and advocacy. I'm tired of the burden falling solely on me - "be the change you want to see".
We live under a moral standard of "go way if you don't like it, I'm not accountable for you". Never mind that most people have nowhere else to go and did not choose what society they were born into.
I'm tired of empathizing with professionals and so-called systemic limitations. I'm tired of "good intentions" and "trying their best". Even the lowest hanging fruit, the smallest ask for something slightly different to be done, becomes seemingly the largest ask ever under current social structures. And no entity takes accountability for funding it.
Most reformers reading this feel helpless and I get that. To me, the path forward is calling out, loudly and clearly, the brokenness of the larger picture situation. Call it out plainly and clearly. Give language to it. Give description to it. Stop excusing it. Start speaking truth to power. And truth to powerlessness.
I am tired of reassurances. I don't need reassurance. I need truth. As Bernice King (daughter of MLK) so eloquently said..
"Being truthful about the state of our nation and world does not equal losing hope. Hope sees truth and still believes in better. That which dismisses or does not seek truth, but grins, saying "It will be okay," is naiveté, not hope.
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