S1E31.5 The Spiritual Radical Left, Burnout, and Disability with The Young Quaker Pod — Transcript
Katherine: Hello, this is Katherine, welcome to Friendly Anarchism. Can you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Jessica: Hi, my name is Jessica Hubbard-Bailey. I am the host of The Young Quaker Podcast, which is a podcast about younger Quakers in the UK, and general Quaker person.
K: Yeah, I am so excited to have you on! It’s fun to meet another Quaker podcaster. Sort of a niche market, isn’t it?
J: Yeah. It’s great, it’s really niche actually [laughter]
K: Have you had any problems gaining any listenership or…?
J: We’re still a little podcast at the moment. We’re kind of a baby podcast, but I’m really happy with how it’s grown. It’s growing quite organically, and especially because a lot of the things that we’re talking about are maybe more geared towards British Quakers, I’ve been really pleasantly surprised how many downloads we’ve had… We just hit our 1000 downloads mark and that was really exciting.
K: Oh, congratulations! That’s great.
J: And our fifth episode is coming out soon, so. Yeah, it’s really exciting. And my favorite thing about it has just been meeting other people, getting to talk to them. Yeah, it’s been great.
K: That’s really good. I’ve been doing this podcast for just shy of a year now, and I think I just passed 16,000 downloads, and that was really exciting, it’s been growing really slowly, but pretty steadily, and so that’s really exciting. I’m super excited to meet another podcaster, especially a Quaker podcaster, like I said, it’s pretty niche, but I’ve been really happily surprised with sort of… I’ve been reaching, I think, a pretty broad audience, especially a lot of anarchists because I do a lot of anarchist content, in fact, actually, I do mostly more anarchist content, and I’ve been slower about learning about Quakerism because I’m a convinced Friend. I’ve only been a Quaker for less than two years at this point, so I know much more about anarchism that I do about being a Quaker. So were you a convinced friend or were you raised in a Quaker church or meeting?
J: I’m a convinced Friend basically, I was raised by atheist parents, but I’m hoping that you guys could teach me some more about anarchism, because I feel like I know more about Quakerism, even though I guess my parents… Especially one of them. So I was raised by lesbians, very lefty household, frequently on marches from the age of zero. I think they were really keen to give us that kind of social justice upbringing to really instill in us how important it was to fight for people who weren’t as privileged as we were, and also to fight for ourselves because sometimes we’re those unprivileged people and it’s really important to, I guess, value yourself in that way, and I think they were surprised when I started becoming more kind of spiritual, because for them, the church as a kind of institution was such an oppressive force for them, particularly one of my mothers, she was the daughter of a bishop, and he was a super big deal and I think really struggled that two out of his four kids turned out to be gay, which was maybe a little [unintelligible] there, from God in any way. But yeah, she struggled slightly to begin with, with me finding faith just because to her, it was one of these incredibly oppressive institutions, but I think Quakerism was actually… it was a more palatable way to be religious then, so it’s like you said, with being able to re-[cuts out] British friends don’t actually believe in God and things like that, so it’s really… It’s maybe perhaps a more spiritual and mystic and religious in the kind of conventional sense, quite a lot of the time, and it’s able to appeal to a broader range of people for that reason. I think partly because no one tells you what to believe. And I think that’s part of thing that really attracted me to it in the first place. But yeah, I think it’s interesting because I think sometimes I struggle with a more traditional language just because that was the language of my mom’s oppressors. It’s been an interesting foray into Quakerism. But what I’ve found is actually another family, and that’s been so valuable and so amazing, especially the young Quaker community, I feel like they’ve really rallied around each other to support each other in recent years, and really wanting to make change and do exciting things, and change things not just in the world, but within Quakerism. Like you’re saying before, you need to be constantly learning and constantly changing things to make progress and to move forward and to move with what we need to be doing at the time that we’re living in.
K: Yeah, I think there is a little bit of a more radical spiritual revival happening right now that we’re probably a part of. I think throughout history there have been these sort of radical revival or uprisings more than occasionally. Regularly, that’s the word I was looking for. So it’s pretty fun to be a part of that because I’m seeing it sort of popping up a lot of places, and I’m seeing a lot of interest from people that probably would never have thought that they would be interested, just like me. I also grew up in an atheist household, who my parents had had a really hard time in the church themselves, and my dad actually got kicked out of his house when he was 16 because their Bishop told them… he had questioned whether or not God existed. And his parents are really worried and went to the Bishop, and the Bishop said he’s gonna taint your household basically, and kicked him out. He’s been amazingly supportive though I’m really lucky, but it’s definitely been hard. It’s definitely been a trip. Especially in the leftist community there is a lot of pain surrounding Christianity specifically, because it has been so, I would say, taken over, co-opted by this really really conservative and oppressive way of looking at the Bible and Biblical teachings.
J: I talked a little bit about this on the podcast that’s about to come out about this idea of canon Jesus and fanon Jesus, and the idea that canon Jesus is this radical socialist far-left guy who is tearing down barriers and so anti-capitalist and anti-state and anti-imperialist and all of those awesome things, and then fanon Jesus is this weird co-opted white Jesus who somehow is white, which I really don’t get, who seems to stand for the right to bear arms and the right to tell people, No, you shouldn’t have sex with that sort of a person…
K: Or at all…
J: Yeah, exactly. So I think you’re right, that we are part of this new radical movement, to take back canon Jesus slightly to kind of reclaim him and be like, No, no, this is what he stood for. And he would not be sitting here and voting Donald Trump into the house and senate… That would not be happening. It’s scary in some ways that it’s gone this far, like it’s had to take this much of an extreme political divide for… I’m not sure to call it an uprising because that sounds like a revolution. But I guess, I mean this huge wave of response that I think we’re seeing all around the world, of especially young people, but I guess left-wing, more radical people in general, standing up and saying… No, enough is enough. This isn’t right. And not in our name. Not in our country’s name, not in Jesus’ name is this happening.
K: I just had a really interesting article about the roots of this super oppressive racist religiosity in america, and how there was a very loving Jesus, very accepting Jesus. And then I got tied in… the church took over or was led by wealthy land owners and slave owners, and it turned into this thing where if you were a radical person of faith and you were speaking up against slavery, then you would be killed or run out of town, basically. And that’s how they created this hegemony of protecting slavery by dampening and shutting down radical people of faith, and that sort of continued on through the centuries until we are here now, where there still is this very, very strong current of deep racism, even fascism within a lot of these white evangelical churches. So the roots of this… I found that a really fascinating article, and it was interesting ’cause it was originally published in Forbes and then got taken down, so… Yeah, Forbes took it down. The editor wrote this little thing about it being like, This is not representative and is painting with a wide brush, blah blah, blah. And it was a very well-researched article. Isn’t that interesting?
J: That is so interesting, and yeah, to be published in such a wide-reaching magazine like Forbes, which is, I guess fairly mainstream even… It sends a real message that such a mainstream publication like Forbes would post something like that or publish something like that and then redact it, that’s almost more strong than not publishing anything like that in the first place… Gosh, yeah. That sounds super interesting, will you send me the link?
K: Of course, I’ll put it in the notes. I always put anything I reference into the notes for the episode.
J: I’d be super Interested to read that.
K: Because it was taken down, it’s now republished on the author’s personal blog with the note from the editor when he wrote the editor saying, why did you take this down? So it’s a really cool… It’s fun.
J: It’s really cool.
K: How did you get pulled into Quakerism?
J: I think I maybe always felt spiritual, but never really known what it was, I kind of… I guess I was spiritual in the kind of hippie way, like when you go to the ocean and you look at the ocean and you’re like, Oh my God, this is so sublime and surreal, and I’m having this bodily experience looking at this vast vast thing that I can’t even comprehend. And I guess that for me is religious. Now I would be able to mark that as a religious experience, but at the time I just thought I was a bit of a weirdo. As I got older, I found that I wanted to explore that more and possibly… I think this is really cringey, but falling in love maybe brought me to God a little more as well. I met my husband six years ago now, or five years ago. We got together and it was like seeing everything that could be good in the world and it really changed me as a person, I think, because I was going through a really tough time, my early 20s and late teens, my mental health was really poor, and I had a lot of problems in my life and falling in love was like this new birth for me, where I could move past a lot of what happened and process it and also start to love myself, and it was through loving myself that I began loving God, and that sounds really cringey, but I think it’s true. And I think he felt the same. And we both were like, You know what, we’d really like to find a home, a kind of spiritual home, and put this somewhere and do something with this, and hopefully make something good out of it. So we went, I think both us have heard of the Quakers? My granny on one of my mum’s side was a Quaker for a little bit because she was really… She was super involved in anti-apartheid stuff when she was growing up and leads an amnesty thing, and she was like a big campaigner, and I think it really appealed to activist nature doing the Quaker thing, so I heard of Quakers that way. And I was like, my granny’s a cool lady. She would go to a cool church. We just went to our first meeting and was like, Yeah, we’re home. This feels like home. Although I think Quakerism as an institution has a lot of things to learn and a way to go in terms of inclusivity and representation and stuff like that, I think out of all the spiritual homes that we could have made for ourselves, it feels like the right one you know? It’s given me so much, I think, and also the world feels really scary sometimes, and having somewhere like that, like Meeting For Worship where you can go and be quiet for an hour a week… it’s very healing for me, and I think… I really appreciate that. In a big way. How did you come to be a Friend?
K: I found the Quakers via a Quaker meeting house when I was at the… I went to the Democratic National Convention back… Oh, back in the day before I started to really re-radicalized ’cause it was pretty radical back in my teens, and then I had just sort of… going to the university and working more electoral politics. I helped with the Obama campaign, and then I helped with the Bernie campaign and then got more re-radicalized. I was still anarchist but felt like I could work sort of within possibly, which I now think is just very funny [laughter]. So when I was in Philadelphia, the two outside the DNC radical things I went to, which was the People’s Convention and the Socialist Convergence, were both held in Quaker meeting houses. And I remember walking into a Quaker meeting house and being like, This is such a still, calm, simple, beautiful space. I feel better just being in this space and meeting some Quakers while I was there, and I was like, Wow, these are also still, calm, beautiful people, and I was having major anxiety problems, which I’m not totally over or anything, but it was like… whatever they’ve got going on, I want a piece of that. [laughter] So I was like, Well, I’m gonna check it out. I never thought about going to a church, that seems kind of strange for me, but I did have sort of spiritual feelings when I was younger, I’d gone to church with some friends and sort of… I kind of enjoyed it but felt bad about it, because of the athiest upbringing I shouldn’t be liking this… it’s weird, I don’t know, there’s all of these reasons that this is an oppressive horrible structure I can’t engage in. But then I went to a meeting and I had, I guess we would call a religious experience, like ‘god feelings’ [laughter]… it was incredibly transforming for me this first meeting. It had been silent the whole time, and I was like… I don’t really know what was going on. I had done a little bit of research, but I didn’t really understand what that meant, ‘silent corporeal worship’. And then one of the elders of the meeting stood up and gave… I’m getting choked up, it was so powerful… gave a vocal ministry that felt directed right at me, you know what I mean? And it wasn’t, but he just talked about being in World War II and being at a time when the world felt like it was gonna end and it was so scary, and how spirituality and how the message of Jesus Christ helped him through that time and having the Quaker community… and there were some other just really poetic things that he said that really spoke to me and I just… I basically had a breakdown. I’d been holding all this stuff in and I just started sobbing in meeting. I’m just an openly emotional person in general. One of the reasons I really enjoy being a Quaker is because it’s been very, very helpful for me to help regulate my emotions and regulate how I interact with the world. I have a far way to go still, but I’m a much calmer, more loving, kind, person, doing all of this weekly and daily practice now in learning how to keep perspective by refocusing on God and learning how to stay in a place of being loving and being kind and being humble. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. That message has been so powerful in my life. How activists talk about leading with love is very important, and it feels like that has been incredibly important in keeping me able to stay forward and move forward. And it’s coming to a place where I realized that places where I had decided and actively worked to lead with love in the past, even over a year ago, are now coming to fruition here. Every time you leave with love, you’re planting a seed that will grow into something even if you have no idea when ,even if it’s years and years later. So it’s been wonderful for me. But it’s so interesting to hear you talking about it earlier, and I can hear that you’re sort of uncomfortable and bashful and have a hard time saying Christ Jesus ’cause I feel the same way, ’cause it’s so weird because I still have a very hard time talking about being Christian, and I think one of the reasons that my podcast has skewed very heavily anarchist a lot of the time is because there’s just not as much interest in the message of Christ on the left. And there’s a lot of hostility, open hostility. I get attacked basically daily on my Facebook page by anarchists. I’ll get a fascist once or twice a week, but I get beat on almost daily by anarchists if I ever post God stuff. So it’s like some days I’m not really posting any kind of God stuff. I have to say that I’ve also been very happy to also have been finding a lot more support than I might have expected as well, ’cause the hostility is forefront, the hostility is a stronger voice than the people who have been coming out of the woodwork to show me a lot of support. I just posted a picture I took of myself where I was reading a little book that says on the cover, it says, Keep Calm and Trust God, and the comments kinda went nuts and there are a lot of people being like, It’s a great photo, but I don’t give me that God crap, blah blah blah. But then there were a lot of people who came in on my defense too, which was really lovely and heartening to see, so it’s just really wonderful to feel like I have a connection with you and that same kind of… We’re kind of living in this bizarre place, it’s sort of really uncomfortable in our current society trying to balance that radicalism with this weird co-opted Christianity thing.
J: Yeah, I think it is hard because I think actually a lot of those people who are gonna be resistant to religious ideas and religious thinking are people who have been hurt by religion or people’s co-opted version of that religion, and I can really understand that and I can sympathize that actually organized religion in general, possibly has been more of a force for bad and good throughout the entire history of the world. But I think as well, I have such a strong, I guess, feeling in my heart that kind of overrides my logical brain that says, Oh, Christians hate gay people or Christians think this and that, that kinda says, No, this is your home and this… I have a strong feeling in my heart that this is my home and this is my spiritual place of nourishment and stuff and… Yeah, it is a little embarrasing sometimes, non-religious moms and friends and stuff because they don’t get it in the same way, and I have to respect that as well, because I think for them, it’s something painful. But I kind of wish I could tell everyone about Canon Jesus sometimes to be like, No, he’s not like that, I swear! You can be religious and cool, and…
K: I have a meme to send you… [laughter] Have you seen the meme with the kid with the trumpet, like following the girl with her hands on her ears? It’s one of those memes that has been going around, people change the wording. It just says like ‘me, meeting somebody new: I’m not that kind of Christian! etc. I wear a cross, but I wear it under my shirt. And that’s fine, ’cause it’s for me, it’s not trying to proclaim anything for other people.
J: And it’s not even like I want to convert anyone or anything weird like that, I just wanna be like, Oh, they’re are spiritual people out there who support you and love you and want to fight your battles too.
K: Yeah, yeah. And that’s kind of what exactly what we’re doing though, isn’t it? … And it’s that desire to just explain who we are and where we’re coming from… we’re both podcasters, right? [laughter] Which I think is a really nice way to do it, ’cause I don’t feel like it’s evangelizing. I don’t wanna evangelize, I’m not saying this is a path for everybody, but I do wanna carve out space for where I’m at, ’cause there isn’t a lot of space for that and there’s other people who feel the same way. So it’s felt like there’s a need, and I think there is a need, we don’t wanna… Anarchists and leftists in general don’t wanna talk about it necessarily in spiritual terms, but there is sort of a gap, there’s sort of a deep pain that a lot of people are feeling that I think could be alleviated by a spiritual practice, even if it’s not… it doesn’t matter if it’s institutionally religious or anything like that, but some kind of deeper, deeper faith in something larger I think has been so grounding for me, and the thing is I understand what people want to evangelize, ’cause it’s like, I see that you’re in pain, and I know how I could maybe help, but… you know what I mean? I don’t want to evangelize but I also just wanna be like, This is a thing you might wanna think about it ’cause it’s been incredibly great. You look at other people doing social justice work…I look at communities of color specifically too doing social justice work where there’s a deep tradition of this spiritual grounding in the work they do, and it’s like, these are people working under really severe oppressive conditions. Look at the slaves and look at Sojourner Truth. And they found their spiritual grounding and often specifically Christian grounding to be incredibly necessary to be able to do that work. So I think it’s a shame that the radical left has excised that in general.
J: I really agree, and I think… Especially for young people as well. And I think it’s maybe slightly different in britain to the states, but correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like there’s more of a cultural heritage of spirituality in the states being just more of a… Just more of a thing. I feel like in Britain, you are definitely in the minority if you go to any kind of church or temple or mosque, or whatever, and it’s more of a kind of… It’s definitely an older person thing, you don’t have the same kind of big charismatic evangelical churches here in the same way. Obviously they do exist, but they are smaller that you don’t have those kind of big super churches in the South and all of that. And it’s quite a kind of isolated community now, I would say, in terms of… And I think that’s partly a chosen thing, but lots of those communities have chosen to stay within those religious groups, and that’s their community and they don’t venture out into other other groups, I guess. But in Britain, it still very much feels like… I guess maybe this is a new thing because actually probably a few years ago, everyone would have been a Christian, but yeah, it still feels like you’re this tiny little island of people. And when I talk about the podcast being a baby, I think we have 200 listeners per episode or something like that, and it’s probably all of the young Quakers in Britain [laughter], we’re so small, but I’m really happy that I think Quakers in particular have been able to make links and relationships and connections with people and groups like anarchists, groups like activists in general, and to have that melding of spiritual and political, I think that’s really important, and I think it’s really good that we can have both and that people can be either or both. I think that’s really important. And I do believe in the idea of the separation of church and state and all of that, although possibly… We shouldn’t have the state at all [laughter]. I think there’s something to be said for being around people who are not like you, being around people with diversity of ideas, being around people with diversity of spiritual experience… I talk about this a lot in terms of the podcast. I love that some Quakers are super Christian and love Jesus and pray to God in a very traditional sense and all of that, and I love that some Quakers are like… I experience God is more of a force, maybe, or like a wind going through the trees also, do you know what I mean? I love that we have such different ideas spiritually, I think that’s so powerful. I think diversity is something that can only make us stronger. It can only make us question our own beliefs and either get stronger in them or change them to make them better. I don’t think there’s any kind of weakness in difference ever.
K: Exactly. It’s true, I think the anarchist monoculture against spirituality is very damaging. Any kind of monoculture is bad. Carving out space for people who are spiritual is like… that’s most of the world… I think it’s more than 90% of people on this planet consider themselves a person of faith, and so it’s like we’re already a small group. Do we want to be even smaller? [laughter] We look at affinity groups… do you know about affinity groups? How affinity group organizing works? So an affinity group is that a small group of people can make a lot of change, and they come together around an ‘affinity’, so something that everybody wants to do. A type of work or a type of goal that people have to work together on, and you work… Affinity groups can be anywhere from two to 16 people, I think, in my experience, about eight people as ideal. Jesus’s affinity group was 13, right? [laughter] Which is another totally great size for an affinity group. So affinity group organizing creates these really intimate little groups that can learn to be… That can really know each other and work… and be able to be very flexible with how they do things because it’s a smaller group and it’s a lot easier to get consensus if you’re working within a small group, right? [pause] Forgot where I was going with this… [laughter] Why did I start this…
J: We were talking about how monoculture is bad
K: Oh yeah yeah yeah, monoculture. So yeah, you look at affinity groups in art and in story telling, you’ve got Robin Hood had the little affinity group, right? You talk about any sci-fi and there’s gonna be a little affinity group that’s on a ship, and these are all examples of little affinity groups and they almost always have a spiritual person, you know what I mean? There’s always, there’s always somebody because there’s a role that needs to be played by a person of faith who does… Who does the death rituals, and who does the marriages, and who does even like prayer, leading people in prayer, getting people to calm down and be together in a space before something… A big action before something happens. For guidance, you know? You can talk about pastoral faith and people need… I think generally speaking, a person in the church has been historically a therapist, right? So there’s a lot of roles that a person of faith have historically within our arts played that’s been very important to the functioning of these affinity groups, and I think there’s a reason for that. So I think it’s something that anarchists and other leftist groups should consider, is that having somebody as faith in your affinity group could be very healthy.
J: And they bring a different kind of strength, they bring a different vibe. Just like everyone brings something to the table, and actually spirituality and religion can bring a lot of… Like you were saying, grounding. Strength, calm, kind of collective-ness. I think a lot of what makes religion so grounding is that you do things as a community. And obviously, that’s less common in Quakerism because we don’t have sacraments and rituals that we have to carry out in the same way, but we still come together to meet. Even that language ‘meeting’, it’s about being together, and it’s about communing and having a covenant between you all in that moment. It’s about connection, I guess. And I think that people of faith really can bring that to groups, they can bring that sense of community and communal being. I found it really helpful, that it’s really added something special to my life, even if still I find it a little difficult and embarrassing sometimes!
K: I know, I do too. One of the Quaker things is inward state and outward action are component parts of a single whole… That’s a Howard Brinton quote, it’s one of my favorites. You can’t bring peace to the world until you bring peace to yourself and this focus on personal individual inner piece as well, and that having an inner piece, just walking through the world in a peaceful state and ripples out to help create peace in the world, and I first thought that was very individualistic and sort of selfish, like you just focus on yourself all the time? How is that helpful? I’ve found that if I’m doing a good job focusing on my spiritual practice and regaining connection to the Source, and then it does help. Becoming a person that is calm in a space can be very helpful, even just the act of being at peace yourself around when people are having a hard time finding that. It’s like I have a hard time finding that. So it seems like for me, it seems like the further I get into activism and the more it’s like, wow, the idea that me working on my own inward state, my own peace being central to my work is absolutely true and needs more specific attention. The further that I get into it, it’s like I need to be spending more time ’cause if I’m going to be a source for calm, then I really do need to be able to continue to connect into that Source. I talk about God as the Source, ’cause I find them to be a well of love that I can pull from to fill my own spirit and find my own light, and then I pull from that source, then hopefully get it out to others. Sort of like a vessel of God’s grace, is old school language for what that is.
J: Yeah, and I think as well, and I’m sure you’ve spoken about this before, that kind of activist burn out thing that can happen. It’s so easy to just run yourself dry trying to desperately to make a difference, and organize things, and go on marches and that actually emotionally… So draining and so exhausting! You need to have that well to dip back into for yourself, not just for other people, because how on earth are you gonna make any kind of difference when you’re just burning out so quickly? I think it’s just super important to have some kind of resource to feed yourself, to nourish yourself as well as… Because you can’t do any good to your community or the people you’re fighting for if you’re totally exhausted and emotionally exhausted. This world, I feel like living in this world right now is emotionally exhausting.
K: Yep. Just every day you wake up and it’s like, Wow, everything is super fucked. Awesome. [laughter]
J: Right? You need something. Or I need something anyway to just keep me grounded and keep me feeling okay and keep me feeling a little bit nourished. I feel like we are plants living in this incredibly hostile terrain currently. For me, God is the rain that comes down and just keeps me going in the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months, however long it takes for that to end.
K: I like that. I think it’s really a shame that burnout has been really normalized in culture. Like, Oh yeah, you’re gonna burn out. That’s just how it is. Everybody burns out. It shouldn’t be that way. We should be working in a way that is sustaining, and in a way that is healthy, and I think that it can be that way. I think it really can be, and I think we need to change the paradigm that being an activist means you’re running yourself into the ground. You know what I mean? I don’t think it needs to be that way. I think one of the nice things about being a Quaker is that sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. You have to take moments… you have to take time to stop. To just stop. To sit in silence. To do nothing, and if you don’t do that… That’s work. The spiritual work, the self-care work, the doing absolutely nothing work of being at peace in yourself is actually activist work. It’s not like a separate piece of it. That is part of being an activist and bringing peace to the world, is in fact taking that time to do self-care, to doing less. A friend of mine just went to a training from the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief folks who are really cool. And one of the things they said is, ‘do less, do better’ was one of their maxims, which I think is brilliant. I’ve been thinking about that one a lot. Do less, do better, ’cause I definitely have been like, I’m gonna be part of five collectives! That’s fine. [laughter] No worries. At one point, last summer, I was like, I was the… I don’t need to list all the shit I was doing …way too much, I was way over doing it, and I burned out. And you know what, it’s the same ripple effect of when you’re at peace, that ripples out. When you are not at peace, it also ripples out and there is like… It’s not just as an individual damaging to yourself, ’cause we’re living within communities, we’re living within… We’re working with other people. If you are burning out, you were damaging, you’re actively damaging other people too, so I think for a lot of us who are really empathetic to think of it in those terms, it’s like it’s not just about your own personal health, it’s about the health of your community, for you to be healthy and working from a place of love and calm and humility.
J: And I think it’s so easy to actually put your mental health second when you’re trying to help other people’s mental health or help other people’s welfare, because it always seems more important. It always seems more important than how you feel on the day or how you’ve been feeling for months. It’s that thing that you said…that will affect other people as well, if you go to a march or something, and you yourself are feeling incredibly emotionally vulnerable, incredibly anxious, paranoid, whatever, you are gonna be bringing those vibes to that march and to… And possibly endangering people, if you’re feeling anxious and paranoid and upset. That could create that kind of feeling and you know how that riles police, you know, anxiety, paranoia, they will take any excuse to attack people. I feel like there should be more of a focus within activist spaces for mental health, looking after your mental health and keeping yourself safe and keeping other people safe, and creating more of a supportive community where it’s not like, ‘who’s done more than who to help these people’, or like, ‘I’ve been on how many matches, how many matches have you been on’? And that kind of thing, and more about How can I support you so that you can do as much as you can for the community or that kind of thing. But it’s hard, it’s really hard, and it’s so easy to put your own emotional well-being last.
K: I think this comes back around to staying humble and believing that lots of people have a lot to bring to the table, and diversity is a good thing, ’cause that means bringing in more people. If you believe that diversity is a good thing, if you really believe to stay humble, that we need help, that means widening out our reach to more community and bringing more people to the table, and that’s also solving the problem of… Could help solve the problem of burnout because more hands make light work, which is another Quaker thing to say, right? Many hands make light work, is that the correct way of saying that? Yeah, exactly. So that’s another Quaker thing, it’s like… That’s true, but that means more vulnerability, that means meeting more people, and so it’s like… And that kind of affects just the basic paradigms of how we organize as anarchists because we are targeted by the state, so there is a level of security risk involved in everything that we do, so it’s like, how do you balance… So then you end up with people feeling like they have to do everything and driving ourselves into the ground because it’s like, well, there’s so much work that needs to be done and we have to do it. Well, we just stay humble, ’cause no, we don’t have to do it, we can teach more people, we can spend more time with education, we can spend more time with training, we can spend more time with community outreach, with recruitment. We need to be focusing on those things too, not just the work, ’cause again, that is the work. Spiritual, inner health, community outreach, training and education, those are all as equally important as actual work, which is like… see?? I even just said that, I just said, actual work. It’s so embedded in our culture.
J: It really is, and I wonder if that is part of a capitalist ideology itself, that idea that the kind of hard grueling emotionally difficult labor is the actual work and then the education, the community care… that’s kind of traditionally coded more feminine anyway, whether that’s less valuable. It’s amazing how it just seeps into everything that idea about masculine work and feminine work, and how one thing is real work and another thing is not real, and part of it is not real because women have been working two jobs for thousands of years, in that they’ve been doing the housework and up the children and organizing the household and all of that, and possibly a paying job as well, and they’re not paid for one of these jobs, so it’s automatically… It’s not valued the same, and female-dominated workforces like education, health care, social care, they’re automatically less valued because they’re paid less. That’s our currency now. That’s what makes the world turn and all of that… Money is the most important thing in capitalism’s eyes. So if someone’s paid less, they’re worth less.
K: We’re only worth our productivity, so like if our self-worth is coming from how much we’re getting done, that is inherently capitalistic. On the other hand, the world is falling apart and there’s a lot of work to do, so it’s hard to say like, I need to take some time off when it’s like, Yeah, but if I take time off, I’m the person doing this important work…
J: Again, we’re still using those ideas. ‘Take time off’, well no because actually that kind of emotional labor that you’re doing for yourself, that’s still labor, that’s still work. And we still think of it as indulgent somehow and not productive. I think it was really interesting… So when I turned 19, I became disabled. And all of a sudden I was like, Oh my God. So I was raised in a very leftist way, learned to be critical of people in power, learned to be critical of follow the money, all of that kind of stuff, but becoming disabled really made me look at capitalism in a totally different way, because all of a sudden I was like, Wow, I’m too sick to work. I’m no longer… I can’t contribute to the state, I can’t contribute to the economy, and therefore the thing that my entire value as a human being is based off of being a commodity to society is nothing, and I’m less than nothing because I’m actually a burden on that society. I need healthcare. I need social benefits. That really shook me, I think, to suddenly be part of a community that was so, I guess hated in some ways by the state because you’re this… You’re this burden, you’re not only unproductive, you’re like anti-productive because you’re taking and you’re not giving anything back. Supposedly.
K: Oh, I feel that so hard as someone who has struggled a lot with chronic mental illness. It can be very hard to hold down a job. At one point when I was on lithium… and the thing about lithium is you need monthly blood draws, you have to get your lithium levels checked monthly because it can break down… Lithium can damage your kidneys pretty badly because it’s a salt, so you have to have monthly blood draws. Also to tackle some mental health problems that are really serious, weekly therapy. And then checking on your medicine and getting your medicines right is a psychiatrist every two weeks. So look at what I’m talking about there. I’m talking about four plus two plus one…that’s seven doctors visits a month, right? When we’re talking about trying to have a shitty 40 hour a week job, and then you’re working within a state structure where I had to try and get all that done within normal work hours, because that’s when the doctors were open… the same time as I was trying to work in a office job, how do you ask for seven times off in a month?
J: It’s impossible, you can’t.
K: You can’t, right? Like you just totally can’t… I never called myself disabled because I feel like not under capitalism, I would be functional, you know? If I didn’t have to have the stress of having to conform to that work schedule because my other skills were not valued by capitalism. I’m an artist. I’ve always kind of felt uncomfortable with the word disabled, but if you look at my life and how I was so severely affected with my ability to hold down a job, or stay in school, or have relationship or whatever, all of these things, it’s like… Yeah, yeah, and it’s like.. I have found that the church has been incredibly helpful to me being able to come to terms with that part of myself. Something that bothers me about this really heavy anti-Christian sentiment is the fact that there’s something inherently ablest in that for me, because Jesus’s message was one of not only accepting or being tolerant of people with mental health problems and people with physical disability or serious health issues, it was one of rising them up, you know what I mean? The person who baptized Jesus was a guy who ran around in a loincloth in the woods eating bugs, and would come into town just to disrupt City Council meetings to yell about trees. That’s who John the Baptist was, and Jesus was like… This guy is the bomb! He’s awesome! [laughter] It’s like… that is such a powerful message. That’s one that I’m not getting from most of society. It’s like mental illness. It’s like you’re broken. You know what I mean? Like there’s something wrong with you. And the church has said, No. If you see things, if you hear voices, if you have a hard time, maybe you have a demon that can be excised, maybe you’re a prophet. Maybe you have something very important to add to the world. So that’s an incredibly powerful message. That’s incredibly powerful, and there’s nowhere in our society that lifts up the differently abled like that does.
J: I think that’s such an interesting point actually, because I’ve never really though of it that way, but you’re right, and I remember so distinctly in my first Quaker meeting we all sat around, we were all silent. I came out of this spiritual experience and everyone started having tea and coffee, and one of the first things that someone turned to me and said was, Oh, so you’re new… Hi, what’s your name? What do you do? And that question, as I’m sure you’ll know, you just dread it if you don’t have a job. Because you think God… Now, I have to reveal this fact that I’m this horrible burden on all of you taxpayers or whatever, and I said, Oh, you know, I, I’m ill… I’m sick, I’m disabled, I’m not working. And she just looked at me and she said, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I was like, Oh my God! I felt so affirmed. And it was such a simple thing to say. But she just looked at me and she said, And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
K: I’m tearing up right now, ’cause I had such a powerful experience similarly in the Quakers, ’cause it’s like… yeah, I was pretty out of whack when I found Quakerdom and the people were so accepting. One of the things that people seem to wanna do a lot is to fix it. They wanna help fix you… You know what I mean? And just give advice, or like, I don’t know, whatever… But Quakers, they just listened. They just existed in space with me and let me exist as who I was at that moment, and it was incredibly refreshing. I’ve never had someone just sit… other than a therapist, and a therapist is being paid to be there. And so to just sit and be with you and be like… Yeah, it does suck. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any answers. You know what I mean? It’s a seeking faith. It’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know, but it’s not like.. ‘I can’t help you! I’m so desperate, I’m scared, I don’t know how to fix you… I don’t know how to fix it…’ Quakers were just like… I don’t know, it sucks. [laughter] And it was lovely. It was so great. I really, really love that. Powerful.
J: I think that is part of the inherent Quaker culture of listening rather than speaking. That listening comes first, and actually none of us really know anything, so it helps sometimes to zip it and to listen and to take time to just be. And I think that I definitely relate to your experience of just feeling held. Just feeling held in the Quaker community and people allowing me to be who I was without trying to say, Oh, you know, Have you tried yoga or… my friend’s brother’ dog’s sister’s aunt went on this special diet and then they were cured! And you’re like, Well, okay…[laughter]
K: Eat more kale, you’ll be fine! You just need some sunshine! Yeah, sunshine doesn’t cure bipolar disorder, thanks though. [laughter] I love that language. I think the language we use is really telling and really important, ’cause I would say, ‘I’ll pray for you’, that means I’m gonna ask a higher authority to fix you, but ‘I’m gonna hold you in the light’, that just means exactly as it sounds, I’m just gonna hold you in a beautiful place and be humble and hope that… And that’s it. No anything else. I’m just gonna hold you in the light. That’s a beautiful thing to say and to feel that isn’t… There’s no pressure… there’s no disappointment in that, ’cause if you pray and then nothing happens, that’s so sad, but you can’t be disappointed by somebody just wanting to hold you and love you and give you light.
J: Yeah, and it’s so fundamentally loving. You’re right about the idea of prayer sometimes being like, I’m gonna fix you, and you see this a little with… So Stephen Hawking’s death recently and the coverage with that in terms of people have been like, Oh he’s finally free of his wheelchair, he can go to heaven free of his disability! And you’re like, Oh fucking God.
K: Shut your face. Shut your tweeter face. [laughter]
J: Problematic. Awful. You just think… he doesn’t need to be free of his wheelchair because wheelchairs are freeing. Wheelchairs are freedom. As someone who is a wheelchair user I can attest to the fact that my wheelchair gives me so much freedom. It’s opened so many doors! Yeah, it stops me from doing stuff, but that’s not the wheelchair, that’s the way that society is designed.
K: Exactly, exactly. So I look at these older societies and Christian societies and how being differently, being mentally different, having that neurodiversity isn’t seen as… it’s just a different… You’re just different, you know what I mean? The whole idea of the Holy Fool, Juniper and St. Francis who are just these like.. the idea of being simple, even being tied to like, Well, you’re stupid, it’s like, No, you’re simple, you’re just like, You’re the Taoist uncarved block. Talking about people who are maybe on the autistic spectrum or something. It’s like, you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just a different type of person that has lots of different things to say. I should explain what I meant by Juniper. Juniper was a Holy Fool that lived with St. Francis of Assisi. From the stories I would assume that… it sounds to me like he’s probably somebody who’s on what we would call the autistic spectrum, he was just incredibly honest and it was incredibly freeing, and he was a lovely, lovely, wonderful person, and they never talked to… it was just like it just… And obviously, this is not entirely true, I’m cherry-picking the parts that make me feel better. There’s obviously been horrible things done to people with disabilities and mental differences throughout history, but I’m just comparing some of the stories that I’ve heard from those versus where I’m living at right now where my life is like… I can’t let… there’s not a convent or something, maybe there is… Just go and like, but without being totally… I don’t know… I’m babbling, I just… I don’t know, Do you kind of see what I’m getting at though? There feels like there’s a place for it in the church, that there’s not necessarily… especially under capitalism and the way that our state is structured.
J: Yeah, and I think you’re definitely encouraged to feel if you have a disability, whether that’s a kind of mental illness or not, and I think I would count mental illness as disability, especially if it impacts your life and impacts your job and your relationships and all of those other things… You’re not seen as part of society, you’ve seen as this drain, and what I really got a lot of strength from was discovering about the social model of disability, and I don’t know if you use it in the States as much, but the social model says if you’re disabled or mentally ill, I am disabled by my environment because it was not appropriately designed to enable me to do things rather than…
K: No, I haven’t really heard that. I like that.
J: Yeah, so the medical model puts the emphasis on the impairment being the thing that stops you from doing things, and the social model says, culture and the inaccessible environment is responsible for my inability to do things. I can’t climb up a flight of stairs, but that’s the stairs fall, not mine. There should be a fucking lift. [laughter] Or, you can’t hold down a 40-hour job maybe sometimes, not because of your mental health, it’s because there’s no job that allows you to do that and look after yourself, and that’s an empowering thing, that’s an empowering thing to learn to put that responsibility back on to the environment, to the state, to the culture, and it’s the reason that stops you from doing stuff.
K: That’s changeable without shame.
J:Right!
K: You can change that. I like that. Well, we’re at an hour. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?
J: No, I think we covered quite a lot!
K: Actually, yeah. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on! It’s been lovely to talk to you.
J: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
K: Okay, cool. Yay! That was lovely. I think that was a beautiful conversation, I don’t even know that… I don’t even know that you were disabled, that was such a lovely thing to talk about with somebody… You know, that was perfect.
J: Yeah, I’m actually, I’m pretty lucky that my disability is mostly invisible until you see a big wheelchair and then you’re like, Oh..
K: I mean same, my mental health problems are invisible…
J: Right. Exactly, exactly.
K: Except their not. But they are.
J: It’s really similar. But yeah, yeah, no, it was really lovely to come on and talk to you. I love the podcast, so much!
K: Thank you! I love yours too.
J: I really wanna bring it to Britain. I feel like some of the Quakers here could do with some radicalizing and also just in general, it’s so great to make connections and meet new people and stuff. So it’s really, really great. And I really appreciate everything that you do. Because I know that it’s fucking hard work to put a podcast together!
K: Yeah! Wow, yeah. That’s one of the things I was doing when I was talking about working too hard, as I was doing this every week by myself, and it’s like that… And you’re doing weekly, right? Or no, you’re doing…I don’t know.
J: We’re doing monthly and that’s enough work!
K: So I’m doing every two weeks now ’cause I had that mental breakdown, I was like, maybe I should do this not every week, ’cause I’m also doing 5000 other things. Terrible idea. So I’m gonna actually… I got invited to be on the interview with Hye Sung with the Magnificast that we’re recording tomorrow, so instead of this weekend, I’m gonna play this podcast episode in the two weeks later.
J: So you’ve got something in the bank, that’s really nice. Good feeling.
K: Yeah, cool. And maybe ’cause it was sort of generic… we didn’t talk about current events at all or anything, then I might keep it in the bank for if I’m having a hard time and can’t get it together, some week.
J: Oh definitely, absolutely. Release it… use it as your mental health week episode.
K: Perfect, that makes perfect sense.
J: Right, exactly.
K: Alright, thank you, my dear. Alright. Well, hopefully we’ll talk again soon.
J: Thanks for having me!
