I Was Wrong(ed)! Welcoming the New Year with Failure
All the Times I've Been Wrong(ed)
Happy New Year, my friends!
We made it! Even if it feels like just barely.
I hope you’ve had a restful holiday break with some quiet moments to reflect on the year that was and to refocus on what you’d like to bring into 2022. We’re living in strange times and I hope you are finding ways to stay grounded, stay sane, and stay hopeful.
I won’t wax poetic too much about the new year and all the promise of new beginnings that it may bring. Instead, I actually want to talk about something we usually shy away from – in the new year and at all times, really.
I want to talk to you about failure, about mistakes, about being wrong.
Over the last decade, I have had the greatest and deepest education of my life. These were not the years I spent learning in Canada’s formal public education system or even my post-secondary academic experience. No, the greatest and deepest education of my life has been self-directed with the guidance of many incredible grassroots educators, activists, and everyday people across different intersections of identity whose lived experiences are not currently acknowledged or deemed “legitimate” or worthy by our existing colonial educational institutions.
The movements of the last decade—Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, Mauna Kea, the Climate Strike, among many, many others — have given me a vocabulary I did not have growing up, that many of us did not have growing up. The #MeToo reckoning and the Black Lives Matter movement, most especially, forced me to reassess so many instances in my life that have always stayed with me for reasons I could not, at the time, understand or vocalize.
These are times that I have been wrong or that I myself have been wronged.
I want to hold space for these precious and painful moments that have been so fundamental in shaping who I am today. That’s why I’m starting a new blog dedicated to looking back at what I once thought and what I now know, and to try to bridge the gap between these two moments in my life. I’m creating this space as a way to move beyond the discomfort of failure in our conversations around social justice and anti-oppression and instead, normalize failure in our discourse. I’m writing these stories as a way to hold tenderness and compassion for an older version of myself who did not know better, but who knows now and is still continuing to learn and unlearn.
A good friend of mine and an activist I admire, Ariel Goldberg, once said to me, “none of us are born woke.” That statement has always stayed with me. We were all born into and grew up within systems of oppression that have shaped our thinking and behaviour so deeply we barely recognize it when we ourselves are complicit in and/or perpetuating the oppression of various marginalized groups.
The truth is that these tools of oppression live inside all of us and we all exist within its systems. And we have been wrong and been wronged many times before and will continue to be wrong(ed) many times more in the future.
But the point isn’t to deny, hide, or reject these wrongs, these mistakes, and these failures. The point is to learn from them.
It seems like such a cliché to “learn from our mistakes,” but somehow in the context of social justice and anti-oppression, we’ve forgotten about this most basic life lesson. We have become so concerned with perfection, with our own egos, and the fallacy of how “good” and “decent” we are, that we’ve forgotten what we teach our own children: That mistakes happen. That we can learn from them. That we can and simply must do better next time.
As a new friend of mine, Dr. Anu Taranath, writes:
If we ignore history or history’s impact on our present identities and imagine that we are individuals freed from the past, we simply replay a colonial gesture. If, by contrast, we share our experiences of how the connections between past and present affect [us] and how we are situated within systems of opportunity and adversity, we begin to reflect a decolonizing stance.” — Dr. Anu Taranath, Beyond Guild Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World.
I always say that the problem with our society today is that we have such a low tolerance and capacity for complexity, for nuance. We want simple. We hold fast to binaries and absolutes. We find it so difficult, so impossible to hold two truths at once.
You are either right or wrong, and there is no in-between. And there is certainly no coming back from a mistake. As a result, we have become so terrified of sitting with the discomfort of our mistakes and work so hard to bury them instead of learning from them.
That’s not the world I want to live in. That world has no room for growth, for transformative justice, for healing. That is the world built by colonizers, and I have no interest in that world.
This space is my decolonizing space. A space where I hope to share all the times that I have been wrong and have been wronged. A space where I can analyze that failure, address what I still don’t know, and work towards charting a better way forward. A space where I can figure out what that word “decolonizing” means and looks like in practice.
I’ll probably be wrong along the way. And that’s ok. I welcome the opportunity to learn from these mistakes so that I can do and be better. Hopefully, you’ll welcome those critical opportunities in your life too.
So here we go, let’s get to work…
In solidarity,
Justine
What’s happening in my world:
The Living Hyphen podcast was selected to be an opening act for this year’s Hot Doc’s Podcast Festival! We’ll be opening for Telling Hidden Stories, a conversation between two of our favourite podcasts Invisibilia and Resistance. How cool is that?! Take a look at the festival line-up here.
Want to continuing digging into your anti-racism work with me? I’m facilitating a virtual anti-racism writing course in February called Distances Within & Between Us through Living Hyphen. This four-week course aims to be a brave and reflective space where we can turn inwards to decolonize our minds, while also working towards actively disrupting systems of oppression. We’ll examine the complexities of our identities and how that impacts how we move through the world through writing prompts, storytelling exercises, and critical but caring conversations. I’d love for you to join me! Use the promo code 3DR for 15% off when you register here or share it with someone who you think might be interested!
If you or anyone you know is interested in starting or rejuvenating their writing practice, Living Hyphen is facilitating a number of writing workshops for racialized writers this winter season to dig deep into questions of home, identity, and belonging. Learn more and please share widely!
Looking for some new books to take you into the new year? I read some real gems in 2021 and would love to share it with you! Take a peek at my reading list here.
I’ve been sourcing a lot of inspiration lately from the gorgeous artwork of Angelica Frausto of @nerdybrowngirl. Check out and support her work here.