The Effects of Young People’s Oppression on a Wide World Changer
I was raised in a Catholic working-class immigrant family in Canada. I was the eldest daughter of three. From an early age I was supposed to be a role model for my younger siblings and my parents’ helper in a foreign language [English]. I was supposed to work hard to make my parents proud and fulfill their dream of “a better life.” My life was about duty, obligation, and “being good.” I did my best to please my parents. There was no place for me or what I wanted in my life.
I was always told, “Be good! Be good!” That message started in my family and was heavily reinforced at school, in church, by cultural conditioning dating back many generations, and in capitalist mainstream society.
As a young person, “being good” meant the following:
- Be obedient. Do what you’re told. Do not think for yourself. Your thinking cannot be trusted. You don’t know enough.
- Be silent. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t bring attention to yourself. Do not ask for what you need. Do not ask for help. Do not question or challenge authority. You will risk getting into trouble and inviting more problems.
- Follow the rules and fit in. Do not question the rules even if they don’t make sense. Do not try to change the rules because that would be hopeless. You are powerless to do anything.
- Be liked by pleasing the people around you. Do what others expect of you—even if it means compromising or giving up on your values or who you are.
- Work hard and work some more! Be useful and achieve measurable results quickly and efficiently, even if it means forcing yourself to go beyond your physical limits. You must give more than a hundred percent effort in everything you do. The work is more important than anything else, including your health and mental and spiritual well-being. There is no room to make mistakes.
As a wide world changer
As wide world changers, what does it mean to be “good” in an oppressive society? What does it mean to be “good” when we are trying to transform society on a systems level? It can put many of us up against our early conditioning and what it meant to be good in our parents’ eyes.
To be a wide world changer, I must do the things I was told not to do as a young person. It is a hundred-and-eighty-degree turning upside down of unquestioned assumptions that have underlain everything I’ve done. As a world changer, I need to do the following:
- Trust my thinking
- Speak up
- Ask for help
- Take charge
- Organize with others to make change
- Have integrity, courage, and compassion
- Try things I’ve never done before
- Take on things I was never good at
- Risk making mistakes, failing, not being liked, upsetting people, and making messes
- Have balance in my life (do the work but also take breaks and have fun!)
- Relax and be myself; know that I matter and that I’m enough
In other words, to be a world changer I had to give up being the “good” child. That felt dangerous! Not being (or not being perceived as) good was risking being misunderstood, isolated, humiliated, criticized, or attacked. But that was the discharge work! When I’d been functioning inside the chronic distress of having to be “good,” I’d been driven by an irrational need to prove my goodness and competence, to be hypervigilant and defensive. I’d been desperately trying to make this other person like me, in the same way that I’d tried to please my parents. That had actually made things worse because I couldn’t relax and just be myself. And being fully myself is the most powerful way to be as a world changer!
I remember the first time I read Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.” I instantly sobbed in the store aisle when I read the first line: “You do not have to be good.” No one had ever told me that. It felt like a valve had been released from a pressure cooker that had reached its limit.
My direction has been to remember the reality of my goodness as my inherent birth right. That has allowed me to embrace being labelled a “troublemaker” by some people sometimes. The fact is, not everyone will like me or agree with me all the time, and that’s okay. My goodness is not on trial. I refuse to be confused by other people’s confusions and irrationalities. In order to check my own confusions, I put everything under the light of discharge. My activism with my close supporters helps me remember who I am. Life doesn’t have to be hard. We can actually feel more alive by taking on big challenges!
How have your experiences as a young person affected your wide world change work? What have you had to discharge to start, or to keep going?
Brampton, Ontario, Canada
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 201, October 2020)