TO RSVP: Send me a message and tell me which event(s) you will be attending.
I took a break from facilitating conversation series in June (April was a series of conversations about shared and divergent values in relationships with cis men, and May was a series of conversations about parenting during the pandemic), but I’m back for July with a series on the topic of competition and comparison!
This conversation series is a response to a few conversations I’ve had with other folks about feeling burdened and overwhelmed by comparison – by the constant invitation offered by social media and by cultural norms to compare ourselves constantly to each other and to ideas about what we “should” be doing, what we “should” have accomplished.
Both comparison and competition create a hierarchy, winners and losers, some folks doing better, some folks doing worse.
I don’t love competition. (At all.) It makes me super uncomfortable. It’s important to acknowledge that, because I’m not an unbiased facilitator in these conversations.
However, I recognize that comparison and competition are complex and nuanced topics, and that even in my own life there have been times when comparison helped me get closer to my preferred self, and when competition felt playful and enlivening.
Part of my preparation for this series of conversations has been crafting narrative questions that don’t assume competition and comparison are always problems, and that invite participants to talk about these experiences in rich and meaningful ways, so that we can come out of the conversations feeling strengthened and more connected to our values and our sense of agency.
This conversation series will focus on how we have experienced, and also how we have responded to competition and comparison in our lives in a few different areas.
There will be three scheduled chats. I’m capping attendance at 10 participants per chat, and I will only run each chat if I have at least 3 confirmed attendees.
To RSVP, send me a message and I’ll send you the link(s) for the topics you’re interested in.
July 2, 5:30-7 pm mountain time – Competition and Comparison in Parenting
In this conversation, we’ll talk about:
– how competition shows up in our parenting lives, including our kids participation in competitive games and sports, and competition within our families
– how comparison shows up in our parenting lives, including comparing our kids’ development to normative developmental timelines, comparing ourselves to other parents, comparing ourselves to the norms and expectations placed on parents, and comparing ourselves to our own parents
– the effects of competition and comparison on our experiences of ourselves as parents, and how we witness competition and comparison impacting our kids – what these discourses make possible, and what they make more difficult, and how we might take a stand in relation to ideas of competition and comparison
July 9, 5:30-7 pm mountain time – Competition and Comparison at Work
This conversation will be about work, and about how capitalism and norms of productivity invite us into both competition and comparison, and how we respond to these invitations. We’ll talk about:
– how competition shows up at work, including competing for resources with our coworkers, competitive workplaces, and what it even means to “be competitive”
– how comparison shows up at work, including comparing ourselves with colleagues, comparing ourselves to the idea of having a “dream job”, and comparing our working lives with the hopes we had for ourselves when we were younger
– the effects of competition and comparison on our experiences of ourselves at work – what these discourses make possible, and what they make more difficult, and how we might take a stand in relation to ideas of competition and comparison
July 16, 5:30-7 pm mountain time – Personal Histories of Competition and Comparison
This chat is all about how we witnessed and experienced competition and comparison in our early childhood homes and communities, how competition and comparison are framed within our cultures, and our own personal experiences with competition and comparison that may be shaping how we experience them now.
THE SUPERPOWERS o The Superpower of Community (and community care) o The Superpower of Showing Up o Resilience o Endurance o Dialectics as a Superpower (holding multiple true stories) o Empathy and Compassion o The Superpower of Quick Turnaround of Emotions o The Superpower of Being Able to Get Out of a Bad Situation o The Ability to ‘Chameleon’
From the document:
This document follows a conversation, facilitated by Osden Nault and Tiffany Sostar, whose goal was to center the voices of folks who identify with BPD (either diagnosed by a professional or self-claimed), and to shift the dominant narrative about Borderline Personality Disorder. This document includes quotes from participants as well as quotes from BPD folks who were not at the event itself.
This event was the result of both Osden and Tiffany noting the lack of BPD voices in the resources available about, and especially for, the BPD community. So much of what is available includes harmful stories about what kind of people have BPD, and how difficult and even dangerous it is to be in relationship with them. These stories obscure the complex lived experiences of BPD individuals who have valuable insider knowledges into how to navigate big emotions and the ongoing effects of complex trauma.
Because we live in such a complex, overwhelming, and traumatizing social context, we hope that this resource might also provide help and insight for folks who do not identify with BPD but who have experienced complex trauma or are living with overwhelming Feels.
We also hope that this resource will help folks who are facing the injustice of inaccessible mental health supports. We recognize that the BPD community faces intense stigma and is also significantly underserved by medical and mental health professionals. If you have found this resource because you haven’t found anything else, we hope that it helps. You are valid, your experiences are valid, and no matter how much you may struggle with your big feelings at times, we know that you also have skills, strategies, superpowers.
There’s so much more that we could have put into this document, and we hope to continue this work both within the BPD Superpowers group and through engagement with other folks who identify with borderline personality disorder (either through self-identification or through a formal diagnosis). Maybe there will even be a book!
For now, here’s what you’ll find in this 43-page PDF.
A note on this moment
Making space for borderline wisdom
Borderline Stories
Deconstructing the Discourse of Borderline Personality Disorder
Experiencing BPD by Osden Nault
Navigating systems
Getting better?
BPD and the Mythology of “Letting Go” by Kay Fidler
Borderline Communities
Empathy on the Borderline
Borderline Chameleons & Identity Flags
A Strategy from Narrative Therapy: Escaping from Normal
Acknowledging the political climate in which we are releasing this work and the intersections of oppression and mental illness / neurodivergence.
At this moment, Black people in the USA and marginalized groups worldwide are mobilizing against white supremacist, racist, and anti-Black violent systemic oppression. We are unequivocally in support of this ongoing struggle for more just futures. In releasing this document at this time, we wish to acknowledge the compounded effects of anti-Black racism, white supremacy, colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and many more forms of violent oppression and marginalization on individual mental health and neurotypes.
An Indigenous participant has shared:
One of the first definitions of BPD I saw described it as resulting from a “genetic predisposition” and trauma. I immediately thought about my own family’s intergenerational trauma. At a point in time when we know ancestral trauma affects us to a genetic level, I wondered how the history of colonial violence plays a role in my present day neurodivergent experience.
We see the effects of violent oppression on physical and mental health, spanning generations and present today. In what Angela Davis has referred to as a “very exciting moment,” and about which she says, “I don’t know if we have ever experienced this kind of a global challenge to racism and to the consequences of slavery and colonialism,”[1] we acknowledge that there is a great deal of ongoing work and healing to be done. We release this collective document with free access and the hope that it will aid in the future and ongoing well being of oppressed individuals and communities.
With love and solidarity, The BPD Superpowers group
This will be another incomplete, last minute, hastily written letter. Still shiny, I would like to think, but shiny like the rainbow slick on a puddle – a brief glimmer in a storm.And wow, are we in a storm.
The Shiny! Speculative Writing Group will be meeting tomorrow, June 7, from 4-6 pm mountain time. Email me for the link.
There is never a cost to attend the Shiny! writing group, but I would like to invite any participants at tomorrow’s event to make a donation of whatever amount you feel the writing group is worth towards supporting a Black creative, or towards one of the organizations supporting protesters right now.
I recognize that this group includes a lot of folks who are living with financial precarity, made worse for the folks in Alberta by the UCP attacking AISH. If making a donation is not possible, I would invite us each to find some other way of offering support. Supporting the work of standing against anti-Blackness and police violence is so necessary. Being part of that work is so necessary.
I would also like to invite the non-Black members of this group to engage meaningfully with the work of Black writers this month. Not just the critical and necessary non-fiction writing about this current political moment, but also the writing of Black romance writers, humour writers, and, of course, speculative fiction writers. Check out the Spring book list at Well Read Black Girl for some ideas.
Have you heard about the Heavy Hitters Poetry Festival? Sonya Renee Taylor, author of The Body is Not An Apology, is performing on June 9th! You can get tickets here – https://awfulgoodwriters.com/
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose short story Evidence is featured in An Unexpected Light, and was the very first prompt we used in this group, has a book called M: Archive that follows that trajectory and imagines Black ongoingness after a worldwide cataclysm. Relevant! https://www.alexispauline.com/
We are collectively witnessing a phenomenal volume of Black pain in the news, and it is so critical that we do witness this, that we see it, recognize it, understand that it is not ‘shocking’ or new. That we recognize how anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence are two strong threads in the rope of capitalist colonialism, and that we work to fray and unravel and dismantle that rope.
But we also have to recognize, and have to actively seek out, the other stories. Black lives matter all the time, not just when they are suffering. Black joy matters. Black imagination matters. If you are invested in supporting a movement for change, I really believe that you must also be invested in seeking out more than just the trauma.
(I also want to acknowledge the sheer volume of Indigenous pain that is also present and being made visible at this time, and invite us collectively to bring the same care and intention to how we witness and respond to this. For a wide range of book recommendations that include both Black and Indigenous writers, along with many others writers of colour, try this list from Art For Ourselves – http://www.artforourselves.org/reviews/read-bipoc-a-list-of-books-by-black-indigenous-andor-people-of-color-writers )
So, you may have guessed that tomorrow’s writing group will focus on what is happening politically right now.
It’s going to be a bit of a different session, more reflective writing than fantastical writing, though I think that reflection can also be speculative in nature. At its best, reflective writing invites us to speculate about our own preferred selves and lives, and can be incredibly future-enabling work.
My goal in writing these prompts was to find ways that we could engage as a group with what is happening culturally and politically in ways that generate and sustain hope without turning away from pain and struggle, and in ways that invite a variety of voices without appropriating stories or experiences that are not our own.
I wanted to invite us to step more meaningfully into our own story, rather than taking the too-frequent path of stepping into the story of someone who is marginalized in ways we are not. I didn’t want to set us up to “imagine what it’s like for someone facing this injustice” because, although I think it is absolutely critical that we read the first hand accounts of people who are facing hardship, and we believe them, that is different than trying to speak in their voices.
It is sometimes easier to imagine ourselves into a life that seems like it is harder than our own, easier to cast ourselves out into that other voice and experience, than to really sit with our own experience, and with the ways in which our own lives are entangled in systems of oppression and harm, the ways in which our own stories are shaped and constrained by colonialism and capitalism, the ways in which we have been invited to be complicit and the values we hold that do not align with these systems of harm. I hope that this event can help us polish off some of those shiny values.
So these prompts are meant to invite reflection on our own experience of this time, on the stories we are being told of this time, and what we can contribute at this time.
My hope is that this event tomorrow will leave participants feeling that their critical eye on the stories we’re being shared has been sharpened, and that their hope for the future and energy to take action in support of justice have been strengthened.
Here are our writing prompts for tomorrow:
What is the story of this time, right now?
This may not seem like a speculative writing prompt, but “the story” of any time is always an act of imagination. There is no single true story of any event. In this prompt, I want to invite us to consider what we are being told about the nature of this current political and cultural moment. Who is telling us this story? What is being valued in this story? Who does this story serve? Does this story align with our own experience or understanding of this time? What is the story we are telling of this time? What is the story we want to tell?
What is the story of this time, 50 years from now?
This is a more directly speculative prompt. What is the mythology of 2020 that evolves over the next half century? How do you imagine the grandchildren of this generation will speak about this time?
What is being asked of you at this time?
This is an invitation to use our speculative writing powers to imagine what we might have to offer, and what might be asked of us or needed from us at this time. What do we have to offer? What do we wish we had to offer?
If you plan to attend tomorrow, please let me know! If there are less than four confirmed attendees, I will be cancelling the event.
Recent Comments