I’m revising The Light Returning for 2023, with brand new prompts, and in a new format on Thinkific.
This online course runs for the last ten days of the calendar year, and is meant to invite participants to reflect on and share their 2023 stories. The good ones and the bad ones, the soft and the hard ones. My hope is that this course will help weave a more complicated, nuanced, richly described tapestry of the year, one that we can look back on and find ourselves in, not as passive recipients of collective trauma but as people with hopes for ourselves and our communities, with skills to navigate hard times, and with agency.
If you participated in this course in 2020 or 2021, you know it is pretty low-key – there’s an optional virtual ‘opening ceremony’ on December 20, and an equally optional ‘closing ceremony’ at the end of the course. In the past, this course has been email-based, and participants received an email every morning. This year, I’m hosting it through Thinkific, and you’ll have access to all of the prompts when the content becomes available on December 21. You’ll maintain access to the content indefinitely, so you can work through it at whatever pace works for you.
We’ll have our own Discord server (available to participants) and I’ll be active in there throughout the course, so even though I won’t be in your inbox like I have been in previous years, I’ll still be around and reachable!
From the welcome section:
One goal of this course is to give participants a way to feel connected to community over a holiday season that, for some of us, can include tension, disconnection, and a feeling of alienation. This stretch of time between the solstice and the calendar year turning over can be a hard one. There are a lot of expectations, a lot of dominant discourses about family and what it means. There can be expectations about availability for in-person, indoor events that may exclude those of us who are still covid cautious. Some of us re-enter (by choice or not) a ‘closet’ during this season for our own safety or because our whole selves are not welcome. Some of us experience significant harm and hardship during this season. Even for those of us who are not experiencing distance from family for political and practical or pandemical reasons, this can be a hard season. Grief hits harder when the world is telling you you’re supposed to be celebrating. This course is meant to provide a counterweight to the heavy drag of those expectations and contexts.
Another goal of this course is to explicitly name collective grief, climate crisis, and colonial violence as core parts of 2023. This is important to me because 2023 has not just been about individual struggle, but it has felt increasingly individualized. How can we bring a sense of collectivity into our 2023 stories?
A third goal of this course is to not only welcome the light back, but to actively turn towards the light – to be phototropic [1] in our own lives.
In this third goal, we don’t just “focus on the positive” to the exclusion of naming and honouring what has hurt, what has been unjust, what has been unbearable. But I do want to suggest that how we tell our stories influences how possible it feels to live our lives.
My hope for us is that we can begin to uncover and give language to the legacies of action we have joined in this last year, the contributions we have made to the lives of others, the care and connections that have kept us tethered to our hopes, our dreams, our lives.
In turning toward the light, I also want to invite course participants to stand against the stories that so many of us have been told about ourselves that do not offer a sense of possibility or hope. I want us to wrestle those stories back from the racist, ableist, cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism that has attempted to steal them from us.
These are our stories.
They are so much more rich and complex than the thin stories handed to us by people who do not value our lives.
[1] Phototropism is the response of a plant or other organism to light, most often seen in plants turning towards the source of light in order to sustain themselves. I love this metaphor for so many reasons, and in my own life it has been helpful to think of all the many times I have turned toward the light in order to sustain myself – holding onto my values as a source of light, holding onto my hopes as a source of light, reaching out to my community (sometimes only in my own thoughts, but still turning towards them). Like that meme says, “you’re basically a houseplant with complicated emotions” – I find this so heartening.
Years ago, Lindsey brought up how hard it is to read about their own experiences in the stigmatizing and pathologizing language that the DSM provides. Lindsey experiences ‘dermatillomania’ or ‘skin picking’, and there is very little kind or dignifying information available about this experience. We wondered if we could create something better. It took a while to get this ball rolling, but here we are, and we want to invite anyone with shared experience of this or ‘trichotillomania’ / ‘hair pulling’ to join us in this project.
Light writing on a dark green background says “Community conversation about dermatillomania / skin picking & trichotillomania / hair pulling. June 24, 2023 | 1-2:30 pm MST | Zoom. Facilitated by Tiffany Sostar and Lindsey Boyes” Below, inside a purple staticky circle, says, “Troubling the boundary between the self and the world”
On June 24, 2023, we will be hosting an initial community conversation for people who experience skin picking / ‘dermatillomania’ or hair pulling / ‘trichotillomania’ and who want to talk about these experiences in ways that name and challenge stigma and that expand beyond the pathologizing and limited definitions of the DSM.
The reason we want to host this conversation and create a collective document that takes this conversation forward is that the stigma associated with these experiences is intense, and the language used to describe people who have these experiences is often demeaning and pathologizing. There is little meaningful awareness about these experiences, and because skin and hair are often so visible, people can face judgement and intrusive questions from many directions. These experiences can also be difficult to discuss because of the (valid!) fear of judgement and the shame that can accumulate after years of experiencing the effects of stigma and lack of awareness.
We hope that this conversation will create a space to share community stories in an honouring and dignifying way – to reclaim some ‘storytelling rights’ from the overwhelming power of silence and stigma. That this conversation will be an act of resistance and care.
“Resistance is an everyday act. The work of excavating every tiny artifact of the oppressor that lives in you. Your call to be a balm to every self-inflicted wound is the way movements are birthed.”
We also hope that this conversation will result in a collective document that can be shared, that can be a balm that comes from the insider knowledge of community members who know that this experience is more than just pathology, and who know how to respond in skillful and meaningful ways.
This conversation will be facilitated by myself and Lindsey. We invite any community members who have lived experience to join us. The conversation will be recorded and transcribed, but the recording and transcription will not be shared publicly. Participants will be able to choose how (and if) their contributions are included in the final collective document, and how (and if) they are credited by name, by pseudonym, or anonymously.
February can be a hard month for folks who have had a romantic relationship end.
The Next Chapter is a four-week narrative therapy group designed for folks who are figuring out what comes next after a major relationship upheaval.
Space is limited to 6 participants, and all meetings will be held on Zoom, Saturdays from 10:30-12 pm Mountain Time. This is a queer, trans, disability, and polyamory welcoming group.
The cost is $160 ($40 per 90-minute session). Register by email.
Week 1 – Introduction: Where we are and how we got here. This week will include introducing ourselves, getting to know each other, and talking about our ideas of self and relationship – what it means to be a good or successful person and how our experiences in relationships, including when relationships end, influence how we experience ourselves.
Week 2 – Character study: Who we are and what matters to us This week we will be talking about what matters to us in relationships, and what it is about ourselves that we value, what might have become obscured or not seen in the relationship that has ended, what we want the people around us to see and know about us.
Week 3 – Plot points: Mapping our way forward after a relationship ends This week will be a mapping exercise! We’ll use the ‘migration of identity’ narrative therapy practice to figure out where we want to go next.
Week 4 – Conclusion: Skills we’re taking into our next chapter In addition to naming the skills and hopes we’re taking forward, this week will include an opportunity to reflect back to each other what is moving and meaningful in the stories we’ve learned about each other (in narrative therapy terms, a definitional ceremony).
The conversation on December 11 was so lovely. It felt good to be in community, speaking about how we try to take care of trans and non-binary people in our lives (for many of us, that includes our own selves).
One participant wrote afterward and said, “it was the most generative convo I have had in such a while and felt so good to be apart of <3!!”
I received the transcript back from Shara (they are always such an important part of this work!) and have started pulling out themes and quotes to get started on the collective document.
The thing I’ve been thinking about most often since is how important relationships are in this work:
Our relationships with ourselves (our own experience of gender, our own learning and unlearning of gender expectations and the gender binary, our own safety as we decide whether to speak up or not in various contexts)
Our relationships with trans and non-binary community (our families, our partners, our friends, our communities, the people we don’t know but with whom we still want to be in solidarity, the safety of those people as we decide whether to speak up or not in various contexts and how we choose to speak when we do, the legacy of trans and non-binary advocacy we join when we act in solidarity)
Our relationships with people who may be acting in alignment with gender essentialism, cisnormativity, or even transphobia (these may also be our families, our partners, our friends and communities!)
And even our relationships with ideas and ideals, values and hopes, curiosities and possibilities.
The original topic was “how we avoid misgendering others”, and I had imagined a conversation about how we’ve unlearned our own cisnormative habits and the skills and strategies we’ve developed for our own internal relationship with gender and gendering. I’d like to talk more about that, still, but in the conversation on the 11th we ended up speaking more about how we respond when we witness misgendering, which is a related (but also very different) thing.
We talked quite a bit about the barriers that get in the way of acting in solidarity, and part of this conversation was bringing some nuance to the idea of what ‘acting in solidarity’ can mean. It is not a binary or a single correct answer – there are always a variety of actions available, and when we determine which action we take, there are many relevant factors. We are always responding based on our position in the specific context, which means thinking about things like – are we the person being misgendered, or are we witnessing someone else being misgendered? what is our relationship with the person engaged in misgendering? what do we know of their values and hopes – if they are someone who cares about not misgendering, then correcting them is almost always the right call, but if they are someone who will become angry, we have to consider what the fall-out or backlash will be, and whether that will compromise our or someone else’s safety. In those instances, other actions, like texting to check in with someone, or finding something affirming to do later, might be the better option. These can be uncomfortable calculations, because it can feel like failure, and I hope that one generative outcome of this work is that we find ways to speak about our desires to be in solidarity and to avoid misgendering and to respond to misgendering with compassion and rigor.
I’m going to get started on the collective document soon, and will be sharing the draft here.
If you would like to contribute, there are many ways you can do this!
I’ve created a little google form for people to contribute asynchronously. You can find that here.
We’re also going to have a follow-up conversation in January, and I’ll share that date once it’s set.
You can also email your thoughts to me, or comment here.
The questions in the form are:
Is there a particular person you are making this effort on behalf of?
What’s important about getting people’s pronouns, names, and gender right?
How did you learn to care about avoiding misgendering?
Who knows that you care about this? (Sometimes we can feel isolated in our efforts, and one goal of this project is to make visible the community around us and the legacy of solidarity that we are part of when we take care in this way.)
How do you practice getting people’s pronouns, names, and gender right? (This can include practices you use for yourself, too! When we avoid misgendering, that includes our own precious trans and non-binary selves.)
What practices do you have for when you get it wrong?
What difference have these acts of care (both for getting it right and responding when you get it wrong) made in your life or the lives of others?
What would you want others to know about avoiding misgendering?
I’ll be hosting a community conversation, along with my excellent pal Zan, on the topic of how we are trying to avoid misgendering (and why, and what difference it makes).
There is so much hostility directed towards trans and gender diverse communities right now, and the actions we take to care for, welcome, affirm, and acknowledge trans folks can often feel small and invisible in the face of so much hostility. But these actions are not small, and our hope is that this conversation will make them more visible, and that by sharing these stories, we can take a stand, together, against transphobia, and alongside trans community members.
This conversation is open to anyone, of any gender, who wants to talk about how they are trying to avoid misgendering.
This conversation will be taking place on December 11 from 3-4:30 pm mountain time (December 12 from 8:30-10 am Adelaide time). You can register for the conversation here.
We will record and transcribe this conversation, and collect the stories into a collective document (probably a zine!) to share with participants and community members, and on the Dulwich Centre’s website as part of this project.
Stories will be anonymized if you prefer, and the transcription will be shared back with conversation participants but will not be shared publicly.
It’s been a minute since I hosted a conversation like this, and I’m really excited for it. But I also want to acknowledge that this conversation is in response to tragedy and trauma. The actions we take to stand with trans and non-binary folks can be life-saving. The effects of transphobia, homophobia, and refusing to support trans and non-binary folks are horrific.
I want to make something that makes care visible. And I want to be in a space where care is visible. It matters that we make this effort.
