We need to know our work makes a difference. We need to know we matter.
Mattering I've come to think of like gravity. When we feel it, we feel anchored. We show up to the world in positive ways.
We want to connect. We want to engage. We want to contribute.
Researchers have discovered that there are ingredients to mattering. Things like feeling significant, feeling appreciated, invested in, depended on. What I have seen in the research is that when we are made to feel like we don't matter, we suffer.
I didn’t listen with the expectation that there would be anything overtly political in the talk Wallace gives - - or in Corrigan’s, which follows - - but as I listened it suddenly felt deeply political to me.
If you want to seize and keep power, if you want to successfully subjugate large numbers of people, it is necessary to convince them that they don’t matter. Feeling that whatever you do has no meaning and that you as a human being have no valuable impact is the deepest kind of helplessness of all.
When you look at all the horror and injustice and begin to think, “what’s the use?” then your unique gifts and your power as a human being in the world are being compromised. Weakened. Poisoned. Sapped.
In order to stand up for your beliefs and to take action for the good you have to believe that what you do will matter. Again, from Jennifer Wallace:
Political theorists argue that when people have autonomy and feel like their voice matters at work, that belief inspires people to engage more deeply in their communities, to speak up, and to take action. Simply put, when people feel like they matter at work, they're more likely to believe they matter to the world around them. Mattering is double edged, deeply protective when you feel it, profoundly damaging when you don't.
So beyond building these cultures of mattering, we also need to confront what researchers are calling anti-mattering. Corrosive messages that say, you're invisible, you don't count, you're replaceable. Today, those messages seem to be everywhere.
Finding the place where you matter - - and I mean not just a physical place but also a mental place - - is essential not just to our personal survival but also to the survival of a free society. And it’s exactly what I have been agonizing over, especially since our ceiling fell in and any last tiny shred of being in control of my own world was suddenly upended.
Listening to Jennifer Wallace set my brain in motion yesterday by affirming the glimmer that it was possible for me to make a difference. If you have time, listen to her talk and also the accompanying one by Kelly Corrigan on Making, which feels equally empowering to me.
And now, let’s get local.
Columbia Community Care put out a call yesterday. It begins, “We can’t afford to stop.” Reading it reminded me of the power of mutual aid and how essential a component of community building it can be. I’m sharing their request to boost their signal.
Mutual aid is an act of solidarity and care between neighbors. It stands in opposition to charity and top-down giving, because it is planned and executed by a community, for a community to not just provide food and essential items but also to educate and organize. “Community Care during COVID”: Oral Histories of Mutual Aid in the Bronx, BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE Archives and Special Collections.
Community is an act of resistance.
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