Being raised in the world of art and activism means that I grew up learning to frame everything I do in the scope of social service. My art has been cultivated with the belief that the stories I aim to tell are bigger than myself – whether that has meant representing identities or beliefs on the margins, or harboring a message that can serve to benefit the collective consciousness. My community organizing has also been about pushing fields and visions further, emphasized even more so working at an institution whose sector literally labels me a “public servant.” One would think that following a life in this direction offers constant checks and balances to keep one selfless, to avoid becoming narcissistic – but I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case.
When everything you do is by default “for others” it can become a slippery slope down a superhero narrative. You start being convinced that doing for yourself is automatically doing for others. Indulgences become necessities for upholding your mentality, physicality, morale for doing the “good work.” But this is how preachers end up with Benzes. It’s how Silicon Valley CEOs justify massive bonuses. It’s how activists end up undermining or holding themselves above the individuals within the communities we’re supposed to uplift. Such faults, we tell ourselves, are overwritten by all the good we do – in fact, we can even tell ourselves that these are the tools, boundaries, vehicles of self-care that are needed in order to be as selfless as we would like to believe we are.
We all need to treat ourselves. But sometimes I wonder if creating a binary in which our service is “work” and our contradictions are “play.” It not only puts us in dangerous territory where harm unto ourselves and others are justified, but we also lose sight of the ways in which the work we do can be, in fact, the treat. We start seeing the art we make, the connections we build, the stories we tell, as the giving. We fail to recognize how the audience inspires us, the community feeds us, the actions themselves keep us holistically tone.
I’ve been thinking about this over the past couple of days while here in New Mexico working on Ways of Knowing. It has been more and more difficult to frame this project in the conventional terms of service as stated above. We are not some group coming from outside merely to benefit the Navajo community. Each time I leave a session with someone here, I leave so satiated, evolved, touched, that I wonder if I’m actually the biggest beneficiary of the project. I then wonder if that’s wrong. I then question the entire dynamic of weighing who benefits more.
Is it selfish of me to be able to more tangibly recognize the ways in which this project has deepened my own relationship with the earth and my vision of the world? Perhaps only if I see projects like this as a one-way dynamic of servitude. But if I recognize the nature of exchange and sharing that exists in communities like the ones we’ve been encountering – and find inspiration in the ecosystem around us, things might look different. Neither the bee nor the flower see themselves as the “public servant” in the process of pollination. There is hardly even a recognition of the “greater good” or the “natural balance” that is being maintained by either, they just simply are doing them. I feel that this is the biggest challenge that I’m facing now – to unravel the categorizations that parcel collective growth. To not think so highly of what I do, and allow the things that fill me up to simply fill me up.