The tangled paths of uncertainty
After writing about the cycles of containment and false transformation in the nonprofit sector, someone sent me a link to a book that is now totally expanding my understanding of what I was exploring. I felt so grateful for their recommendation and glad I had decided to share my early thoughts the way I did. It made me excited about the possibilities of writing in an open and uncertain way. Looking both behind and ahead, the paths appear tangled, messy, unresolved, and sometimes punishingly slow. But the journey’s real substance lies right there: in the contradiction of moving while knowing the ‘end’ will likely never come.
‘Creating connection, potential, and possibility is creative work. We are in a moment when we must hold prediction and possibility all at once.’
There has been real, notable change but growth, I’ve learned, is not arrival. As I continue to reflect, I realise sharing these experiences is also a living commitment to my values and politics.
‘we write the meaning of life as we live it‘
What have I learned? First, that contradiction is inescapable. I write about de-centering myself, even as this self authored post itself is a form of centring, while at the same time nothing here is really mine, rather an amalgamating web of space, time, memory and matter. The space I occupy to share these thoughts is also inherently privileged, while claiming motivations of justice. But is it better to write something clumsy or nothing at all? Perhaps naming the contradiction is itself useful, a form of transparent allyship, alongside all seeking to dismantle the unfair structures that tie us together - seeking the blurry spaces in between in a binary world.
As I brought forward before, working inside nonprofit institutions can reinforce the very logics we’re meant to challenge. There’s persistent tension between wanting change and being structured, even against our intentions, to contain it. I’ve felt it personally, manifesting as defensiveness, exhaustion, and sometimes avoidance. Performing in this paradigm destroys us from the inside, often without even realising the source of this discomfort. Even now, there’s a temptation to self-flagellate or say what I “should” say, seeking to perform understanding rather than simply living it out.
But collective healing, real liberation, cannot be performed. It must be lived, and lived together. The pain we carry as people doing justice work is connected: we feel it individually, but it is also the symptom of broader systems (racism, ableism, transphobia, capitalism, and more). These systems persist not just “out there,” but in our bodies, our language, our work, our relationships.
So, take a breath with me. Locate your edges, where you end and the air begins; where gravity connects you to the ground.
Are these words working their way into your body now? How is this landing with you? Because the only real change begins in connection: with ourselves, with each other, and through reckoning with the histories and forces that have formed us, not just as individuals, but as workers, neighbours, and fellow truth‑seekers.
‘Transform Yourself to Transform the World.’ - adrienne maree brown
This is not intended as a sermon or a display of expertise, I remain full of uncertainty, and the risk of “preaching” is what keeps me silent more often than I’d like. But over the last few years, one thing has become clear: the discomfort and trauma I once thought were purely personal in origin were actually shaped by cultural structures, masculinity, white supremacy, capitalism and the more I can see that, the less isolating and the more liberating the work becomes. And in a ‘world that often shames us for what we do not know’ I want to embrace and embody a practice of uncertainty.
Everything I’m saying here is an admission: mistakes, complicity, and the certainty that more mistakes will come. Anti-colonial praxis, like real systemic change, is ongoing, embodied, iterative.
So, we move forward, in all our mess and contradiction, carrying both pain and hope, towards more honest dialogue, deeper collective healing, and the possibility, always, of genuine transformation.
All quotes, unless stated otherwise, are gratefully lifted from Let this radicalize you by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
