16 December 2019 / 14 March 2020
As I learn more about myself and other people, I have come to see that I am very empowered as an individual, and I am only growing in this area. Not only do I strive to empower myself, but I try to be empowering toward others in nearly every interaction I have.
Empowerment.
A critical component that first comes to mind with this concept of empowerment is, of course, power. Not in a "power over" kind of way where you must compete with those around you in a zero-sum game of power, the object of the game being to gain as much power as you can at whatever cost. No, empowerment is a sort of non-mutually exclusive sort of power that encompasses autonomy, authenticity, self-love, humility, and an awareness of our responsibilities and consequences to our actions--both those consequences for which we want to take credit and those for which we wish we could pass credit onto another or erase altogether. This is how we grow and encourage the growth of those around us. I view empowerment to be very mutual and I have found that it works BEST to empower ourselves while also working to create communities where there is an individual and collective responsibility to empower each other.The humility piece in this is crucial, and it can be a hard thing to judge. It is very empowering to know yourself appropriately--your strengths, your challenges, and your place in the world around you (which changes according to the context and can be rather subjective). We often get bogged down by other people's judgments of how we should look, act, love--also how we should think of ourselves. Often these expectations are communicated on a daily basis through advertisements and media, both in obvious and subtle ways.
I am not here to judge the way other people become empowered--not really. There is a sort of balance, though, that we need to hold ourselves and others accountable to regarding our individual and collective responsibilities to help the world continue to flourish and grow. Based on my own skills and interests, I like to do this starting on a small, personal scale and work outward toward grander scales of community and the world around me. I think much of the time through Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, and I will say that it really helps to seek humility by connecting with nature and to our down-to-earth selves. There we find that life is simultaneously very complex and very simple.
In thinking about empowerment, I have been taught from a young age that I can more or less do whatever I want but that I have to be mindful of and responsible for the consequences of those actions (good and bad). When I think about times now that stand out to me from my childhood where I felt upset or frustrated with the way my parents taught me things, many of those times involved disempowering messages: during puberty I was encouraged to shave my underarms because young women don't have hair in their underarms, and I was told I can't run and jump up to embrace men because people might get the wrong idea. Clearly these two examples have some pretty crucial differences in their potential consequences, but there is something to each of them that has to do with "what is acceptable to society." My parents wanted me to be safe first and foremost, and they also wanted me to be accepted by my peers and judged based on my personality and behaviors rather than by my degree of "normalcy." In many ways these are both significant lessons to be learned. But the way I was taught about these two things felt disempowering because it communicates "this is what the world says is important and you need to accommodate to those expectations without necessarily understanding or agreeing with the reasons WHY the world thinks these are important things." Now that I am older and do understand at least some of those reasons, I don't usually jump up on men in public (I might sometimes still do it with non-men though) and I do whatever the heck I want with my armpits because I am able to parse out what values are important to me (namely, the safety piece of not being molested by other people, man or otherwise, and specifically not wanting to communicate messages where that might be acceptable behavior). I also want to mention that the above comments are not meant to be a criticism of my parents as a whole--they did a very great job of empowering me and teaching me the whys, which I see to have granted me quite a bit of privilege. Plus I can only imagine how challenging it is to be a parent let alone just being a human being. Not only that, but those were very important messages that are very hard to communicate to children with all the complexity that they entail.
The more I learn about widespread social issues, I feel disempowered and angry about the inequalities and negligence that exist in this world. I am angry that not everyone has the same rights as others (legal and social), especially since it has so much to do with entitlement and that other kind of power (power-over) that I spoke about above. I believe that anger is appropriate, yet I don't want to feel disempowered to the point that I use anger as my source of gaining power. From my observations, that interaction can quickly turn into greed for power at the cost of others' well-being. Instead, I constantly work to uncover my strengths and skills, my personal character challenges, the societal barriers around me, and my own energy level at any given time--and then I empower myself and others to be authentic and responsible beings. I try to channel deep into my belief that I am a worthwhile person to love, as is everyone around me in their own diverse ways. The key is to identify and build upon the strengths, teach consequences with an awareness and criticism of how societal beliefs impact those consequences, and be reflective cognitively and emotionally the whole time. It is a big challenge, and it takes a lot out of me, but it works toward this goal of mutual empowerment, starting with myself. I just have to remind myself that I can't and won't succeed at this 100% of the time and that I am often going to be unavoidably ignorant--and that's okay. Just take hold of the lessons learned and move on.
