Welcome! Thank you so much for tuning in to our work, an Expose on Hope: a Reflection guide for when liberatory practice feels hopeless. I’m Abby, my pronouns are (she/her) and I’m a cis-queer, straight-sized, neurodivergent, working-turned-middle-class first gen settler from Hong Kong currently occupying the stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), Qayqayt, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples and spent most of my life occupying the Annishnabeg, Ojibwe and Missisauga of the Credit territories colonially known as so-called Toronto.

And this is reflecting on justice, a wealth redistribution-based educational community for therapists to unlearn systemic oppression, together. Our relationship to these lands dictates our commitment to addressing the ongoing impacts of colonization in our work and in our lives, and is why we created reflecting on justice to do this deep work together in community.

I invite you to take this moment to reflect on your relationship with these lands and what it means for you to be here. I will absolutely have a different relationship than you do, and I’d be so curious to find out what has sparked for you as you do this work. If you’re not sure of the Indigeneity of the land you’re occupying, please visit www.native-land.ca to find out.

Alright so let’s start with some context before we do our deep dive into hope:

It seems like in every conversation, in every class I teach, in every lecture I watch, there are questions about how we sustain hope and how we move through hopelessness. Questions about how we stay in this work when the problem feels too big, too reinforced, too powerful. Questions about how we save ourselves from despair and keep ourselves from drowning amidst all the ways our systems are causing us suffering, amidst all the ways our systems are privileging us at the expense of others.

And those questions hold so much weight - this work is hard, and hopelessness is one of the primary tactics deployed to keep us from our revolutionary power. This makes having a fully processed response to hopelessness foundational to living our ethics when our ethics are inconvenient, when they are painful, and when opting out would just be so much easier.

Because understanding systemic oppression is not hard, saying you are an anti-oppressive therapist is not hard, saying your values are in kindness and compassion, and even in liberatory practice is not hard…

It’s when you’re challenged to question what you think you know and how you live your life, when you’re called to live your ethics in a way that doesn’t come naturally, when liberatory practice requires you to leave something on the table, or when you’ve been doing this for years and years and years and you get hit with an unexpected set back without the support you need, or when you’re isolated time and time again in your work and life, now that’s when it’s hard, that’s when your commitment really needs to kick in.

And that’s when hopelessness tries creeps in too, the heaviness of “what’s the point”, the gut-wrenching “this is too big and pervasive for us to shift”, the resigned “this will never change” or the restricting “humans are fundamentally harmful and selfish” narratives start to take up more space than you intend.

If this resonates with you, please know that you’re not alone. And please know that you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. This reflection guide was specifically created because you’re not alone and because there is already so much wisdom out there that can support you in redefining your relationship with your ethics, in shifting your response to hopelessness, and in reframing what it means for you to hope.

And this is such important work for us to do. With genocides happening in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo; with clients sitting in front of you holding the impact of a cruelty too systemic for our therapy rooms to completely dismantle in one conversation; with Indigenous, Black and Brown lives bearing disproportionate amounts of violence on the daily; with Queer, Trans, and pregnant folx having their rights stripped away under the guise of “family values”; with sick and disabled folx being told their safety, access, and dignity are worth less than individualistic preferences and the ableist scraps that allow organizations to slap diversity and inclusion on their values statement; with our world struggling under the scarcity and exploitation of capitalism and the destruction of ecocide…

We need all the revolutionary power we can get, and we can not have you going around believing that yours doesn’t matter.

Before we jump right into building this foundation, let’s get familiar with where you are in relation to your hope and hopelessness. Feel free to pause this guide as you reflect, come back to this after you’ve gone through some of the material, or just listen through fully this first time around and let things unfold organically:

Starting off simple: As we engage in this work, how would you define your understanding of hope and hopelessness?

What is your relationship and experience with hope and hopelessness? How do they show up for you? What other words might they show up as? When does your hope and hopelessness, or however else they come up for you as, get in the way? When do they support you?

If/When you think to yourself “what’s the point?”, or “this is too big and pervasive for us to shift” Or any other question and statement that hopelessness likes to deploy, who / what does that question serve? What makes it possible for this question to be at the forefront of your ethics, to dominate and overtake your revolutionary power? And what stops it from doing so?

As you reflect on how these questions have landed for you, let’s start to explore how hope and hopelessness have been examined in some liberatory communities so we have a foundation to lean on as we deep dive into what it means to build liberatory hope.

Riel Dupuis Rossi, Travis Health, and Vikki Reynolds co-constructs the idea of a believed-in-hope:

A hope that is not a binary between winners and losers. A hope that is not grounded in optimism and positivity, but bred from a lineage of resistance to what is realistically experienced as terrifying. It is a practice of not stealing hope, as many institutions do, as a tactic to keep revolution at bay. It is “doing dignity” with people, to witness their resistance and hold them in their space of pain and grief rather than to perform pity or charity.

And then there’s one of my favorite poems, a poem I actually use a lot in my practice, sharing it with folx who host suicide as resistance to the increasing unlivability of this world.

Written by Caitlin Seida, this is Hope is A Sewer Rat:

Hope is not the thing with feathers That comes home to roost When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing With teeth and claws and Patchy fur that’s seen some s**t.

It’s what thrives in the discards And survives in the ugliest parts of our world, Able to find a way to go on When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as optimism, persistence, Perseverance and joy, Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path and bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird, Emily. It’s a lowly little sewer rat That snorts pesticides like they were Lines of coke and still Shows up on time to work the next day Looking no worse for wear.

Similarly, Leanne Betasamosake (beta-sam-o-sake) Simpson and Robyn Maynard exchange letters about resistance in the book Rehearsals for Living - one of my favorite books of all time by the way, highly recommended - naming that a question about hope is simply the wrong question, I’ll read a small excerpt of their co-creation here:

“We both know hope is a luxury; my ancestors have taught me that. My people got up and worked really hard all day with or without hope. My ancestors didn’t need hope to build resistance, to build Nishnaabeg life and imaginings beyond regulation. Our movements and mobilizations do not have the privilege of resting upon a fleeting emotion. The absence of hope is a beautiful catalyst. Tenacity, persistence, stubbornness, rage, resentment, pessimism and despair are all motivators. So are joy, love, attachment, care, truth, optimism, respect and reciprocity. So is the delicious soup in which all those exist at once. The tentacles of racial capitalism do not get to demand hope or optimism, or celebrate rage and pessimism or consume our trauma and tragedy, or transform me into “uplift”—what Saidiya Hartman calls “a translation of Black suffering into white pedagogy. What I can learn from my ancestors about “Armageddon in effect,” as Public Enemy says, is that we world-build anyway, as a practice, as a way of life.”

And finally, Mariame Kaba’s reflections on hope as a discipline

Here is an excerpt from an interview she did on the Intercept about dismantling the carceral state:

“It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle, that was what I took away from it. It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change