Our year with brafe.space: brafe Letters between colleagues

Before the end of the year, Anna and I sat over coffee to see how we might reflect on the past year with one another and brafe.space. I am grateful to Anna for suggesting we write letters to each other; we decided on a few topics before the holidays and for which topics we could write for the other to respond. Amongst our gratitude and joy, the letters also revealed the many times and ways this year when we were exhausted. In fact, you reading can probably relate - it would be fair to assume that a majority of us have been emotionally labored to exhaustion this past year trying to either keep up with, resist, and/or protect ourselves from the current state of affairs. Never mind the other forms of labor we are committed to.

There is one correspondence we wanted to share with you for the time being, about how we are learning to recognize and acknowledge that labor for ourselves. It also reminded me that it is labor best shared with those in our communities, and the value of speaking it aloud:

First Letter to Anna from Ally

Dear Anna,

I needed to write this to you after baking cookies over lunch. I had to laugh at myself that this is sometimes what the complexity we are dealing with requires of me to process it; deep pause which is so seldom afforded to us, but which I have learned to savour. And before having words to say about our experiences of the last year, I needed one of those pauses. More and more, I find myself clinging to and appreciating the deep presence and connection that pause provides - not because it is easy, but because it is necessary.

We have super bizarre roles which even now, one year into, I struggle to describe. One thing we do know, is that we are being slapped in the face with complexity from different sectors of society. We have this opportunity to hear from quite different perspectives on how they view the challenges of our time and how they see us overcoming them, and the absolute privilege of hearing how these challenges feel for themselves and their beloved communities to experience. And our role is many times to just sit with this and learn to be okay with it - so that the space we are creating and the programs we are developing can be okay with it as well.

Sometimes, our role is to sit with the fact that there is no program for certain processes, and that certain work needs to be done in dimensions over which we have little control.

Normally, this is the kind of emotional work we might do with our families around a dinner table. We would play this role of translating between generations, genders, class and lifestyles. We wouldn’t try to make them agree with one another, but would accept where they don’t. More than harmony, our goal would be keeping the connection and making sure we could all still hug one another goodbye. Somehow now, it feels like we are trying to do that at scale - and I for one don’t know how we will or what will happen if we do.

To make space for this collective experience in our current culture, with our personal cultural upbringings and all the real or perceived expectations of us can feel exhausting. It can feel like a constant battle between what I know and what I don’t. So sometimes, I take a walk, cook a long meal, or laugh to the sky in surrender to the fact that, on an intellectual level, I really don’t grasp what the fuck we are doing- but it feels good and right, and maybe in this new something we are creating and in this complexity we are acknowledging, feeling good and right might be more important than making sense.

I hope you’re as discombobulated as I am sometimes - in fact, I know you are, and I deeply appreciate you sharing it with me. I like to think that’s part of our magic ✨

Talk soon, Allyson

Response to Ally from Anna

Hey Ally,

Happy New Year and cheers to the new something we’ll continue creating in 2023! Loved that sentence in your letter, it made me smile. Reading your words once more after my little Christmas/ New Years break (the important pause you mentioned) transported me directly back into the exciting, stretchy, uncomfortable, warm, and fuzzy feelings of the last year. I can resonate so much with your thoughts. Thank you for sharing them so well pointed.

Something I had to learn this year, harder than ever before I guess, is the importance of emotional work and the exhaustion coming with it. I think, before, I was very much used to hard work in the traditional sense of working long hours and weekends, and getting things done that obviously needed to get done. My achiever was/is fully enjoying that kind of work to be very honest. It made me feel productive and triggered the feeling of being successful in what I was doing. Of course, it was visible to me and to others, and recognized much more easily.

My work has changed 180 degrees from that: there isn’t the obvious work that needs to be done to a degree that it would keep me busy for long hours. It has been interchanged with another type of work that I lacked the vocabulary (and also the appreciation) for to describe it. It’s the emotional work of holding a space that is tyring to find out where it wants to develop while empowering very contrary and diverse perspectives to be part of this development. This emotional work means sitting with complexity and uncertainty while guiding people along a process of co-creation. It means listening to the nuances in conversations, allowing for conflict, hearing the pains and fears, acknowledging the anger and frustrations, realizing the hopes and the wishes, feeling the love and connections … and holding space for all of this, processing it, being ok with it, not trying to resolve something, not jumping to solutions immediately. And oh dear, did this exhaust me! It overwhelmed me and it still does sometimes. And in times of anxiety a wave of questions would hit me: How can we ever achieve fulfilling all these expectations? And how can we ever move forward and progress in this complexity? How can I feel productive in this? This comes down to the final question to myself: How can I get a sense of recognition in what I’m doing from myself and of course from others?

It reminds me one more time how deeply I’m personally involved with the socialized mindset of work and success which does not hold much attention and acknowledgment for the emotional work, as it's so invisible. Yet I’m realizing that this is the glue for our space - it is our actual value creation. Once we have a program, great! But we will create new ones, iterate, throw them out the window and develop a better one. Our events? they will be small, big, intense, communal, and official, with great locations and the best food - but the spices will come from the energy in our community; how well we see, feel, and relate with each other to co-create differently.
Our biggest impact lies there.

This being said, I thank you for your very hard emotional work last year: the perspectives you have listened to, the feelings you have held for others, the frustrations you have offered a chair, the joys you have shared with others, the hard opinions you have patiently made space for, the laughers, the cries, the irritations, and the excitements (...). All this work makes our space brafe - brave and safe for others to be a bit more themselves and a little less the roles they play elsewhere.

Happy New Year Ally!

Lots of hugs, Anna

WE LEAVE YOU WITH SOME QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

• How does it feel for me to contribute in the ways that I do to my work?

• What aspects of my personal self or experience are benefiting my work?

• Which contributions and work of mine/ and others have I recognized and acknowledge? Which contributions and work of mine/ and others have I failed to recognize and acknowledge?

• What does success really mean to you when you think of it beyond its conventional understanding?