It was a dark January Evening, I was staying at my friends house, and a month into starting a new job, I was about to attend in person training (its funny, ‘training’ was just ‘training’ in Jan 2019) , with Citizens UK, and their ‘branch, in Tyne and Wear.
I’ll come back to that in a second.
Powerlessness wasn’t something I thought I was. But what I had consciously and subconsciously adopted in most of my life was a combination of the following, as a youth worker
- Siding and empathising with the oppressed
- Thinking that being a youthworker was also a place of oppression
A lecturer of mine once said to me that I had assumed the position of thinking that youthworkers were also oppressed.
What I was doing was assuming myself into those places. Assuming the victim.
What I was also doing was assuming powerlessness
‘I cant do that’
‘I cannot change that’
‘This will never happen’
What I did, as a youthworker, and as a person was become wholly reactive. I didnt want to, or maybe more so, I feared a position of power.
That was a position abusive people took.
I didnt want to be like the powerful people who had abused me.
Even though I had responsibility placed upon me. Rarely, if ever, did I seek to assert power within these spaces. It was a position to develop others, that ’empowerment’ thing.
So I knew about power. Or so I thought. I even wrote about it in a few of my MA essays.
Know about it, but don’t take any. Assume powerlessness. That was the right thing to do right? Thats what Jesus did..wasnt it?
Back to the story above. I was about to see things differently. And at that time, in January 2019 I needed to.
I needed to see power as something healthy. I needed to see that I could take power, I needed to begin to take more power in my own life.
So much confusion around my life, at the time, and a journey on Sunderlands public bus/metro system in the rain to ponder my lifes choices ahead. And training that I didnt want to like. But it was something I needed.
I needed to indwell having healthy power. Of feeling that I can make decisions.
That I didnt need to give myself away. That I didnt need to react.
It was unhealthy to see myself as powerless. That there was nothing I could do. That was part of the breaking down the summer before. Despondent confusion and feeling like there was no way out.
In a way, the lesson I was receiving on Power was from an unlikely source. But then again. Un likely sources sometime showed me that the universe was in a conspiracy to wake me, teach me, push me, and hold me. I was soaking up and learning something new. My mind was being changed.
That ‘mind’ that over thought and over worried, that ‘mind’ that had been on overdrive since it was 11.
I was being educatied by community organisers, how to get my own power back. Giving myself permission to think of myself as having power.
Yet, in some ways I had started. But this was another one of the many pushes in the same direction.
This from ‘Inner Practitioner’ on Twitter summed up much of my relationship with power.
Things start to happen when you start taking power.
Those around me who were used to me acting in one way, were reacting, revealing themselves, to me acting differently.
When I changed. I couldn’t be controlled the same
Small steps of starting to take power.
I started to fear less their reaction, even if it had been demonstrative before, and I had been scared.
I begin to not let the control freak have control. I could choose.
Learning about power, learning to take power. Learning to stop, wait, and pause – even in the midst of emotional abuse – were small, beginning examples of taking power.
If you have a read of my Survivor story (link here) you will understand how my childhood revolved around staying small and assuming powerlessness. Fearing power was like fearing becoming like the person who dominated and abused me.
Taking power, starting to assume having some, starting to think of myself in a healthier respectful way, was one of the many aspects of my healing and recovery journey. On yours where are some of the surprising lessons coming from that you are needing to hear?
Maybe it really is a conspiracy when the universe starts interfering in all the ways, in working you towards wholeness. Maybe its that true power being awoken from within.
James Ballantyne 
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