Rituals of Repair

I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt unsettled in my body and mind—still reverberating from something that happened earlier in the day. And it taps into something I’ve been thinking about for years. 

Yesterday, I was called out on social media by a group of people. This happens more and more now that my platform is growing; I’m starting to expect it when one of my posts gets a lot of attention. I wasn’t called out by the person whose work these people claimed I copied, but by people in their circles—people I’ve never met, who didn’t ask questions, didn’t reach out in any relational way, and were not familiar with my body work. 

One man in particular claimed I had copied someone’s work “verbatim” (I did not). They told me I had caused harm and demanded I reach out to make amends to someone I had never met and whose work I had never seen. The post I had written that they were questioning came from my head, my heart, my lineage, and years of lived practice.

I tried to clarify, to ask questions, to make space for dialogue. I was met with silence or accusations. No relationship. No context. No room for anything other than I was causing harm and needed to check myself.

When I finally saw the work they were claiming I copied, it was not even as similar as I thought it would be given these people’s reactions. It felt shocking, bizarre, frustrating, sad, and exhausting. Mostly, it felt so disappointing and disheartening.

It also messed with my nervous system and took up time on a day when I was bringing my dad home from the hospital and holding a community grief vigil. This is to say, there are so many better things so many of us could be doing, need to be doing, with our time than calling each other out in these anti-relational ways and dealing with the impacts of that. 

The person whose work they were referencing eventually reached out to me directly. They were open. Human. Willing to engage. For that, I’m grateful. This essay isn’t about them or whatever unfolds with that situation.

It’s about what happens when we, as people who claim to care about the communal well being and collective liberation, bypass relationship and go straight to accusation. When we use the language of harm without discernment. When we dispose of each other instead of re-shaping relationships in less traumatic ways. When we confuse punishment with accountability and performance with care. 

I recognize I’m not the first person to write or speak about this, but apparently it’s something we need to keep coming back to because we are losing this fight for liberation simply by turning on ourselves. We cannot afford to keep being careless with each other, we can’t afford to keep throwing each other out. This jump to public confrontation is not sustainable or skillful. On the other hand, not recognizing real ruptures and harm is not sustainable or skillful either.

Before I go on, it feels important to name that I have caused both hurt and harm at times, and I am sure I will again, particularly given my work is all based in relationships. I am certainly not immune to causing the various ruptures and unrelational behavior that I’m writing about. I have participated in several accountability processes and been in every role: the impacted, the impactor, the witness, the facilitator. And, I have also avoided accountability processes at times. I’m not trying to say I’ve completely figured this out or lived up to my own standard or hopes for us as liberation-seeking people. 

What happened yesterday is nowhere near the worst thing I’ve experienced, it’s merely a blip in what it means to be visible, doing depth work in public, facilitating community processes, in a time of deep disconnection, desperation, and collapse. I’ve been part of land-based grief projects and collapse-aware communities that caused very real harm to me and others. I named those experiences with clarity and care to the people involved in those communities. I was mostly met with silence. In some cases, subtle or not so subtle exile. 

Many of the people responsible for the harm I’ve experienced in the last five years are still leading projects, holding power, and receiving resources. That would feel totally okay with me if some kind of recognition and repair had been attempted. No one around them asked them to engage with an accountability process, not even people I had been in close relationship with. 

I still haven’t spoken publicly about much of these experiences. Not because I’m afraid (not anymore), but because I don’t want to cancel anyone. I don’t believe in exile. I don’t believe in treating people as disposable. I believe people can mess up and still have platforms and meaningful bodies of work. And/but, I don’t trust the masses, the crowd born from this overculture. I don’t trust us because most of us have not developed the skills to deal with these situations. 

But silence isn’t the answer either. Silence has also caused a lot of harm. 

We need something else, something in between exile and excuses. Something rooted in soul, relationship, and deep communal skill. Something that doesn’t rely on shame or erasure. Something that asks us to be real and relational, not performative and demanding.

I want to be clear: I’m not sharing any of this as a personal complaint. I’m okay. I have an accountability team that walks with me through complexity. I have mentors who both challenge and support me. I have communities who love me—not because I’m perfect, but because I’ve shown up consistently for years.

I come from a strong lineage. My Bohemian grandparents taught me to sew, to speak to stones, and to honor the unseen as kin. My siblings who’ve passed still shape my heart and guide my hands. My soul lineage is rooted with activists, witches, neuroqueers, mountains, creeks, and donkeys. My Ancestors are mighty. 

So, I’ll get over what happened yesterday and even heal from some of these other projects that were much more harmful. But I am heart-weary. Because this isn’t just about me. It’s about a larger pattern that continues in spaces that claim to be rooted in justice, healing, liberation, and even grief work—and yet, so often, forget how to treat people with basic human dignity and care.

What’s missing is curiosity, discernment, conflict care, and belonging. These aren’t innate traits. They’re skills. Relational skills. Soul skills. Community survival skills. And if we don’t start developing them fast, we will keep losing each other to shame, silence, suspicion, criticism, untended hurt, untended harm. 

This is complicated because if we are truly committed to collective healing, we must tend not only to the harms we’ve experienced, but also to the harms we’ve caused and are complicit in. This goes deep and it’s not easy or quick. 

Desiree Adaway, Rachael Rice and I have been working with what we recognize as a sixth gate of grief: the grief of the harms we’ve done. The ache of the impacts we’ve had—knowingly or unknowingly—through silence, fragility, overwhelm, supremacy, entitlement, complicity, urgency, and simply being human in times of late capitalism.

This grief is sacred. And it’s often missing from our conversations about justice and healing. But without it, our communities will not make it through this time of fascism and The Long Dark. 

To meet these ruptures, and this grief, with integrity, we need to skill up. We need conflict-tending practices rooted in care, not control. We need compassionate accountability processes that allow people to remain in their dignity while being asked to grow. We need shared definitions and processes. We need to learn to accept that rupture will happen and it’s how we respond that matters most. 

We need to be able to name the difference between hurt, harm, and rupture, and to respond to each with the nuance and care they require. There are people doing this work, but it’s sparse in the public realm (I’m sure there are many more people quietly doing some of this in their communities). Some of these people include Kai Cheng Thom, Mariame Kaba, adrienne maree brown, Aftab Erfan, Dean Spade, and Sera Thompson. 

I also want to recognize that most of us are carrying far too much right now. We are grieving, afraid, stretched thin, and trying to survive. I’m currently caregiving for my mom who has Alzheimer’s, supporting my aging father, managing chronic illness, organizing several communities, and working to financially sustain the work I’ve been called to do. I share this not for personal recognition but because I know I’m not alone, each of us have people and places we’re taking care of, most of us are on the edge of collapse, if not in it. We are all human, trying to make it through ridiculously hard times.

Which is all the more reason why we need to dedicate ourselves to the skills of cultural and communal repair work. Truly, if we forget how tender and overwhelmed most people are, we will keep turning on each other instead of turning toward each other.

What happened this week shook me, not because it was a personal hit, but because it revealed how easily we lose each other. We cannot keep rushing toward accusation or exiling each other when rupture happens AND we also cannot keep allowing real harm to go unacknowledged. 

What we need is a culture of return, not rejection. We need a way back home to each other when rupture and harm has happened, or is even believed to have happened. So we need rituals of repair that try to address the humanness of mistake and injury. We need to learn how to practice accountability while also bringing people back into the fold of belonging. 

This is critical because when we don’t have a deep sense of belonging we substitute rank, power, and privilege in shadowy ways. We must center belonging and community. We must  make moves to connect and build lives that do not just center nuclear families and romantic partnerships. That is how we deepen relational accountability systems, that is how we make it through this time of global collapse. 

We desperately need central practices of reconciliation and repair because in a healthy village, a healthy movement, everyone is needed. 

For those of us who are leading, facilitating, building coalitions and communities in any way, let us continue to ask and practice: What are the suturing spells we need now? What are the repair rituals that bring us back into truth and connection? What are the skills we must grow to help us stay—with each other, with our grief, with the conflict that comes from being in relationship and living in a complex world?

This is the conversation, the practices, I’m committed to. Not just about harm, but about how we build soul-rooted community in times of rupture. How we stay with the messy middle. How we become people who can be trusted with grief, complexity, and each other’s lives.