Last night, Democratic US Senator and Vice Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris said: “service to others brings meaning and purpose to life”.
Many of my colleagues and I have been shouting this message for decades (shout out to my service-learning folks!). For me, I have known this truth for at least the last 18 years of my life. When I went to UC Berkeley, like Senator Harris‘s parents, I found a purpose through service to others.
But service to others was never instead of service to myself. I was lucky to find REACH!, the Asian/Pacific Islander Recruitment and Retention Center and meet people who taught me that my liberation is bound up with others. REACH! stood for Recruitment, retention and Empowerment of Asian/Pacific Islanders Considering Higher Education. (This was also my introduction to the art of making acronyms work.) REACH!, along with other recruitment and retention centers (RRCs), (RAZA, PASS, NARRC, and BRRC) were responsible for ensuring that UC Berkeley maintained a racially and ethnically diverse population inspite of, and in the face of, the ban on Affirmative Action. I could go on about the importance of that work, and I urge California voters to support the Repeal of Prop 209 on this year’s ballot, but I return to the topic at hand.
When asked about how I began my journey into leadership, or when I knew I wanted to commit my life to social justice, I always talk about my time at UC Berkeley. My purpose has stayed the same, though its manifestations are different: collective liberation. I became politicized through my Asian American and Pacific Islander classmates. I became politicized through our coalition building with Black students, Latino students, Filipino students, Indigenous students, and yes, white students as well. I learned how to be an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community from the Gender & Equity Resource Center. I also learned that people fight for their own rights, together. It’s not me or you, it’s us.
I remember a retreat for the bridges Multicultural Resource Center, the umbrella organisation that brought all the RRCs together, when we ended the day with a bit of fun. Someone made a pile of couch cushions in the middle of a fairly large living room. In that early young adulthood kind of way, we were egging each other on to run across the room (I said it was large!) and jump onto the pile of cushions. Those close to me know that I have a silly side, but most people see my fiercely committed, no b.s., hard-working side. After minutes of internal conflict with myself, I decided to take the very literal leap. I remember this with so much joy. Getting up off the cushions, I felt a little bit lighter. My peers and colleagues were clapping, laughing, and dancing to music, as we closed out a hard day of anti-racist coalition building work. I remember the feeling of wanting to laugh and cry for the rest of the night.
Being at that retreat was “service to others” or “movement building work,” as I was there in my official role as a student leader of REACH!. But being there and jumping on that pile of cushions, was also “self care.” During those undergraduate years, I was coming into my identity as an individual human being, connected to a history and legacy that was beyond my immediate birth family.
You see, I was still partially entrapped in my abusive birth family. University was meant to be my escape route, but that proved to be much harder than I realised. It was no longer the regular physical and emotional violence that kept me in bondage. It was the psychological chains. It was the guilt of growing up with food on the table and a soft bed, instead of living the life of my female cousins in Viet Nam - life in a poverty-stricken village, a banana-leaf thatched hut home, short-lived education, and a male-dominated culture. It was the emotional and financial dependency, and the all too engrained psychological anticipation of physical and sexual violence when I was “disobedient,” that kept me tied to my parents - the perpetrators of violence. (You can listen and learn about my lived experiences of child abuse and enslavement in other venues and elsewhere on this website.)
I want to emphasize that one of the consequences of the abuse I sufferred was the near destruction of my self-hood. Building, creating, and growing a self is no small feat. I’m still learning - is this my true self? Is there such thing? Am I returning to the self I was, underneath all the trauma and suffering? Who knows. What I do know now, is that my self, seems utterly compelled to remain whole-heartedly committed to social justice and liberation for all people.
This means that today, I will “work” a 14-hour day, that I take phone calls on evenings and weekends, and that I have used my own money during Survivor Alliance’s start-up years. But it also means that I am building a life and community that is worth my breath and time. I can offer paid self-care days to staff, and promote courageous conversations. I can call on my movement friends, who are also just my friends, or my former colleagues who have become older siblings and will be aunties and uncles to my children.
Yes, we all need self-care. Time to tend to our selves and make sure that we are not serving others to the detriment of our own health and wellbeing. At the same time, what if serving ourself and taking care of ourselves IS through taking care of one another?
There are no right answers.
I will tell you this. My purpose is to join the chorus of Delores Huerta and Amanda Nguyen, to do justice by Dr. Maya Angelou and Yuri Kochiyama. To live into the questions, to, like Brene Brown writes about, lay down the weapons of armored leadership and foster spaces within myself and others to enact vulnerable leadership.
I believe that self-care and service to others are intricately intertwined. When we deny this fact, we hold our individual selves accountable for systemic problems. Or, we will only fight for systemic change, and neglect ourselves and our close loved ones. For some, self-care is a radical act. For others, service is radical.
I can’t tell you how many times people remind me to take care of myself and be gentle. I might need these reminders. And yet, how often do we say this to cis-male politicians? To cis-male organisation and business leaders? Sometimes, we are busy taking care of ourselves, while others use that same time to assert power and dominate. We then break our self-care in order to fight back, protect, and heal wounds.
Maybe, self-care is building a viable alternative for others. Instead of fighting against domination, we can build a new way of living and being together.
If service to others gives us meaning and purpose, and meaning and purpose give us a reason to live, then maybe service to others is part of self-care. To me, self-care includes nurturing your reason to live. Tending to it, make sure you stoke the flames. Yes, some of that can be done with yoga and meditation, but some of it, can only be done in the middle of a protest with thousands of other strangers who remind you that you are not alone.