What portals can we step through in 2023?
Revisiting hope in preparation for the new year
First of all, you may have noticed a new name and domain. As 2023 approaches, I’m looking back on this year, and my writing in particular, and I feel ready to bid a fond farewell to “Is Our Children Learning?” aka iSour. I am proud of that first attempt to collect my thoughts and connect with readers, but I have felt ready for a reset. So here we are.
Welcome to “Hope for the Best.” In 2023 I expect to write about similar topics as this year, but with an intentional effort to explore hope as a discipline.
With that in mind, I wanted to revisit the idea of the pandemic “portal.” In March, I asked if the “portal” described by Arundhati Roy — the moment of rupture and new possibilities created by the arrival of COVID-19 — was closing. At the time, I felt that it was and urged us to “fight to keep the portal of possibility for a new world open as long as possible.” It’s a nice idea, but what does it mean?
With 2022 coming to a close, I’m thinking about ways I’ve tried to fight for a new world, and I feel like I mostly came up short. In June, for example, I made a commitment to “direct my energy toward my immediate community.” But in the six months since I failed to do that consistently. I brought food to my community’s free fridge and volunteered as an escort at Planned Parenthood, but those actions felt sporadic. They didn’t feel grounded in any sort of community.
So did I fail? Did I allow the portal to close?
After some reflection, I’ve decided I did not. I’m choosing to reject that impulse toward shame. Here’s why.
First of all, it’s absurd to place the burden of keeping hope alive on myself as an individual.
But more importantly, while COVID-19 created a unique moment of possibility for change in the world, the portal that opened at that moment was not a new one. The portal of possibility has always existed. It’s still here now. It just looks different.
To use a cheesy analogy, if the pandemic portal was a huge Stargate-like portal, then the day-to-day portal is more like the wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia.
The pandemic portal was huge and terrifying, and even a bit exciting. It was different from the day-to-day portal we have access to in that every inequity and fracture in our society felt bigger and clearer. But like so many have commented time and again, COVID-19 didn’t create those inequities. It just exacerbated them. And when we were sheltering at home, afraid and uncertain, I (like many White people with class privilege) had a new appreciation for the precarity our society is founded on.
With most of society returning to “normal,” it makes sense why it feels like the portal of possibility is closing. But as long as there is injustice, there is an opportunity to see it, name it, and fight to change it.
Like the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia, we can find this version of the portal very close to home. To find it, we can think about the people or passions we care about. Maybe it’s our parents or children, sports, music, food, travel, medicine, housing, or education. Once we’ve identified what matters to us, we just need to look a little closer.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore told Teen Vogue:
[We need] to combine curiosity with our capacity to see patterns. It’s a really human thing to see patterns. A pattern combined with curiosity enables us to see, “Oh, people do this kind of thing,” or “This is happening everywhere,” or “Oh, I wonder whether this pattern tells me something I couldn’t figure out, that I haven’t thought about yet.”
Once we look carefully at our passions, we’ll inevitably notice these patterns. Perhaps people are being excluded or harmed. When we see these wrongs and feel a need to do something, we are opening that portal of possibility.
Then we just need to take one step forward. We don’t have to fix it all at once or know the perfect solution.
This is my reminder to myself. Don't feel overwhelmed. Don't feel responsible to transform it all immediately. Just try to do one thing, whatever is possible and in your power, and do it alongside others.
Then take one more step forward. This is often how Mariame Kaba talks about practicing hope as a discipline. This is my intention for 2023. I don’t expect myself to be perfect, but through small and persistent efforts, I will try to keep moving toward a portal of possibility.
Some random favorites of 2022
Favorite book I read: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Favorite podcast I listened to: One Million Experiments
Favorite thing I wrote: Creative Solutions to the Teacher Shortage Crisis
Favorite song I listened to:
Favorite TV show I watched: Nathan for You