ALT Picture of Holiday, a Black person in a pink shirt, glasses, and a beige cowboy hat, with a goatee and pink braids, against a dynamic blue background. Text reads, livestream conversation with Holiday Simmons Monday 2/2 - 1pm EST www.patreon.com/deanspade

ALT Disappointment, Conflict, and Burnout in Care and Resistance Work People often experience a special kind of disappointment in resistance work. We join groups to do something that we really care about. Often, we are relieved to finally find people who see things the way we do, excited to be understood and have accompaniment and solidarity. We have high expectations for each other. And then we find out that we're all very human and imperfect. I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired. Most people I've talked to who feel burned out and leave movement work, during the laset 28 years that I have been in these movements, are actually in pain because of unresolved conflict. They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn't just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.

ALT Abolitionism and Transformative Justice I've spent the last decades in the movement for police, prison, and border abolition. I believe we shouldn't have of those structures. Abolitionists use a concept called "transformative justice" to describe the work we do to address conflict without using police. There is a lot of conflict, harm, and violence in our communities, we know the police don't help and only make it worse. Transformative justice practices do three things: 1. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who have been harmed need to heal and participate in community, to not be isolated by what happened to them, and to be listened to, even though we can't undo what happened. 2. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who did the harm need to stop doing it. 3. Work to figure out what the community surrounding the harm could do to make it less likely--how did we all set up a situation that made this more likely?

ALT When Big Reactions Happen One thing that is surprising and challenging about the emotional dynamics of conflict is that we do the most harm to others when we are feeling aggrieved, victimized, left out, and/or resentful. It's counterintuitive because these are the moments when we are focused on what others did wrong and how we are hurting. But those are the times we are most likely to do something harmful, like go and write the really messed up email to somebody, treat somebody with the cold shoulder, gossip negatively about people in our group or about another group in town, post a bunch of stuff on Instagram that's really inflammatory, or violate someone's privacy. As strange as it might seem, it's when I'm feeling like the victim that I should ask for help from a friend to figure out what the right-sized response is, or to figure out if I'm still too upset to decide how to respond and need more time. It's not that we aren't legitimately sometimes victimized, but the victim....

ALT Centering Belonging I was recently talking to somebody who's doing a conflict support process with a group that's had a major difficult conflict. And one of the things the person is doing is individually reaching out to the 40 or 50 people who all were involved in the group over these many years where these hard things were happening. The people from the group have been telling the conflict support person, who's not even in the group, "It just means so much to me that you're listening to me." We live in societies that minimize our experiences of pain and harm. And so, we join movement groups and we hope we're finally going to be part of something where we're heard and seen. And then we have a bad experience where people don't hear us or see us at some point. And then we wreak havoc. We're like, I have to tear down everybody in this group, and this group itself, because I'm feeling all of my historical cumulative pain of being dismissed. If we could catch each other in the moment

ALT "Prisons are designed to keep us isolated. When we connect with our dear ones, every second is precious and the stakes are high. This added pressure means we have to strive to be as intentional as possible to make each moment count." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs)

ALT "As a longtime prison abolitionist, Dean Spade is offering all of us insight on how to live, f*ck, be present, and survive with contextualized compassion for ourselves and others." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs)

ALT Daughters cover image: beautiful illustration of two Black women on the top and bottom of the page with interconnecting braid hair and daffodils over their chests. They are over top a bright red border which as the words "Daughters" and "#13" and "Fall 2024" and "Let's Get Free's Magazine" over top with a bright yellow border.

ALT "Daughters is a faith-based, political publication founded by Sarita Miller (SCI Muncy) that aims to illuminate issues and perspectives, specifically those of women, pertaining to the crisis of mass incarceration."

ALT Pink, red, and yellow diagonal striped background with a cover of Love in a F*cked-Up World and text that reads, "Book Launch + Q&A with Author, October 26 5pm Lovelite, Organized by Berlin Internationals Polyamory Group"