Tiny Revolutions №124: The revolution never ends

channeling the wizard, not the cop 🪽

Cristoforo de Predis from Lives of Saints Joachim and Anne and the Nativities of Saint Mary and Our Lord, 1476

It’s always startling to hear someone talk and realize they have a cop living in their head. Always keeping score of the transgressions of themselves and others. Things taken, things done improperly, things done that are simply Not Done. Never offering good faith, always reducing events to their pettiest, most uncharitable interpretations. NWA said “Fuck the Police” and I mostly agree, but for my money it’s the cops on the inside who are inflicting the most damage.

Be better, try harder, get smarter. Point the gun inward, finger on the trigger. Stay like that for years, a heartbeat away from obliteration. White knuckle it through life, always waiting for clarity and distinct definitions of right and wrong, mistaking that for liberation.

My internal cop is not as loud as she once was, but she shows up here and there, often without me even noticing. When I listen to my cop, I make safe, stilted work that only reaches the shallows. I sand down my edges, making sure nothing I say could possibly be used against me.

But seeing as I’m close to entering my fifth decade and Shit is Really Off Out There, I’m doing this thing where I’m trying to zoom out and enter the mythic instead, which just seems good preparation for my crone years. Be another kind of being, one who sails the sea, rides the rails, judges less, questions more. The shapeshifting wizard, unafraid to peer into dark realms without being consumed by them. A plumber of depths, an ascender into light, a being who knows that it just doesn’t all add up neatly.

This tension has new stakes now that I’m moving into this new role of teaching Zen. People come to the zendo expecting wisdom, guides who have their shit together enough to point toward liberation. The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m supposed to help people see their internal cops while mine still tries to run the show. And yet how else would I recognize it when the cop takes over?

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.” The revolution doesn’t end because the conditions never stop changing, and change creates tension. The work is to notice the gap between what we know and what we fear, and to keep going anyway. To stay present to who we’re becoming, not who we were.

I started my first blog in 2003, and wrote under a pseudonym for years. I worked in corporate PR at the time, and I kept my personal and professional worlds very separate. “Jane Donuts” was sharp, irreverent, and free. She could say anything because no one knew who she really was.

Then in 2011, Salon ran a personal essay I wrote about struggling to be productive after leaving my corporate job to freelance. This was long before productivity discourse and the ensuing backlash, but it hit a nerve. I must have shared it on Twitter, even though I wasn’t really “out” as Sara Campbell the PR person at the time. A journalist from a popular tech blog that I often worked with found me through the essay and asked if I was the same Sara Campbell who sent him press releases and arranged interviews with executives, and I never replied.

I was creeping up on being a person who could articulate the absurdities of modern work culture without fear of repercussion, but I just wasn’t there. I didn’t feel like I could live in both worlds as a person who both made a living off of high profile PR work and also critiqued the culture (and companies) that underwrote it. Whether I could have is debatable. What I know is that in my mind, trying to do both was flying too close to the sun.

At some time during those years, I casually mentioned my creative writing in an interview for a job I was really excited about. I didn’t get the job because the executive I’d met with said he didn’t think I would be 100% dedicated to it. Just thinking about it still makes me angry, because it seemed to prove the cop right: that speaking the truth would cost me.

But I kept writing anyway. And ironically, some people hired me because of my personal work — they wanted help speaking from the heart.

And yet here I am, 124 issues into the newsletter I started to speak the unfiltered truth as I saw it, and I still feel like I have to pry myself open with a crowbar to get anything honest on the page.

For years, I figured eventually the cop would see all the evidence and update its priors, and I’d finally be free of this exhausting back-and-forth. But no matter how much counter-evidence I accumulate, the cop is still there. Which has led me to wonder: What if the issue isn’t that the cop is outdated or irrational, but that I’ve been waiting for a kind of certainty that doesn’t exist? If I’m channeling the wizard, creating from within paradox is the only way.

Because the thing is, the journalist could have used my essay against me. That executive did decide my interest in creative writing made me a bad hire. What the cop gets wrong isn’t the existence of risk, it’s the idea that something being risky means it shouldn’t be done.

There is no amount of evidence that will make the next story from my life feel completely safe to share, because that kind of safety is a mirage. Life is dynamic. I’m always changing. The conditions are always changing. What felt right to share last year might not be right today. What felt too naked yesterday might be exactly what needs to be said now.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying I’m back and am planning to publish weekly through the end of the year. Not to prove the cop wrong, but to practice being in a relationship with her.

The cop will still be there next week. And the week after that. And I’ll still be here too, wrestling with her and feeling salty and insecure about it. That’s the work. That’s the revolution. And because I’ve given up on it ever being finished, I have a way to, once again, begin.

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Thanks for reading, as ever. See you next week.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.