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#013 — In Conversation with the System
In 2005, I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, setting up the field operation for Women for Women International. By that point, I had been in conversation with a donor agency for several weeks. As an organization, we had been working with women for years, and I was exploring an expansion of our work. The conversations across distance had been substantive, the kind of exchange where two professionals are testing whether the work between them is real.
By the time we met in person, I expected recognition. The warmth of two people who had been doing serious work together and were now meeting each other in a room.
Instead, there was a pause. A small, visible adjustment. The face working to reconcile the person standing before it with the person imagined through our exchanges.
I often fell outside that imagination. They had expected someone older. Or larger. Or white. Or male. Or some combination of these: someone whose body fit the inherited shape of authority and leadership more comfortably than mine did.
Then some version of the same sentence: Oh. I wasn't expecting you.
I respond gently: Well, look at you. You got lucky. You got me.
I was protecting both of us from having to name the moment immediately. The person across from me had already experienced my leadership through the work. What surprised them was its embodiment.
The pause is where the system becomes visible.
Systems live in governments, institutions, policies, and laws. They also live in expectation: in inherited ideas, professional norms, histories of power, and what we have been taught to recognize as credible and authoritative, even after a person has already demonstrated both.
The pause is structural. It lands personally.
Naming the system matters because it restores proportion. I can honor what I experienced without carrying it as evidence against myself. I can also see what entered the room before either of us had spoken.
One thing worth carrying: What in your life have you been treating as personal that may also be structural?
— Judithe
Notes written while a book is becoming.
P.S. The manuscript moves toward beta reader review this month. The book is becoming itself.
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