Playing our Way to a Better World
An interview about fighting dragons and changing the world
Last week, I recorded an episode of the Questify Your Life podcast with Sierra Grandy, who I’ve been a huge fan of for quite some time. Sierra’s philosophy is at once simple and grand: Turn your life into an adventure, and you’ll find that mundane things become enjoyable and the hard things more likely to get done.
I’ve followed an approach similar to this, albeit less formally, for quite a few years now, and Sierra’s tools have given me the opportunity to expand this thinking into my advocacy world.
If you’d like to watch the full conversation, which I highly recommend, you can do so at the bottom of the article! I’m also going to share a few additional reflections I’ve had since we talked in the article down below. But before I do, I want to share a few wins from this week!
The European Court of Justice has ruled that same sex marriages must be recognized across the entire European Union. Woohoo!! (EuroNews)
Yesterday, a deep-red Tennessee district held a special election for a vacant seat in the house of representatives. What should have been an easy republican victory turned into a nail-bitingly close race. Though the republican candidate ultimately won by 9 points, Trump’s lead last year was over 20 points and this close race has many high-power republicans panicking about the impending midterm defeat of their party. I found a lot of joy reading this article and seeing what seems to be a pretty genuine sense of doom among the countless republicans who requested to speak anonymously: Politico
There have honestly been a lot of non-queer specific wins that are still major wins for all of us, including resistance against ICE, efforts to push ranked choice voting, republican pushback against trump extremism, and more. Check out the latest good news roundup on Chop Wood, Carry Water!
If you missed my session on going home for the holidays last month, or you just can’t get enough of me talking, I’ll be hosting a similar session in collaboration with TransFamily Alliance on December 17th! The session is free and all are welcome! RSVP here: bit.ly/lgbtq-holiday-joy
Okay! Back to nerding out. I had so much fun talking to Sierra about changemaking and the power of joy. In particular, our conversation focused on the idea of…
Dragon Quests
Which are essentially a fun analogy to conceptualize the advocacy battles closest to your heart. I’m a huge fan of this analogy for a variety of reasons. It emphasizes planning, resources, community, and healing, as well as pointing out that if you want to actually accomplish anything, you’re going to have to focus on one dragon at a time while being aware of the other dragons, knowing you might get to others eventually.
It’s saying that in this moment, with my one body and one sword, I should throw myself into one battle. The other reason I love this analogy is because I think the playfulness, for me at least, makes the concept of the fight suck a little bit less. When I get ready to give a difficult testimony, for example, I listen to theme music from Game of Thrones. When I strength train at the gym, I imagine myself to be a powerful warrior, keeping myself and my community safe. At the end of a long day, I imagine myself returning to the fireside camp, tending to my wounds, and reveling in the stories of bravery and defeat from other adventurers around me.
It’s hard to show up every day for a bureaucratic nightmare intent on treating me like a nameless target. When I give myself the opportunity to play, I still have my eyes wide open about how frightening or dangerous the situation might be, but I have the ability to keep showing up because I use fun to make the challenges more powerful.
This is a critical reminder that I will come back to again and again. Human brains are highly efficient machines, and a big part of this efficiency is built through training and subconscious thought that’s very Pavlovian. Our brain learns what things happen at the same time: It’s how we remember routines, or use mnemonic devices, or become experts at a trade.
When we only ever engage in advocacy actions that are exhausting and not fun or that feel like they don’t do anything, like calling a hostile legislator on the phone every day or attending certain protests, our brains associate feelings of exhaustion or powerlessness or unhappiness with the concept of advocacy. This then means that the second we start to think about advocacy, about doing things that really matter and that really make a difference, our brains understand that the next step we’re going to want is to feel bad.
If I wrote here, “the rest of this email is going to be full of actions you need to take”. Do you feel the resistance coming up, the anxiety, or the guilt about not doing it, or the exhaustion about the effort required? How does your brain attempt to help out? All this training contributes to a false hierarchy in our minds, an inverted graph saying that the worse something feels, the more important it is.
The more uncomfortable, more hostile, or exhausting, an action is, the more it matters. This is a mindset that is going to send us positively hurtling towards burnout and cynicism.
Yes, sometimes you need to eat your vegetables. We take to the streets. We make unpleasant phone calls. We sign petitions with no idea if they’ll reach their intended recipients.
But advocacy that we have fun doing and that makes us more likely to show up again and again will make the biggest impact by far because we will actually keep doing it. Whatever little voice in your head tells you that if you’re having fun, it’s because you’re not serious enough, consider telling it to take a hike.
If you’re ready to start incorporating play into your advocacy practice. Here are a few starting pointers:
Give yourself a theme song that makes you feel energized and powerful. Create some form of ritual, either mental or physical, that involves using this theme song to put on your armor and step into your power before undertaking an advocacy action. One of my theme songs for my adventurer-self is Free by Florence and the Machine.
Spend time reflecting on what makes something fun for you. Is it being with a certain group of people, certain type of activity or a certain time of day, the presence of music or good food, visibility of impact? Spend time thinking about what kinds of initiatives might involve these sources of fun, or how you can incorporate these into your existing actions
Plan initiatives that get you excited. This might include designing cool, hand-drawn posters to hang up around your neighborhood or city letting trans people know you think they’re cool. Asking a local queer-owned or allied business if you can host a bake sale fundraiser outside of their store for an organization that you believe in. Starting a book club for books that help you dream of liberation. It could be anything!
I’d love to hear from you about how you experience fun and whimsy in your own changemaking practice! What does it look like for you to slay your dragons?
If you want to learn more about how I approach my dragon quest on the fight for trans rights and how Sierra approaches it and her fight for the neurodivergent community, I highly recommend taking some time to check out the episode here via spotify:
or on Youtube here:
Thank you Ben. Your joy is contagious 💖
Love it. My kids have long teased me that I've made a life out of a series of side quests. Even though I accomplish things that some people are big, in my mind, it's more palatable if I think about it as a side quest. I'm actually not sure what the main quest is anymore because all the side quests overtook the main thing long ago :)