Hi Reader,
Yesterday I spent a full day cooking soup.
Today I’m lying on my couch with a fever, remembering pandemic war rooms.
I got my covid and flu shots yesterday, and I spent the twelve hours before my symptoms hit cooking up a storm to prep.
A roasted acorn squash and ginger soup, simmering low and sweet. A riff on avgolemono, homey and cozy and the perfect sick day soup. An overnight slow cooker of bone broth made from the scraps, for when I can't stomach much else.
I always get knocked out by the covid vaccines — a fever, chills, migraine, body aches, the works — every year, for the last five years. The body stays keeping the dang score.
And last night, lying on my couch as the symptoms started to hit, my body remembered more than just the physical toll.
It remembered the pandemic response work. I was deployed to a state’s pandemic response in the fall of 2020, asked to design an equity strategy six months in to an already-raging pandemic.
We spent that fall and winter constantly fighting. In true government bureaucracy, we had meetings before the meeting and meetings after the meeting — the pre-meeting strategy, the post-meeting debrief.
But we weren’t arguing over the minor details of grant funding or an unintentional interpersonal mishap. We spent those pre-meetings outlining the ethical, moral, political, scientific, and financial arguments for why incarcerated people should have access to vaccines, quickly.
We spent the post-meetings grieving when we lost the fight, again, again, and again.
Somatic memory is a bitch of a thing.
Most of us lived, and many people died.
And now I light white candles, and cook soup, and remember.
People sometimes ask me: But my problem is too big for this conflict midwifing thing. My organization is too far gone, my team is too checked out, the systems we face are just too much.
And I want to tell them — I know what “too big” and “too much” feel like.
I didn’t just start thinking about conflict after a dissolution that cost me one of my most foundational relationships, or even as an eldest immigrant daughter where default mode is mediation — although both of those are true, too.
I’ve been analyzing conflicts for years. High stakes ones. Systemic and structural ones. Life and death ones.
I spent those pandemic months facilitating ethical and systemic wars, with so many people’s lives on the line. I redesigned government structures to embed disability justice throughout, and I fought to put “discrimination” on the official CDC checklists.
Here’s what I know:
There’s the kind of conflict that destructs — where relationships end, trauma get etched into our neural pathways, racism continues and gets enforced — and people die.
And there is the kind of conflict that generates — the kind that repairs relationships, shifts racist ableist systems in real time, saves lives.
Generative conflict transforms the realm of what is possible.
The workplace tension that’s been festering for six months? The family fracture that keeps you up at night? The organizational breakdown that makes you want to quit?
Those conflicts carry the same existential weight as my pandemic war rooms did.
Not because the stakes are identical — but because the systemic fracturing we’re living through right now shows up everywhere:
in our meetings, in our text threads, in the way we lose each other, over and over — when we could be finding each other instead.
We can practice the skills that keep us creating, living, making. We can learn to generate instead of destruct.
Join me at this week’s Conflict Clinic, will you?
Let’s practice the kind of conflict that saves lives — including our own.
