I have been thinking about what happens to people who spend their lives trying to transform the conditions around them, and about what we have normalized as the cost of that work.

I know something about this terrain because I have tried to do transformational work both from within institutions and outside them. I have learned that doing the work of transformation does not protect you from being destroyed by the very systems you are trying to change. Institutional location does not necessarily make you safe, and working outside institutions does not necessarily make you free. The forms of exposure change, but the person carrying the work can become precarious in either place.

Inside institutions, people may have salaries, titles, benefits, colleagues, and professional standing, and still discover that those forms of belonging are more conditional than they understood them to be. The work of transformation can place pressure on an institution's understanding of itself, its relationships, its distribution of authority, or what it has been willing to see. A person may be welcomed because they represent change and then become increasingly exposed when the change they carry becomes consequential. Their work can be valued while their authority is diminished. Their presence can become subject to scrutiny. Their livelihood, reputation, or future can suddenly feel much less secure.

When this happens to one person, the consequences are not necessarily contained to that person. Others who occupy similar terrain feel it. They recognize the conditionality of their own belonging and understand the message about what may happen when a person becomes too disruptive to an existing coherence. A loss that appears individual can therefore enter a much larger collective body.

Outside formal institutions, people doing transformational work encounter other forms of exposure. Across this hemisphere, people are organizing and leading under conditions that can include surveillance, criminalization, political persecution, economic retaliation, organized criminal power, state violence, threats, displacement, and danger to themselves and their families. They may be carrying enormous political responsibility without the institutional protections that would normally surround someone doing difficult and consequential work.

I do not think these experiences are equivalent. Our proximity to power, race, class, gender, citizenship, geography, institutional standing, economic security, and history shape what each of us carries and what happens when we become exposed. But I do think there is a condition we need to understand across these differences: people engaged in consequential transformation often encounter or deepen precarity when their work touches arrangements organized to reproduce themselves.

I have also learned something more personal from moving through this terrain. When a person survives rupture more than once, their capacity to survive can itself become part of what others take for granted. People see that you rebuilt and assume you can rebuild again. They see that you continued without support and begin to believe support was unnecessary. They see the work that emerged after the destruction and can lose sight of what was destroyed, what it cost to continue, and what parts of a life do not simply regenerate because the work did.

There is a danger in this. We can begin to confuse people's capacity to carry extraordinary conditions with evidence that those conditions are acceptable. We can admire courage while normalizing the circumstances that require it. We can celebrate resilience while failing to resource the life of the person who keeps having to recover. We can become so accustomed to people doing transformative work under conditions of precarity that sacrifice begins to look like an ordinary qualification for leadership.

We cannot only concern ourselves with what people are trying to change. We have to concern ourselves with what happens to human beings while they are changing it.

There is an internal landscape that must be resourced. We need ways of remaining in relationship with ourselves when institutions, political forces, or public narratives attempt to tell us who we are. We need the ability to distinguish what has happened to us from what it means about us. We need memory, discernment, spiritual and emotional grounding, beauty, creativity, love, and relationships that connect us to a life larger than the conflict we are carrying. We need places inside ourselves that cannot be granted by institutional recognition and therefore cannot be entirely withdrawn when recognition disappears.

But I am increasingly wary of speaking about internal capacity without speaking about the world around the person. A coherent human cannot become our name for someone who has simply learned to endure more abandonment. There are conditions no amount of internal work should be asked to compensate for.

Human beings need enough material and relational security to remain capable of choice. We need rest, health care, relationships, protection, and somewhere to go when an institution becomes dangerous or the political terrain changes beneath us. We need people who will remain beside us when doing so becomes inconvenient or costly. We need enough room around our lives that one institutional rupture, one political attack, or one period of economic precarity does not have the power to destroy everything.

What is striking is that we already know this. There are parts of the social-change ecosystem where stable salaries, benefits, paid leave, organizational support, legal and communications capacity, professional networks, and institutional legitimacy are understood as ordinary conditions for doing demanding work over time. I do not think those things are excessive. Their existence demonstrates that we already understand the importance of placing some distance between a human being and every consequence their work may generate.

The question is why we understand that insulation as necessary in some places while normalizing extraordinary exposure in others.

This becomes especially difficult when the institutions with the greatest insulation understand themselves as existing in relationship to movements and people carrying far greater consequence. The problem is not that someone else has protection. The problem is when protection accumulates near resources while precarity remains concentrated near consequence, and we stop experiencing that arrangement as strange.

Perhaps we need to understand insulation differently. Insulation does not have to mean separation from consequence or freedom from accountability. It can mean creating enough stability around a human life that a person can think, choose, recover, take risks, say no, and step away when necessary without losing everything. It can mean knowing that when a person is attacked or exhausted, they will not have to carry everything alone.

This matters because people living closest to rupture often develop forms of knowledge and leadership that become essential to our collective capacity to create viable futures. They learn to perceive consequence, read terrain, understand how relationships hold under pressure, move across difference, make decisions under uncertainty, and continue imagining when existing arrangements have stopped producing believable futures.

But we cannot romanticize the conditions under which those capacities were formed. If rupture teaches something, our responsibility is not to preserve the rupture so that people will keep learning. Our responsibility is to listen to what they know and change the conditions.

Across the hemisphere, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. People are trying to transform institutions, communities, governments, economies, and political arrangements at the same time that many of those arrangements are becoming more punitive, more unstable, or less capable of carrying human life well. The people closest to this work are often being asked to absorb the contradiction between what exists and what must become possible.

So I find myself returning to a question that is both political and deeply human: What do we need to build within ourselves, between us, and around one another so that destruction does not become the price we quietly accept for transformation?

I do not think we can eliminate the risks of consequential work. There will always be moments when telling the truth, refusing an arrangement, building something new, or standing with people under attack carries consequence. But there is a profound difference between accepting that transformation can involve risk and building a political culture that treats the destruction of those carrying it as normal.

A rehumanizing movement cannot do that. It has to care about what happens to people while they are making change, not only about whether change occurs. It has to cultivate the internal capacities that allow us to remain human under conditions we cannot fully control, while building the relational and material conditions that keep those capacities from becoming substitutes for protection.

It has to learn how to surround courage rather than consume it.

And it has to insist that the people through whom another future becomes possible have the right to a future themselves.

Lastly, here is a gift to lift up your spirits.