Tolerating Discomfort

Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

I had the privilege earlier this fall to work with the staff and board of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) in Provincetown, Massachusetts as they took on the challenging work of building practices and systems to accelerate and sustain equity for PAAM artists, educators, students, visitors, staff and volunteers.

We met at a large table covered in paper, in a studio full of an organized clutter of easels and printmaking supplies. The sun streamed through a glass ceiling, and when I stepped outside on our breaks, I breathed in salty air from the harbor just across the street. Inside, as I introduced the day, I said, “This will not be a safe space.”

That declaration was met with surprise on many faces around that table. I went on to explain that the work of driving equity is necessarily uncomfortable, that – given the variety of human experience – harm was inevitable. Accepting that reality was necessary, I suggested, in order to engage in the everyday work of driving change.

Equity is not a destination. It’s change; it’s a road. The work we did those first two days was mostly about personal practice, shaping one’s own behavior to drive change in relationships, one of the most critical leverage points for organizational change. Next time we meet, we’ll focus on systems. Importantly, we’ll build guardrails – made of things like policies, processes, mindsets, and agreements – against the kinds of things that will ruin the road.

It's pretty easy to imagine some of the things that will ruin change defined by more people thriving, and behaving in ways that others can thrive as well. Organizations committed to equity can’t tolerate bigoted behavior toward any socially identified group of people.  Persistent bias, ignorance, and harm can’t be tolerated. Nor can punishment or diminishment.

In that studio at PAAM, I put a poster on the wall, with a drawing of a road framed by guardrails, with  threatening arrows pointing in, representing each intolerable thing. The surprising arrow, to many, is intolerance of discomfort.

When activist and writer Loretta Ross teaches courses at Smith College on social change and justice, she begins by advising her students, “If you need a trigger warning or a safe space, I urge you to drop this class.”

I put up another poster on the wall, this one with two columns. On one side a list of intolerable things, on the other the things that people must tolerate once they commit to the forever work of driving equity.

Expressions of hurt, frustration, fear or anger are on that list. So are honest bias and ignorance. So are mistakes, even mistakes that cause harm.

Ross calls these “accidents,” and she is decidedly against intolerance of those kinds of missteps, even when they are arguably fueled by pervasive and systematized mindsets about things like race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, and dis/ability. She cautions that while harm should not be ignored, discomfort should also not be exaggerated. “Every time somebody disagrees with me,” Ross says, “it’s not ‘verbal violence.’ ”  It’s uncomfortable, she insists, not intolerable.

Moreover, when discomfort with disagreement leads to intolerance reflected in shaming responses, it backfires. Molly Crockett, a professor at Princeton University who studies moral outrage online, has found that shaming makes people more resistant to change than they were before they made their mistake. Many other researchers, she says, have discovered the same dynamic.

So, in our work with organizations as well as in schools, we encourage tolerance for mistakes. We also counsel those who make mistakes to practice accountability. We also suggest learning to live with others’ decisions to limit or withdraw from relationships in which harm, even if it was not intended, has occurred.  Sometimes a working relationship is required but if someone refuses to go beyond that, it’s not intolerable. It’s uncomfortable.

It’s also uncomfortable to experience harm, and then have to navigate a working relationship anyway. It’s uncomfortable to make mistakes and acknowledge them. It’s uncomfortable to see my own biases, limitations of my perspective, and holes in my knowledge of histories and patterns of harms.

And precisely because humanity is defined by almost infinite perspectives, I will always be caught off guard by biases I didn’t realize I’d had. Human history is too long and complex for anyone to know all of it, and I cannot know the hurt and tender places in everyone I meet. So, I will inevitably misspeak or act. I will inevitably cause harm. And others will inevitably harm me.

And my gosh that’s uncomfortable to know. Really, really uncomfortable. Sometimes I get defensive about it. I get combative. I deny or withdraw. In short, I become intolerant of discomfort.

But intolerance of the inevitable doesn’t make sense.  Learning to cope with it does.

When I finally accepted that I will be inevitably uncomfortable in this work, I actually felt relief. I also became a better proponent of change. Intolerance of discomfort steals energy from accountability. It steals energy from practicing curiosity, grace, non-violence, compassion, and steadiness. It distracts from critiquing and rebuilding the systems of which I’m a part.

Those are the things that drive real change, which comfort never has.