This week, I realized something huge

What if… my career choice of fundraising was in fact a trauma response?

What if… what if… I was nurtured to become a fundraiser? 

I am the eldest daughter, when I was little I was parentified, encouraged to solve everyone’s problems, have no boundaries, be a doormat, take care of others, think of myself last, be a leader, save the world.

This dovetails really nicely with most nonprofit fundraising jobs.

You are absolutely rewarded in the nonprofit sector for trying to see yourself as a savior.

Someone who can help other people, to the detriment of your own boundaries. 

Look at the average job duties of a fundraiser or nonprofit leader. You take on being the volunteer coordinator, events director, grants manager, major gifts officer, focusing on relationships and making nice with donors and staff and board and and and… other duties as assigned. 

Taking care of people seems normal for very little in return seems normal. It’s how we were raised. And… asking for more gets you punished. So this sector attracts managers who devalue their own labor. And they go on to encourage their direct reports to take the same crappy standards. 

And the cycle goes on and on. 

So for years, I did that. I did that inside of nonprofits then I assumed it was my job as a consultant as well.

I worked hard to make online conferences, workshops, webinars, consulting to help nonprofit folks and SAVE them from working for low wages at bad workplaces.

Welp, turns out that was a trauma response!

Trying to convince nonprofit leaders with LOGIC to treat their workers better. Hah! Like that’s gonna work!

Not when this system is set up on unspoken trauma and white supremacy!

Not when we are still throwing disabled people under the bus by asking people to come back to the office, do events, no masks, no nothing.

Your job is not your family. Even if it brings out the same responses in you.

But as you heal… you start to realize how this dynamic is toxic, and you don’t have to play in this space anymore. 

I don’t have to keep making those choices.

YOU don’t have to keep making these choices. 

I don’t have to keep doing fundraising in an environment that fosters no boundaries and giving until you’re used up. 

Why? Because just like in my family, I no longer have to strive to prove myself worthy of love, promotion, attention. 

I can just LET IT GO. 

What if YOU could just let it go too?

What if you could do the least? Do the bare minimum?

What if you’ve fallen into a pattern…

And mistaken it for your identity? 

And you can now step outside of it?

What if you bought into the savior martyr idea and you mistook it for your identity?

Who would you be if not a fundraiser, a nonprofit person, an overgiver?

What if now you can step outside of it?

Who would you be now? 

I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night, and bawled my eyes out.

I learned to let it all go, but at such great personal cost.

Getting sick.

Burning out with fundraising jobs.

Burning out with my family.

We are here for such brief periods of time, and it’s hard to deal with family immigrant trauma- waiting for people to make better choices- seeing they will not.

This is shadow grief.

Shadow grief is when we mourn people who are still alive.

I’m only now realizing how much grief and rage I pent up, for so long.

I’ve had different aspects of grief rear their heads for the last 4 years, but it’s only been in the last year that I had to stop and sit with this hard feeling.

It won’t go away if you ignore it. It is still there.

I had to ask myself how many things I wanted were constructed.

I have to mourn what I thought the nonprofit sector was, seeing it as a greater good, when in fact it’s… just covering up a lot of harm. It’s covering the harm we do to our own people, primarily. I’m mourning it as I’m leaving it. 

People now ask me about my business and I just kind of look at them. Like, what’s the point? 

I got a sponsorship at an event and gave the benefits to someone else, because I don’t want to promote my business. 

It feels so meaningless, so empty. So fake, when thousands of people are still dying from COVID, getting Long COVID, and dead, dying and suffering in the ongoing genocides in Ukraine and Palestine. 

I honestly don’t know how to integrate this loss into the cacophony of grief that exists within me already.

How do I layer this, the most personal of griefs, onto the colossal, collective grief we all feel at the ongoing genocide?

I have no clue.

All I know is that this movie and this moment remind me of the frailty and fleetingness of our lives.

This is the thing capitalism promises to help you forget-

Your mortality.

Make no mistake: we are all frail; and our lives are fleeting.

This year I got to watch my garden grow, and now I am watching it die. And that’s the rhythm of nature.

We are all going to die, plain and simple.

And so I’m struck even harder than I usually am at the callousness of the world we’ve built — and how utterly unfit it is for such fragile and temporary beings like us.

Which leads me to some questions…

What to do with all of this grief?

What use could it be?

Is it possible to take this impossible grief and build something?

Something that uses our radical imagination, and makes a beautiful new reality?

Can we take the unbearable pain and honor it?

Can we learn from this pain?

I have to believe we can.

And I have to believe that, fundamentally, the overwhelming majority of us want that.

And so the only thing I can reasonably do in this moment of loss is continue to fight for that — for my lost friends and family members, and my lost brothers and sisters the world over.

Donating to Palestinians fleeing their homeland.

Asking my body what I need when I feel overwhelmed.

Listening, and trusting that my body knows best.

Walking away from the overwork. Creating better boundaries.

And listening more than ever to that still, small voice inside that says, “NO.”