I Don’t Come Here to Change Them

I want to be honest with you about something.

I’m not sure it’s going to get better.

I know that’s not what we’re supposed to say. We’re supposed to rally, right? To remind you that we’ve faced hard times before, that the arc of history bends toward justice, that light always wins in the end.

And maybe it does. But right now, looking at the state of the world: the venom in political discourse, the way social media has learned to feed on division like a fire feeds on oxygen, the wars, the climate, the slow crumbling of systems that quite frankly don’t work too well for too many… I find it hard to make that promise. Even to my kids.

The truth is I think it might get worse before it gets better.

There. I said it.

And I’m saying it not to frighten you, but because I think pretending otherwise is its own kind of harm.

If you’re a woman who cares , I mean really cares, the kind of caring that lives in your guts and keeps you awake at night, then you already know this. You’ve felt the weight of it sitting in your nervous system like a stone.

You know how it is… The news arrives before you’ve had your first cup of tea. Social media has made our grief someone’s content and outrage equals engagement. Truly- the only “viral” post I’ve ever had was where I was shocked, shattered and visibly outraged at men hurling missiles again.

In all of this, it becomes very hard to remember who you actually are and what you actually believe, separate from the relentless noise of it all.

This is the real danger, as I see it.

The danger that in response to the noise we’ll quietly withdraw. That the women most needed … the empathic ones, the ones with the long view, the ones who can hold complexity without drama… we will disappear inside our shells. That we will stop leading. And flip to survival in the face of nervous system overwhelm.

I keep coming back to a story about a clergyman called Abraham Johannes Muste (AJ). A lifelong pacifist who, near the end of his life, stood outside the White House night after night during the Vietnam War, holding a candle in solitary protest. Anne Lamott tells the story in her book Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

One rainy night, a reporter approached him and asked: “Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?”

He replied softly: “Oh, I don’t do it to change the country. I do it so the country won’t change me.”

Muste died just weeks later, in February 1967. That candle was one of the last acts of his life. An old man, out in the rain, refusing to be changed.

I think about that a lot.

Because I think that’s the real work, right now. Not fixing everything. Not even fixing anything, necessarily (although it’s hard for me as a consummate fixer!)

But the more important work right now is perhaps just staying intact. Staying ourselves. Refusing to let the cynicism and the cruelty and the helplessness colonise us from the inside.

So what does that actually look like?

For me, it comes down to two things, neither of them dramatic.

The first is beauty. The simple deliberate act of noticing it. The quality of light when the mist hangs over the valley I see from my bedroom window early in the morning. Playing Coldplay's “We Pray” for the millionth time and remembering other souls are feeling too. It’s the beauty of breaking down in giggles with my kids after my befuddled perimenopausal brain calls my daughter’s piano book “magical tunes for ten toes” (instead of the obvious tunes for ten fingers!)

Beauty is not a luxury when the world is burning. It is, I think, a form of fuel. It keeps the nervous system from collapsing entirely into threat. It reminds us that the world contains more than the worst of itself. And god that matters right now.

The second is community. Real community. Not the network kind where you abandon yourself to fit in and struggle to be noticed. But the spaces where you can arrive as you actually are. Where you can bring the fear and the grief alongside the hope and the laughter, and have all of it held. Where you don’t have to be the strong one, or the sorted one, or the one who’s definitely got it together.

I see this every single day in our One of many community. Women who arrive carrying enormous weight, and find that they don’t have to carry it alone. Women who are reminded, through being truly seen, that they still know who they are.

That reminder turns out to matter enormously. Because when you know who you are, you can’t be so easily changed by what’s out there. You have an internal compass that the noise can’t quite reach.

We are not going to fix this world by ourselves. We don’t have to. But we do have to stay in it … present, awake, and as much ourselves as we can possibly manage.

Because Muste was right. The most radical thing any of us can do right now is simply this: refuse to be changed by it.

That's what our One Woman Conference is about this year. Not relentless positivity. Not solutions to problems that are genuinely enormous.

It’s about coming together to remember ourselves. To find the beauty and the connection that keep us intact. To light each other’s candles.

I’d love for you to be there.

Our intention is simple. To support professional women to handle the day-to-day so they can unleash the bigger impact they feel called to make in the world.

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