Choose Joy: Be Wrong!
Today’s challenge is all about surprising yourself!
I continue to be so floored at how quickly this project is spreading joyful change. Thank you all! To give y’all a taste of what I’m working on, the whole first week of The Joyful Choice will be FREE! After that, the daily challenges and ideas will be available only to paid subscribers.
A daily email is a lot of work, and the funds generated here will be used to help support my many, many hours of free work on Good Queer News and through my public events!
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Today’s Challenge:
Take a moment to think of a group of people that you view as hateful or anti-LGBTQ+. Don’t choose a political group or an explicit hate group, rather, notice when you’re tempted to paint a community with a broad stroke. It might be a certain job, a religion, a nationality, a region of the US, etc.
Now, spend 10 minutes searching the web for LGBTQ+ people in that group, and LGBTQ+ allies in that group. You might be surprised at what you find.
I know I love this exercise, and it’s helped me learn about things like the “Ag for All” inclusive agriculture conference, or “Queering the Map”, which you can visit to read short messages from queer folks around the globe—including areas you might have spent a long time hearing were completely absent of queer love + queer joy.
The Why:
One of the things that’s most limiting to our joy is our desire to look for an “enemy”, and to view whole groups of people in the world as against us. The walls between us are far more manufactured than you might think, but we’ll only notice if we’re willing to walk right up to them and take a closer look.
Bias & Stereotypes are not one-directional, and only by having the courage to learn we might be wrong about people, cultures, communities, and more can we start to build a more just world.