The Institutions Have No Clothes
It's all just labor under capitalism
Last week, there was a day at work in which I attended six straight hours of meetings, one droning right onto the next. From 9am to 3pm I “circled back” and “put things in the parking lot” and even suggested we “take this offline,” — an utterly meaningless phrase at a remote job. I tried my hand at playing politics — that thing you must do in a meeting-centric job with insecure leaders whose delicate little egos can bust like a crystal glass if you accidentally emit just the right frequency — by carefully preparing talking points artfully designed not to ruffle feathers. I smiled and said, “What a good idea!” while gripping a pen so hard in my fist ink ran between my fingers.
I was practicing because a handful of tense calls over the previous days left me curled in a tight ball sobbing on my office floor. It must be the shrillness of my voice, because I have a knack for finding that frequency that makes blood drip down from the nostrils of the powerful and the powerful have a knack for convincing me that I am, in fact, not only horrible at my job but also a horrible person.
I reached out for guidance from no fewer than three industry professionals who all assured me that I am very good at my job (which I hope means very good at telling stories and not very good at responding to emails — which lately seems to be my actual job), but suggested that I am not, however, very good at playing the game. In a corporate setting (oh yes, a nonprofit is absolutely a corporation) I completely lose my ability to “grin and bear it,” and instead end up acting something like this:
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And this:
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And also this:
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I’d like to claim that it’s my background in journalism and my broader career as a communicator that makes me so direct and action-oriented (and also makes it next to impossible for me to schmooze my way through anything, least of all a meeting in which no one seems to know what they’re doing), but I’ve been like this since childhood. I don’t play games or strategically dance around things to get what I want; instead, I ask nicely, directly, ONCE, and if I’m met with defensive excuses, I find the one-liner that will cut through their ego like a blade. I wouldn’t survive more than an hour as a politician.
By C.D. Cunningham
With every job hop, I delusionally assume that THIS will be the place where I can finally be myself; where we don’t bullshit each other, where we push each other to be better, where leaders actually lead instead of sinking into the self-importance of their to-do lists. And every time I am left a gaping hole of disappointment. Gob-smacked. It is soul-crushing to look up from your desk one day and realize the emperor has no clothes. But when you realize your coworkers legitimately can’t see his naked, flabby ass or can’t be bothered to bring it up, that’s the day your soul actually begins to die. It is then that you are left with three options:
Leave the safety and stability of the emperor’s regime and hope there’s another emperor out there who isn’t walking around, dick out: There’s gotta be penis-free health insurance out here somewhere!
Accept that you’ll never be able to unsee the emperor’s nudeness and try to mimic the coworkers who have sold their souls to ignore it: Sure, you gotta see a wrinkly scrotum 9-5, but that’s why we have work/life balance!
Attempt, over decades of your one wild and precious life, to slip a pair of undies on the emperor without him noticing: If we stick around long enough watching this old man’s pimply bottom, we can change things from within!
For most of my 20s, I did want to belong to the institution of nonprofits. They seemed, on paper, to be a beautiful hub of thought, creativity, and compassion. I was wooed by the dreams of rigorous campaign strategizing paired with learn-ed mentors who had spent their careers honing their craft.
But within two years of my first nonprofit job, I realized:
Everyone is winging it and never received any training on how to clothe an emperor.
The people who want to develop strategies to clothe the emperor burn out the fastest.
The people who can’t see the emperor (or simply don’t care that his jiggly bits are flopping about) last the longest and receive the biggest rewards.
To be clear, the emperor in this metaphor is not a person (don’t @ me), but a larger institution. The nonprofit industrial complex perhaps. Or maybe just capitalism more broadly.
In The Book of (More) Delights (the A+ compendium to The Book of Delights) Ross Gay speaks to the nature of institutions (specifically academic institutions) saying, “We may not, some of us anyway, be that interested in belonging to the institution…We may love that it pays the bills, but we may not be that into the corporation it has become.”
I do find it pretty nice that this little nude dude covers my rent and provides me with okay health insurance at just $28/month. But I am not, as Gay says, into the corporation this whole nonprofit thing has become. And because of that, I always feel a little outside the circle, or as Gay calls it, “unbelonging.”
“Unbelonging requires some discipline, some practice, because, and this is purely conjectural, speculative, I think Imposterism is often co-diagnosed with optimistic-diverse-thought, the belief (hope!) that if we apply a little elbow grease and keep a good attitude our very presence in the institution will transform that institution. Changing it from the inside, we sing-say, throwing cute little uppercuts through the air.”
I’ve thrown too many cute little uppercuts and been made the head of enough “fun committees” (seriously) to know that my presence and forced good attitude never gets the emperor to put on his pants. The institution will always have more time, money, and resources to preserve itself than the individual will have in elbow grease to dismantle it from within.
So what is the desk worker to do?
Activist, poet, writer, teacher, (and more!) adrienne maree brown speaks regularly about composting organizations and institutions once they have fulfilled their missions. This way, the organization can either recreate itself to serve a different purpose or open up those donor dollars for someone else.
As I’ve also heard it said, “Try to organize yourself out of a job.”
I am skeptical of any institution that has been around for more than a decade and hasn’t undergone some kind of major strategic reckoning. I am all for slow, regenerative work, but I also know how much the landscape (physical, metaphorical, and political) can change in 10 years. I’m not all that interested in legacy or statements that claim “We’ve been doing this for 50 years!” I don’t find it particularly salient to brag about your failure to meet the moment for the last half-century
When the institution won’t do the composting and the emperor won’t put a goddamn t-shirt on, I take matters into my own hands. I feed my metaphorical banana peels and coffee grounds to my metaphorical creative worms and adorn myself in the most luxurious metaphorical clothing so that to look at me out there tending my luscious creative garden in my flowing royal robes might make the average corporate lackey gasp with confusion. Putting the elbow grease back into the institution leaves me sobbing on my office floor. So instead, I put it back into my own life, right where it belongs.
More and more I wonder if it’s even possible to commodify advocacy and activism — which is to say, when you institutionalize dismantling institutions, have you really solved any problems?
Which is also to say I am grateful for that paycheck and the groceries I bought with it this week, and also the gas I put in my car (while I fight oil and gas development on public lands — oh, how complex our lives are!). And I’m also grateful for a fun team tackling big issues and maybe all I’m asking is for fewer emails and half as many meetings and for the belonging — those folks who can’t see the emperor has no clothes — to perhaps acknowledge every once in a while that maybe it could be possible they’ve glimpsed a nutsack here and there when they’d rather prefer not to. All I’m asking is that every once in a while, we at least try to compost the shit.