Regardless of the situation — asking for a raise, applying for a loan, reminding your flaky friend to put in their share for drinks last Friday — conversations about money are difficult and can activate all kinds of discomfort around how we live our lives. 

But conversations about money or wealth can also be a terrible way of looking at the value of things because context like generational wealth and historical injustice is often missing. Lots of writing about money just pretends that things are easy, or it’s written for people who already have it.  

I wanted to talk to our guest today, Paco de Leon, because her work addresses a lot of the things that are usually unsaid when it comes to finance — how it’s really emotional, and how even though we’re in 2022, our financial system is still rooted in racism and classism. Paco’s advice looks objectively at that, and also speaks to the emotional truths of our own habits around money. 

Paco’s book is called Finance for the People: Getting a Grip on Your Finances, and I don’t even have it on my shelf anymore because I had to press it into the hands of a friend who needed it last week. It talks about things in language that is easy to understand, like we’re real people sometimes struggling to make rent and pay our student loans — not some hot shot investment gurus with hedge funds. The charts and illustrations in the book, also done by Paco, are extremely helpful when it comes to explaining how to face your finances head on. 

We talk about how to start looking at your finances and the pros and cons of debt, and she gives real, actionable, practical advice for how to manage in an economy that can seem like it only works if you already have money. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Julia Furlan

I want to start off with a larger question, which is: Where do you think most people go wrong when it comes to managing their money?

Paco de Leon

I think the first thing that people do wrong is they let their fear paralyze them into doing nothing. Sometimes the nothingness can compound and get even more terrible than it already was. And for a lot of folks, when you finally do look, it’s oftentimes maybe not as terrible as you thought it was going to be. And the fear is much greater than the actual problem. 

I’m definitely trying to help people who are stuck in their own heads or stuck in their own emotions. I want to first tell them, well, that’s completely normal. It’s called being a human being on planet Earth.

Julia Furlan

Why is money so hard to talk about and to think about, in your opinion?

Paco de Leon

I think that we could do like, many, many episodes about why it is. But if I were to sum it up, we live in a society where it’s just not okay to talk about money, and we’ve all internalized that idea. It’s something that we believe.

Julia Furlan

I feel like there’s a really big gap between what is polite and what is true. When you say people don’t want to talk about money, it’s true, intergenerationally, where people have different values around talking about money. What hides in those corners?

Paco de Leon

Oh, a lot of shame. I think a lot of people feel insecure in general. Or they feel a lack of safety, maybe because they grew up in a certain household. So money becomes a proxy for that kind of trauma. It is a very uncomfortable thing to look at and to sit with. And I think here in the US, we’re also confronting a lot of the things that make us uncomfortable about our history. I think, also, talking about money is becoming a lot less taboo.

You can’t bypass these bad feelings by going around them. You just have to confront them head-on. The only way through the forest is through the forest. And there’s a lot of different ways.

People can sit with their feelings and address their feelings. A really common way is talk therapy. Talk therapy played a vital role for me. We just gotta be nice to ourselves and take the time to realize that money feels weird. And especially being a creative freelancer or professional, I think that it’s really hard to untangle this idea of worth and your bank balance based on how much money you’re making.

Julia Furlan

Can you talk a little bit about the lessons that we learn from our families of origin, and how people can let go of the tough things that aren’t helping them?

Paco de Leon

We all grow up and we have caretakers and people that are surrounding us when we’re little creatures becoming bigger creatures. We watch things happen, and we create a narrative based on what we observe, and that creates our own understanding of how money works in the world.

We could look at a really extreme example. The example in the book is a woman who grew up with an abusive father who was an alcoholic, and this father would get his paycheck on payday and he would go to the bar and he would spend almost all of it, get really drunk, come home, and be physically abusive.

Not everybody who experiences this is going to create this connection, but this woman has grown up to equate getting paid with abuse. And so for many, many years she was underpaid. And for many, many years, she would try to educate herself about money and try to understand intellectually why that was. And for her, it took a really long time to understand this connection of “When money comes in, I experience pain.” 

That’s a really extreme example of that. We could look at a more lighthearted example. Like, if you had grandparents who just instilled in you that “you gotta work hard, you gotta work hard. I came to this country and I worked hard.”

That messaging plays out over and over. And for a lot of us, we want to be accepted in our family. So we internalize that messaging, and then we grow up and we’re working hard. They think, well, wow. I followed my grandparents’ advice. I did as they did.

And somehow, inflation is really killing me and I can’t afford a house. I’m not on track for retirement. What’s going on? That’s another way that things that we observe, lessons and  narrative stories, become beliefs about how we think money works in the world.

I suffer from that too. My parents were like, “Go and work for somebody else.” That’s what’s secure. It took me a really long time to unlearn that story and to realize that actually, security’s an illusion and for me, it’s actually more insecure to have one boss be in charge of my whole paycheck.

Julia Furlan

I want to talk a little bit about some of the first steps that you recommend for people to take control of their finances. 

Paco de Leon

The very first thing that I recommend people do to get their financial lives in order is to set aside weekly finance time. I am so annoying about this. It’s really simple. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You find space on your calendar — I would say at least 20 minutes, if you were feeling ambitious, to an hour — and l set it up as a recurring meeting, and keep it sacred. By sacred, I mean guard that time and then just start showing up. You don’t have to create a spreadsheet right away.

I don’t want to scare anyone who’s maybe fearing spreadsheets. The first thing you could do is just wrangle those logins, figure out what your usernames and your passwords are. Then maybe the second week, I would say log in and look at what happened in the last week. How did you spend your money? How much money came in? Just start looking. Is anything in your financial life on fire? What are the steps here, to go from it being completely on fire to putting it out?

Basically, if you don’t have any emergencies or little fires that you need to put out, definitely make a spending plan. 

Julia Furlan 

Okay. I can feel my cortisol levels rising. A spending plan. Okay.

Paco de Leon

So I would say, let’s all just take a deep breath, listen to Beyonce’s new album, whatever you need to do. Scream into your pillow, if that’s what’s going to help calm your nervous system before making your spending plan. But it’s important to understand how much money you need to earn in order to try to live the life that you want to live.

But my approach to a spending plan and to budgeting is to not do it.

Let me give you the caveats here. First, if you’re not earning enough money or you’re just making enough money to meet your needs and to pay your bills, and there’s not a lot left over for fun and all that stuff, you’re gonna have to budget.

That is the harsh reality. And I’m so sorry that you’re there, and it sucks, but you need to do that in order to really get a grip on your money going out. 

If you’re privileged, and you’re earning more where you have a lot more money to play with, then you can kind of create a spending plan in the way that I do it. I set up one checking account called my bills and life checking account. And I have another checking account called my fun and BS checking. And whenever I pay myself, I put money into my bills and life account to take care of all of my necessary expenses.

Then I put money into future things like savings. Whatever’s left over can go into my fun and BS account. It kind of flips the script. Instead of saying, “can I afford it?” it goes, “how do I get to spend this money?” 

Julia Furlan

One thing that I really loved in your writing was how much you highlighted the larger racist and classist underpinnings of these systems. Can you walk me through that a little bit?

Paco de Leon

The more I dug in, the more I kept asking, like, okay, how the hell did we get here? The great thing about America is that if you do have an idea and you do want to make money, it’s pretty easy to do it here. You know, there’s not a lot of restrictions.

Almost anyone can set up a company, even if you’re not from here, you can set up a company and you can make money and that’s amazing, but there’s a huge downfall to that, right? There’s a proliferation of scams happening. And even legit companies are not always doing the best thing for the consumer.

And that’s because things are loose here. So I wanted to address these things because I want to invite people who have felt like they were excluded from learning about money, which feels crazy to say, but there’s a whole bunch of people who have felt that way: “Investing is not for me. Financial planning is not for me. Knowing about the system, not for me.”

I’m gonna lift up the curtain and just say, this is how it’s all going down. We’re gonna be in power soon. 

Julia Furlan

What needs to change about these systems?

Paco de Leon

We need to look at the root of why so many people are in credit card debt and try to address that issue. We need to have a better system where we don’t have to prove creditworthiness based on an equation. That’s not nuanced. And that doesn’t take things into context, because if you have a really bad credit score, that doesn’t really tell us why. It doesn’t say somebody in your family got cancer and you had to figure things out. I think that there’s better ways. It would be cool if you couldn’t go into an infinite amount of debt because of something that’s outside of your control, like getting sick.

If people could access education, become skilled, not go into debt, and then turn around and make a contribution, things would be better.. And I understand why, because people can make money off of the school system. And that’s why it is the way it is. But it’s ultimately gonna cost us more as a society.

Julia Furlan

Let’s say I don’t have a lot of money. I have a lot of student debt, which is the case for a lot of people in the United States.

Let’s say I’m having to choose between paying my rent and paying my student loans. What should I do? How do I address the simple fact of not having enough money and needing to pay rent and student loans?

Paco de Leon

So, this is the hardest part of the job. You have to talk to people who are struggling to make the two ends meet and it’s not a great answer. 

One answer I give is pay the rent, get on an income-based repayment plan with your student loans, and hope for the best. 

The other answer I give is to maybe focus your energies on how to drastically increase your income to eliminate that problem, right? Focus on the problem of earning enough money, instead of focusing on the problem of allocating scarce resources. I hate those answers, and this is the hardest part of the job. You have to really look at if you can move back in with your parents or find another roommate. 

I want to be sensitive to the fact that that’s a reality for people. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Or you can try to go the other way, and just look at it as fire-hosing the problem, by just trying to make enough money so that you have a new set of problems.

Julia Furlan

Wages are really lagging, and that is something that a lot of people across sectors and across age groups are talking about. How do you recommend thinking about that?

Paco de Leon

I think you have to understand how a company works. You have to understand the culture of your organization and what’s even possible there. First of all, because if you’re working as a warehouse worker at Amazon, you’re gonna max out at a certain wage or hourly rate, and they’re gonna abuse the hell out of you.

So understanding the culture of the organization you’re at is gonna help you determine what your play is. So if it’s a bad organization that does not invest in workers, you need to understand that your time at that organization is gonna be short-lived.

In order to earn more money, you’re gonna have to figure out a way to sidestep or work at another company. Do something else. I left the workforce and I started working for myself because I could not fathom my employer paying me enough so that I wasn’t having to ride my bike to work every day or have a garden to save $2 on lettuce every week.

I just couldn’t see that. That could have been my lack of imagination or my limiting beliefs. My own idea of unworthiness, but also combined with the reality that I was cheap labor. I was young, a woman of color, queer, all these things are working against me and it’s the reality of the situation.

So I went around the problem, and I think so many people in our generation are forced to see that reality, right? How can we come up with ways to survive and thrive, given the fact that this is not working for us? Right after the Great rRcession, we saw the gig economy blow up. That was a direct response to, “Oh crap. This isn’t working.” So now we’ll have a weird version of communism where we like to stay in other people’s houses and people drive us around in their cars, okay, great. Let’s do it. 

Julia Furlan

The stock market is just gambling for rich people, right? Like that’s my personal understanding of the stock market.

Paco de Leon

Yeah, what you’re doing is you’re taking money that you don’t need today, which is another way of saying you’re a rich person, right? Because maybe you never need it. You’re just letting your shit grow. Or you just need it in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It’s putting money into companies that you think are gonna do well, and then you get rewarded. You just give them money. It’s really weird, but kind of cool. I don’t know.

Julia Furlan

Actually I think the cool thing about it is that ostensibly, you can learn how to participate in that system.

Paco de Leon

Yes. It’s no longer surrounded by walled gardens anymore. We have these apps where any person could do it. You don’t need a guy and you don’t need $10,000. You could have $25 with some of these platforms and you can get started and understand, like holy crap. All I did was sit around and watch Netflix and I earned a penny. It’s a way to make your money work for you.

Julia Furlan

How does somebody with not a ton of money get involved in the stock market? 

Paco de Leon

Before you start investing, it’s important to have some money saved in an emergency fund. You want to have cash on hand. The most common way a lot of Americans are going to get into investing is through an employer-sponsored retirement plan, like a 401(k), or if you work for a nonprofit.

If you don’t have that available, you can open up a retirement account called an individual retirement account, an IRA, and you can start putting money into that. There’s different investing platforms that you can use. This is very exciting stuff. 

You can use Betterment, which is what I personally use. You can use a classic, like Fidelity or Vanguard. Those are some pretty common players, and that’s how most people get started with investing. Most people, when they invest in a retirement account, they’re going to invest in something called a target date fund.

Disclaimer, you know, I’m not an investment adviser. This is just infotainment for all of you. Please don’t sue me.

Julia Furlan

A lot of people don’t have extra money to spend. Even a three-month emergency fund feels unattainable to them. What do you say to folks who are in that moment?

Paco de Leon

I say that it’s just important to start where you are. Just put a little bit away right now and get into the habit and see what happens and how you feel when you start to see that balance grow. And you might feel frustrated because it’s not growing fast enough, and that’s okay to feel frustrated. I’ve been there before, where I could only put $25 a month and it was embarrassing almost, especially because I had a finance degree, but sometimes that’s the reality. It doesn’t mean that your circumstances today are gonna be your circumstances tomorrow. Life is crazy and weird stuff happens that you don’t think is gonna happen. You’re gonna have to use your emergency funds sometimes. And that’s okay. 

When you start to heal and address your relationship with money, inevitably you start to heal and address your relationship with yourself.

Julia Furlan

 I have one final question, which is, you talk in your book about fucking up the equation. What does that mean?

Paco de Leon

So the equation I’m referring to is the personal finance equation, and you can arrange it however you want, but however much money you make is gonna be equal to how much you spend and how much you save. There’s a lot of ways you can balance that equation.You can try to cut expenses as much as you possibly can, but there’s always gonna be a floor for your expenses.

You’re always gonna have to feed yourself. You’re always gonna have to have shelter. There’s just a floor for expenses. And for me, when I realized that riding my bike and growing a lettuce garden was the best that I could do, I had this kind of epiphany and this awakening that I needed to fuck up the equation, not just kind of move the needle by doing these little things that could cut $50 here and there.

I needed to fuck up the income side. If I was ever going to get out of this cycle of debt, if I was ever going to be able to be in a position where I could help other people. That’s what I mean by fucking up the equation.

Julia Furlan

This is not about you not getting avocado toast or about you not spending your money on lattes. There are moments where you need to just blow up the whole thing.

Paco de Leon

Totally. And there’s a lot of people who are gonna feel really resistant to that, and I invite you to feel whatever you’re feeling. If you’re feeling like this is degrading, why double-click on that? And why is that a problem for you? What deep ingrained messaging belief, narrative, or cognitive bias do you have about making enough money to go beyond just survival and into thriving?

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Your parents may have taught you that “no” is a complete sentence, but actually saying it — or setting a boundary in general — can be tricky. Sometimes, you feel uncomfortable setting the boundary; sometimes, the other person hates it and has a strong reaction. But the fact remains that in your romantic relationships, at work, in your family, and in friendships, you’re going to have to set some boundaries one way or another. 

Boundaries are a way to value yourself, and they don’t have to be scary. Or at least, that’s what our guest today, Nedra Glover Tawwab, writes about in her new book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace. Nedra is a therapist, bestselling author, and relationship expert. We talk about what boundaries are, why they’re so important, and I get some strategies for setting and keeping boundaries even when other people in my life don’t seem to want me to.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Julia Furlan

I want to start with a question that you use to open your book, which is basically, what even is a boundary? 

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Boundaries are statements that make you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. Sometimes it is behaviors that make you feel safe and comfortable. A woman asked me today on Instagram: “How can I set boundaries with my drinking socially?” So that is a behavior. How do you drink less socially?

Sometimes it can be my mother-in-law keeps popping up at my house and you may need to say something to your mother-in-law. So it works in both ways. 

Before writing this book, and for many years, I thought of boundaries as saying no or cutting people off. I have learned that it’s a lot of gray areas. It’s all of these situations that we feel very uncomfortable about in our relationship, it is bigger than “no,” it is bigger than just cutting people off.

Boundaries preserve relationships. Cutting someone off is like the ultimate boundary, right? There are 1,000 other boundaries we can set before cutting people off.

Julia Furlan

Right. Sometimes people think that it’s, as we say in Portuguese, oito oitenta — all or nothing.

But, in fact, there is a lot of flexibility. There’s a lot of space that you can give both yourself and the other person when you’re putting in a boundary. One experience that I’ve had is that if the other person has fewer boundaries or doesn’t really live their life with a lot of boundaries in a particular area, there is resentment.

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Yeah, I think in general, we feel best when people do as we do. You don’t answer emails on vacation. It’s now problematic because it is different from what I choose to do. So it’s really important to acknowledge that boundaries are preferences. It’s not a rule. It’s not a fact. It is just what we choose to do.

I choose not to work after 7:00 pm. It is a preference for me because this is what makes me feel comfortable. There are tons of people who love working in the evenings. It makes them feel fulfilled. Keep doing it, if that’s what you like. I’m saying, I don’t like it. And it’s okay for me to think differently about this thing. And it doesn’t mean that I’m lazy because I’m not doing things like you. It doesn’t mean that I’m inefficient. It just means that my time is my time.

Julia Furlan

One thing that I want to go back to that you said is that boundaries are statements or behaviors that make you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. I would love to know the range of some of those things. What’s a small one and what’s a big one that’s not cutting someone off completely?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

I think a small one is something we did at the beginning of this conversation: making sure we’re appropriately pronouncing each other’s names.

That’s a really small one that can get really annoying, right? If someone’s mispronouncing your name or mislabeling you, sometimes people might be using the wrong pronoun.

It’s never too late to set a boundary. I think we really program ourselves to think like, oh, it’s too late. The moment has passed. You’ve let this person do this thing for six months. You might as well let them do it forever. But now I am recognizing that this is an issue for me.

Julia Furlan

What are some of the larger boundaries that you have guided people on in your work?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

One significant thing that I’ve helped with a ton is helping clients become adults in their relationship with their parents. That is a really big one because it is a struggle to get people to accept that they want to spend holidays differently. They want to maybe not do that yearly family vacation anymore.

They may not want to talk to their parents every single day. There are so many different things that we continue to do just because we’ve been doing them, but they have always bothered us. Like, I don’t want to go over to uncle so-and-so’s house.

Family relationships have been a huge part of the boundaries work that I’ve done. With couples, it has been communicating what your needs are, communicating what you like and what you don’t like because if you are agreeing to spend even this moment, this week with a person, you need to be very clear about what is bothering you. We’re hoping that our partners sort of figure it out. We’re hoping that there is some signal that they receive, that we are secretly bothered by something, and they don’t typically get it.

We get our needs met by communicating them. And that can be really hard. There is this huge, huge, huge thing that I see all the time on social media. I saw a girl saying that when people really love you, you don’t have to tell them how to love you. It’s like, what fairy tale was this in?

Julia Furlan

One of the things that is really hard about boundaries is reckoning with your own feelings around saying it aloud or writing it down. It feels like just the communication of it itself can be its own huge thing.

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Yeah, by unpopular opinion, I do suggest getting it out whichever way you can, in person, by phone, via text or email. Whatever it is, because it is better out than in.

Julia Furlan

People don’t always respect your boundaries, even if you’re specific. Even if you’ve worked really hard to articulate it. There is sometimes a whole dynamic, where the person loves to get under your skin or enjoys the experience of making you upset or teasing you.

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Yeah. I think when people habitually disrespect our boundaries, we have to try something different. I’m thinking of a relationship with someone who could not keep a secret. A solution that you can manage is to not tell this person anything that’s secret because they’ve demonstrated that they cannot respect that boundary.

So how do we change the way we behave with people who demonstrate that they can’t respect your boundaries? There are times where people say, “You know, I know you told me that you didn’t wanna hear me talk about all the terrible things happening in my relationship anymore …” but that’s a wonderful time for you to jump in and say, “I will not listen.”

Julia Furlan

One thing that I want to recognize here, though, is that especially when you’re putting up a boundary with someone that you love and that you really care for, you’re changing the way that something’s going. You’re changing a dynamic. You’re trying to get out of a pattern. There is a grief that can come up, and I’ve felt this grief before where that boundaryless relationship was also a symbol of some special closeness, and you’re having to let go of some of that  closeness. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Is it that you’re letting go of the closeness because you have to let go of the relationship, or are you letting go of the idea that this person could respect the boundary?

So there’s a disappointment that you’re dealing with. You know, I think in being in relationships with other people, the unfortunate risk is being hurt and being disappointed by people. No matter how much people love us, in some way big or small they will disappoint us because it’s so unintentional.

Usually when a person isn’t respecting your boundaries, it’s because they can’t. It is really because they just can’t do this thing you’re asking, or at least I feel like they can’t. 

You’re right. You do have to grieve the loss of who you thought that person could be for you and reconstruct what’s possible with the person that you actually have. Sometimes we will stay in those relationships. We’ll keep doing the same thing, place in the same boundary over and over. But it’s really on us to change the way in which we engage.

I often hear people say, ”My friend always calls me to complain. Every time we talk, they’re complaining.” And I think, every time you talk, are you picking up the phone every time to be complained to?

And I know that’s a really hard boundary to say, “Instead of talking to this person every day after work, I will talk to them on Tuesdays like that. That is what I can manage without being overwhelmed.”

And it is really hard to think about, oh my gosh, we used to talk every day, and here I am, intentionally stepping back because I’ve set this boundary over and over and this person refuses to listen to me.

Julia Furlan

Can you speak a little bit to the things that might open up? What do people gain by putting up this boundary?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

A relationship that’s less stressful, a relationship that seems less contentious, a relationship that you receive more joy from. Sometimes we get burnt out with people doing some of the things that we’ve asked them not to do. And then we start to complain and get upset and become anxious about having to engage with them. So stepping back could be the healthiest option.

Julia Furlan

Sometimes people in general, not specifically me at all, in no way is this about me, might be a little conflict-averse. They don’t want to have a big conversation. They get really scared. And then they bail. How often do you have to have boundary conversation about ghosting?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

Ghosting is an interesting topic because I don’t think people believe that they are the type of person who might be hard to communicate with. But there are some people, when you bring them a boundary, it becomes an abusive situation. Belittling may occur. They may become really defensive. It may just be a really unhealthy interaction.

And there are other situations of ghosting where it’s like, “I really can’t say this to the person. I hope that they just start to get the picture when I stop answering them because I don’t have the words. I don’t feel comfortable.” Ghosting is never an easy decision. It’s not the best solution, but it is a solution.

We can’t control how every relationship ends, and many of our relationships don’t work out.

The friends you had in elementary school, then middle school, then high school, then college or wherever you used to live, a lot of these things, they just sort of fizzle out. There’s this low level of non-harmful ghosting,

Julia Furlan

How do you talk to your followers who are conflict-averse? Are there any tips to pump yourself up before setting a boundary?

Nedra Glover Tawwab

I would say don’t pump yourself up. When we pump ourselves up, we deflate ourselves later because we think about all of the things that could go wrong. We get into this very spirally way of thinking. We think about very black-and-white outcomes. Practicing beforehand in the mirror and on paper, I think it can really work us up into an anxiety spiral that might not even be useful. The world is very flexible and we cannot add those black-and-white principles. And I think when you are averse to conflict, you are thinking of one outcome and it is very bad. You are thinking about one way of saying something.

It’s really healthy to think about the flexibility, that you can’t control how this person feels and you don’t know how they would feel about you. I would say in most cases, when we set boundaries and relationships, it actually goes well.

They’re not like, oh my gosh, you’re not my friend anymore. It’s not as big as we think. Keep it simple. If you can whittle your thoughts down to one simple sentence, I think it will be easier. Don’t think of it as “having a boundaries conversation” as much as it is just talking to someone and just letting them know. 

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lately it feels like there are just a lot of overlapping crises — repeals of civil rights, legislative attacks on trans people, mass shootings, police violence against Black and brown people, the climate catastrophe — not to mention the pandemic, which is not at all over. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy to feel exhausted and hopeless, wondering what I can do just as one small person moving through the world.

Brea Baker is a writer and activist whose work is focused on action. For over a decade, Brea has been a student organizer, an activist, and a strategist for national progressive movements. As she tells it, the death of Trayvon Martin when she was graduating high school was the radicalizing event that guided her into organizing. At Yale, Brea created reading lists to help educate her fellow students, and in 2017 she was one of the organizers of the Women’s March in Washington, DC. 

I wanted to talk to Brea about finding small ways to bring organizing or activism into your life, wherever you’re at. 

This is a conversation rooted in writing that has come before. It takes lessons from bell hooks about radical love and from Mariame Kaba about digging deep for hope. But fundamentally, the thing I want anyone to take away from it is that there are achievable, concrete things that you can do right now, in the community you’re a part of. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and condensed. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Julia Furlan

I want to start this conversation by asking you: What have you been doing lately to combat any existential dread you may be feeling about being here in 2022?

Brea Baker

I think I’ve had a lot of practice feeling a lot of dread over the last 10 years as an activist. To be honest, it just feels like a constant state that has definitely gotten worse.

And it just feels like an onslaught. So, unplugging in general and finding some time in nature and grounding yourself is so important.

Julia Furlan

Wait, scrolling on your phone 18 or so hours a day… that’s not recommended? So weird.

Brea Baker 

Here’s the funny part. We convince ourselves that by staying tapped in, we are better serving the movement, and then what is actually happening is that we’re exhausted, we’re desensitized, and we know a lot of what’s happening, but it doesn’t make us any more strategic at disrupting it. 

Julia Furlan

When we think about the state of the world, or we think about the things that are really hard to hold and hard to carry, it’s very easy to forget about the people who came before us, like for example, bell hooks. You’ve written about bell hooks’s theory on radical love. How do you define radical love and how do you perform it? How do you bring that into your life?

Brea Baker

I think for me, radical love gives me something to fight for versus being constantly in opposition to, or in defense against, something. I think that sometimes in being defensive, we have no vision for what we are trying to build.

If I was defining radical love, I would say it is care as a politic; sometimes the word “love” and the word “care” can be used so often that it loses its meaning for us. But [bell hooks] really grounds us in the fact that if we lived our lives not in the way that the world and our society looks now, but in the way we want our society and our world to look in the future, then we would have to be more loving. 

I love that because that doesn’t make me feel jaded. It reminds me that we all have inherent worth and value that is worth loving and caring for, even if that person is not as tapped into that part of themselves.

Julia Furlan

In reminding yourself that people have the capacity to love and to care for themselves and for their community, how do you connect that to action?

Brea Baker

I think that is where a lot of people get lost, because they have these beautiful values that they are espousing, and then their day-to-day lives don’t match up with it.

For me, the world that I want to live in requires me to spend my money in certain strategic ways, as a reflection of radical love. So I can’t spend money with people and companies that don’t match my values and then wonder why companies like that exist. I am keeping them alive, even if I think some people convince themselves, “Oh well, my $15 isn’t gonna stop anything.”

But your $15 is keeping it going. So it’s not just, “I’m boycotting Amazon.” It’s also, “I am now spending my money with a bunch of small family-owned businesses that are way more grateful for my little $15 than Jeff Bezos ever would be.”

Julia Furlan

I want to unpack love as a politic. What does that mean?

Brea Baker

One example of what love as a politic feels like for me is that even when I don’t know enough about an issue, I don’t need a master’s in environmental justice and climate change to feel love for this planet, to feel awe when I look at nature, and to want better for it than what we are currently doing.

It has freed me a lot to not feel like I need to know everything, but to trust what love is directing me to do. Sometimes I’ll get into arguments with people and they’re like, well, you can’t even fully explain all of these things to me. And it’s like, I don’t have to. Love is telling me that I shouldn’t do that to someone that I love, or something that I love, or some place that I love.

Julia Furlan 

You’re touching on something that I wanted to ask about, because it’s something that I come up against a lot. And that’s the question of how to respond when someone else is judging you, or mocking you for your values. I have someone in my life who loves to push my buttons about the things I believe and the ways in which I aspire to live my life. People can take the fact that you care deeply as an opportunity to belittle you. How do you respond with love to that sort of thing? 

Brea Baker

I think recently I’ve gotten better at sifting through and understanding people’s intentions. My first step: why are you pushing back? 

I do think a lot of people do want to debate.  I’m not here to debate you. I am open to a conversation.

I think it’s a lot easier when the conversation is happening digitally, because you can quite literally walk away from the phone. And I think that is something that a lot of people lose sight of when they just respond immediately to something. You do not owe that person an immediate response at all, and you don’t have to be that keyboard warrior person who’s sending paragraphs. It is both that I recognize that person’s humanity and that I recognize my own humanity enough to say, “I don’t have to put up with the way that they’re treating me.” I can walk away. 

Julia Furlan

I want to ask one question about how you acknowledge privilege and power as you engage with social justice. 

Because sometimes someone arrives in a movement, with all this privilege and power, and they don’t know how to recognize it, or they don’t know how to bring that context into their struggle. And you don’t want to lose them, you know, like their intentions are good. I wonder how you acknowledge privilege and power when you’re engaging with social justice.

Brea Baker

You just described my entire experience with the Women’s March. I was a national organizer with the 2017 Women’s March and some of the subsequent actions as well. And I was actually the youngest national organizer.

And that was definitely a description of that moment, not just with the attendees of the march, because there were a lot of people who attended and said, “This is my first protest,” or “This past election was the first time I voted,” and they were two and three and four times my age. And I was like, huh? 

You’ve lived through so many things, and none of that shocked you or enraged you enough?

So, that was one thing. It was mind-blowing to sit in rooms of people who were being elevated and who were being given a lot of microphones to speak and who thought a lot of themselves. And I understood it, because they really felt the need to really affirm and validate themselves after this election where a very sexist man was elected. But at the same time, I think it’s about welcoming people and not settling for that entry point, because the reality was a lot of those women who we were co-organizing with wanted Women’s March to only speak about gender and not touch on race, not touch on ability, not touch on sexuality.

Well, I’m a queer Black woman, so I can’t be in this space and not talk about sexuality and race. It’s not gonna happen, because actually I feel deepest about racism and addressing white supremacy, because if we do that, then we’d have to address patriarchy and everything else.

And so, how I deal with it is that I think you can’t coddle people. And I think people who want to be coddled are not ready to be in the movement yet. And I think that’s important, to recognize that sometimes we need to have prerequisites for the spaces that we’re coming into, and we need to have a standard of what it means to be in this movement. 

The Black Panther Party, for example, is a political organization that I have so much admiration for. I have a tattoo for them on my shoulder, and every single person who entered that organization had to read certain texts, and had to go through certain trainings. And sometimes we want to make things too easy for people, that they come in with all their baggage, with all their preconceived notions. And they’re actually hurting people in spaces they’re supposed to be in. And it’s like, no, we have to have a higher standard for people and say: “Welcome! I’m so glad that this activated you. And if you care about feminism, you have to care about these things too.” 

And you have to be willing to hear that: we’re willing to let you come as you are, but you can’t leave in the same way that you came, you have to be transformed. 

And if you’re not willing to be transformed, then you are actually only interested in power for you, not redistributing power for all. And that’s not okay.

Julia Furlan

You are an abolitionist and that is a fundamental part of the activism that you do, and it informs all of the values that come before it.

But not everyone who is going to be a part of the movement that you’re a part of is a believer in abolition. I wonder, when people have different objectives, but they want to be shoulder to shoulder with you, how do you square that? 

Brea Baker

This is something I learned from Mariame Kaba, who is the abolitionist I learned the most from. If you have not read We Do This ’Til We Free Us, you must go get it now. 

Julia Furlan

You gotta.

Brea Baker

You have to go get it right now.

Julia Furlan

One of the best to ever do it.

Brea Baker

Oh, like, quite literally. And something that she said a while back — I’m gonna butcher it, so I’m just gonna paraphrase — “As long as you are not standing in the way of my long-term goals towards abolition, we can still work together.”

Julia Furlan

Right. You don’t have to be the perfect organizer, and you don’t have to know everything. But it is really important that you acknowledge your privilege and power and think about the ways that what you believe interacts with the things that other people believe. 

Brea Baker

Yeah, one million percent. And I think sometimes I like to level-set with people and remind them that I also still don’t have all the answers, but certainly did not at other points. And so in helping people acknowledge their own privilege, I sometimes start by acknowledging my own, and kind of model for them.

Julia Furlan  

I have a question about the practical things that you recommend people do.

I think it’s very easy to feel very overwhelmed. There are a lot of different issues that are radicalizing or that are going to push people towards wanting to organize.

What’s one thing that you recommend people do? And, furthermore, how can we think sustainably about the things that we’re capable of doing?

Brea Baker

Yeah. I love that you brought up sustainability already, because I had my one action and it is, in my opinion, what will allow our movements to really be withstanding and to survive the attention span of the media, which is to join a local organization — specifically, a local progressive organization.

But I’m purposely being vague because I want you to find whatever organization is connected to that issue for you, but a local one. I say that because a lot of people, when they become activated, they go through this phase of wanting to change the world. And they believe that the only way to do that is if they have a huge following, or if they are part of national politics. And it never works that way.

I have to tell you that local organizers get shit done way more frequently than national organizers do. That is not to say that national organizers are not needed, because I do believe that we need people who can focus on national policy and who can thread together the things that are happening across the country. But local organizers do it.

National organizers cannot follow up with every single person who makes one donation and say, “Hey, we haven’t heard from you since.” A local organizer will say, “Hey, you came to that first meeting. We haven’t seen you in a while.” We’re not just planning these activities and these protests and these rallies, which are the exciting and sexy things that people want to be a part of. We’re also reading books together. We’re planning film screenings together. We’re canvassing our community and having conversations with elders. You’re able to have so much more of an impact because you know the community you live in, and you’re surrounded by people who also know the community that they live in.

Julia Furlan

One thing that has really helped me, especially when I’ve been feeling overwhelmed — and this is something that I learned from my good pal Sally Tamarkin — I was feeling really overwhelmed. Then I started delivering meals for the local food collaborative. I started, whenever we went to the grocery store, stocking the community fridge, you know, buying a bunch of perishable food and putting it in the community fridge. I didn’t think that it was going to help, and it really helped.

And looking left and right, and seeing who in your community is already doing work that you care about and getting involved in that particular way can be a really helpful first step.

Brea Baker

Oh yeah. I think for people who really engage, it becomes way more than their first step. It actually leads to a deeper radicalization. 

If you put that same energy into local politics and you got your mayor out of office and got someone new and exciting in office, you’d actually feel a huge difference, because it would be more immediate and you’d also be able to see on the ground.

So I think it gives people more inspiration when they’re able to have local wins and then they can turn around and be like, wait, this isn’t all gloom and doom. Like, we are able to really build the world we want to live in. If I could just leave with a quote: on the note of inspiration, Arundhati Roy said, “Another world is not only possible. She’s on her way. On a quiet day. I can hear her breathing.” 

And I love that quote because it reminds us that it is not inherent, and it is not inevitable, that the world is going to be shitty and difficult and challenging. We’ve survived more challenging things in the past. We will continue to survive the challenging moments that we’re in. And if we think of the world in that personification way, like, she’s on her way. Like, she’s literally in the Lyft. We’re just waiting for her to send the ETA. Let’s just prepare for her arrival. When this other world gets here, let’s be ready. 

And if everyone acted like that and spoke to their family members and their colleagues and their neighbors in that way and organized locally in that way, by the time she got here, we’d realized she arrived because we had prepared for her, not the other way around.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.