A compilation of talks by Erin Huang-Schaffer


Welcome to the Young Adults’ Conference! I’m so glad you’re here and that we get to notice what’s possible for us when we are together as young adults.


First, I want us to notice that we’re in person together. Take a moment to slow down, look around, and notice each other. Here you can lean into people, press your heads together, hold hands, cross your legs over someone else’s legs, and sit in each other’s laps. (Laughter and moving closer) Try to notice that you’re here with people. We might need to take a lot of time getting close and connecting.


Young people know how important connection is. As we become young adults and get older and older, connection gets treated as less and less important. Connection is very important. It makes a lot of different things possible. We need connection to do this work of healing from hurts that we do in RC. We need connection for our lives to go as well as possible. We need connection if we want to change the world and lead the revolution.


We get to fight the messages of young adults’ oppression that tell us there are more important things to do. A big part of the work that we get to do as young adults is to hold onto what’s actually important to us as humans outside of distress. This includes connection. My goal for us this weekend is for us to be connected with each other. If all we did this weekend was get connected, I would be happy.


Let’s do a mini-session where we notice the person we’re with. Discharge any embarrassment that gets in our way of noticing.


GLOBAL MAJORITY
TAKING LEADERSHIP


We are about to go into two classes to work on racism: one for Global Majority people and one for white people. As we connect with each other, we will need to work on the many ways that we get divided from each other as young adults. Racism is a huge way that we get divided. This is also a great opportunity to work on racism while we are at a workshop led by two Global Majority women—Teresa and myself.


(The white people leave for their class.)


We are the people of the Global Majority at this workshop. This is your workshop. It is for you. We are about half of this workshop. When I’m up here leading, I am looking at you and thinking about you. Even when I’m not leading, I’m looking across the room for you. You just being here and being yourself makes a big difference to me, Teresa, and this whole workshop. You don’t need to do anything other than be yourself. You get to know that this workshop is for you.


I’ve noticed that the white people tend to have a lot of ideas about what they’d like to see happen at workshops. They don’t hesitate; they just go ahead and say their ideas. That’s really great! (Laughter) But I know you have ideas, too.


You have ideas about your lives, the people around you, and the world. There are things that you want and hope for all the time. I know you have hopes for yourselves at this workshop. You get to think about what you want for yourself and this workshop. If this is a workshop for you, what does that look like? I want to know what’s important to you and hear your thoughts.


It would be great if any of you wanted to lead a topic group. Any discharge topic that is useful to you would be just right for this workshop.


DISCHARGING
“COOLNESS” PATTERNS


Young adults’ oppression is harsh. It sets us up to be left alone to figure out hard things about our lives and the world. It trains us to become isolated and discouraged adults to maintain a capitalist society. We internalize the oppression, and then we show that harshness to each other. It divides us. For example, we act competitive with each other because of capitalism.


Another way that the internalized oppression shows is in how we act “cool” with each other. I think of “being cool” as trying to look like we don’t care. It’s a way that we don’t show ourselves. We might all have different versions of this hurt. It’s connected to past experiences of young people’s oppression, present experiences of young adults’ oppression, class oppression, and so on. It’s a huge loss when we don’t get to show that we care about each other. (Cries) We lose so much.


It’s important that we get to show how much we like each other. We get to be excited about things. We can feel that way most of the time on the inside, but how much we care can get hidden.


Many of us may have gotten humiliated when we tried to show that we care. Trying to look like we didn’t care may have been our attempt to avoid having to feel that way again.


Every single one of us is waiting for permission to show ourselves fully and show that we’re interested and excited about humans. We get to be the ones to make space for that. We’re going to have to be honest with each other about how much we care. We get to take it seriously. And we’ll have to risk feeling all of the humiliation, discouragement, and fear that comes up.


FIGURING OUT OUR LIVES


I want to talk about the conditions we get to set up to think about our lives. All humans have struggles. We have struggles in all parts of our lives, at every age. There’s never been anything wrong with us for struggling. If anything was “wrong” about us struggling, it was that we got left alone. We didn’t get the help and support we needed then. We get to show each other what that was like for us.


We’ll need to build close support around us as we think and struggle. We need to not be alone when we’re trying to figure things out. We also get to remember that our minds do work well. We can and do figure things out. But it goes better when we can discharge with the attention of someone who stays close to us and is confident in our minds.


When I turned twenty-two (the age when you’re considered a young adult in RC), almost immediately I started getting a lot of advice from people older than me. Even while I’d be in the middle of leading and giving an RC talk, people from their thirties to their seventies would try to “help me” (laughter) by telling me what I needed to do.


Older adults are really scared about us! They care about us and want us to be okay. Their lives were very hard when they were young adults because of young adults’ oppression. Many of them didn’t have RC. They definitely didn’t have all of you. And—not to judge—some of them might have been in worse shape than we are! (Lots of laughter) One thing was true for all of them: they didn’t always get to have close people who could remember they had good minds.


We get to remember what our minds can do. One of the first things we learn in RC fundamentals is how to be a good counselor. We start from the assumption that all human beings are intelligent. We’re advised to not give our clients advice. We focus on listening well. We trust and follow their minds. At the same time, we try to stay close to our clients and let them know we’re with them. We work together to contradict distress. That’s a very different model of support than we usually get to see in our societies.


We still get to share and ask each other for our thinking. But we have to always come back to the assumption that we’re inherently smart. With enough closeness and confidence in our minds as we discharge, we’re capable of figuring out big things in our lives. We’re at a time in our lives when we have a lot of questions and we’re getting to try things for the first time. Our relationships here are a valuable resource for us as we discharge, think, and try together.


TAKING WHAT WE
WANT SERIOUSLY


A question that has been asked a lot in RC young adults’ liberation work is, “What are your hopes, dreams, and goals?” What do you want for your life and for the world?


We get to be honest with each other. I think the point of the question isn’t to give an impressive answer just because it sounds good to capitalism. It’s about being honest about what’s important to you personally. What brings you re-emergence, joy, and fun. What reminds you of how powerful and connected you are. We might need to show all the ways we’ve been made to feel like what we want isn’t important or useful. If something is really important to you, it is important, because it’s important to you.


We get to take the things that matter to us seriously, despite what capitalism and the oppressions in our societies say. What matters is that you get to be and show yourself. You get to show what you hope for and what you want.


If you were speaking to yourself as a one-, two-, or three-year-old, what you wanted then matters too. If you’ve ever spent a lot of time around very young people, you may have noticed that they know what they want. They’re interested and curious about things. They go after [pursue] people and the things they want. You can see it if you’ve ever had a three-year-old climb up you, grab onto you, and just go, “I like you! I like you!” (assertively).


They’re so clear about what they want. And that’s the model we need to get back to as young adults. We must try to hold onto and show each other what’s important to us. We’ll have to discharge any hurts that get in our way.


PERSPECTIVES AS WE GET OLDER


I want to bring us back to what we want to hold onto as young adults. We’re getting older. . . . (Laughter) We’re actually getting older all the time! No matter what age we are. There are things we understood well about humans when we were young people. That humans are smart, caring, playful, powerful, creative, good at connection, and natural leaders. Young adults’ oppression tries to make us forget what we understood as young people. Our work as young adults is to fight to remember what we knew and not lose that. It will be a lot easier for us to remember if we get to have relationships with young people.


It’s good to be close to young people and follow their leadership. Fighting for young people’s liberation in the present is really not that different from fighting for our younger selves in our work on early hurts. Being allies to young people is always about fighting for ourselves.


We get to have good lives at every age. This project of figuring out our lives doesn’t stop when we get older. We’re always going to have questions about our lives. We always get to be thinking about what we want and hope for. Young people’s oppression laid in the earliest hurts of discouragement that have made this hard to do. We will need to remember that young people’s oppression and young adults’ oppression exist. These oppressions don’t get acknowledged much outside of RC. That makes it hard for all of us to remember how important this liberation work is for everyone.


We’re going to make amazing older adults. We have good things to look forward to. And we’re going to be clumsy adults! (Laughter) We’ll be clumsy around young people and young adults. We’ll likely make some similar mistakes to what were made in our direction. (Lots of laughter)


That’s okay, as long as we keep discharging about the ways we got treated when we were young because of these oppressions. What matters is that we stay close to each other. We get to have relationships with people of every age—younger and older. That will be good for them and good for us. And we always get to remember that this is about fighting to hold onto what’s important to us.