“Grace is the face that love wears when it meets imperfection.”
Unknown
So here we are, another year gone by. Another trip around the sun in this journey called life. And what a year it has been.
Originally when I conceived of this journey to wellbeing and reflected on the foundational elements that have been fundamental to my own journey, the theme of this month, the last in our yearlong adventure, was going to be celebration. The aim was to encourage us all to celebrate how far we’ve come towards enhancing our own wellbeing and cultivating a thriving community.
That’s still relevant. Because if you’ve been on this journey with me, we have come a long way over the past almost 12 months. But that feels hollow for me right now as I grapple with the aftermath of COP 29. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate when the most vulnerable have been betrayed. It doesn’t resonate with me as I question what I’ve dedicated my life to, how I want to make change in the world and what comes next.
That said, I have so much in my life to celebrate. So much to be grateful for. And I am grateful for those things. For the incredible abundance in my life. A lovely flat to live in. Nourishing food to eat. Clean air to breath. Safe streets to walk. Work that excites me (generally). Amazing people to work with. And the list goes on and on. My life is a life full of things to be grateful for.
And in fact, December is usually a time of celebration for me. A month when I reflect on the past year and make plans for what I want to do in my next journey around the sun. But right now, in this moment, it doesn’t feel quite right to celebrate when there is so much suffering in the world. I know that finding joy in the most challenging moments is precisely the work, but I can’t summon the energy to do that right now. I’m still reeling. As I write, it is less than a week since the closing plenary in Baku. Less than a week since that devastating outcome that left so many people wondering what happened. What happened to ambition? What happened to leadership? What happened to taking care of each other?
So many questions to ask. Can trust be repaired? Is the multilateral process broken? We have long known that the power was skewed in favour of developed countries, but it used to be that developing countries at least had a voice - though not an equal one - they still had a say. In the aftermath of COP 29, many of us are wondering how we can continue to dedicate our lives to making change in a process that is fundamentally flawed, if not broken.
What we need most right now is to give ourselves grace and to allow ourselves to feel. I’ve been practising that a lot lately. The last few months have been challenging. I travelled for the better part of four months and got home just weeks before I would have had to leave for Baku. But my body said no more. So, I listened and made the difficult decision not to go to COP 29 in person, though I engaged virtually. I felt some guilt about that, but no shame. And that is progress.
In the last few months I had COVID once and was ill two other times. I missed two installments of the wellbeing series because I couldn’t find time to prioritise writing amidst everything else going on. Rather than beating myself up for all the things I didn’t do, I chose to give myself grace. I ate healthfully, slept as well as I could and went to the gym nearly every day.
October was meant to be dedicated to the importance of allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable emotions. As I mentioned, it’s something I’ve been working on and it’s been game changing to give myself time to really sit with the sadness or the anger or the frustration - whatever uncomfortable emotion I’m feeling. First, I need to give myself the space to acknowledge the feeling is there and resist the urge to push it away. Once I’ve gotten quiet, I locate that feeling in my body and just let it be, focusing on the sensations that come with it. Not needing anything to happen but just being present. Typically, in less than a minute the feeling dissolves and beneath that is a limitlessness, a powerful feeling. And when I get up I feel lighter, calmer and often, inspired.
There is a full spectrum of emotions that come up in our work on Loss and Damage, many of them difficult to contain in our bodies. The images we see, the stories we hear, the fact that this all could have been avoided with ambitious mitigation action on the part of historical emitters - it’s hugely frustrating. There’s a lot to process in the work we do, if we allow ourselves to do so. And rather than letting those tiny little paper cuts accumulate in our bodies, we need to allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable emotions and then move them through us.
In November I planned to write about cultivating a growth mindset, which enables us to see challenges as opportunities to grow, rather than as setbacks that paralyse us in a cycle of shame. My work feels like both a challenging obstacle course, a schoolhouse and a retreat centre. My colleagues are my gurus and I meet my edges every day. But if I allow myself to see challenges as opportunities for growth, both for myself and my work, it changes the game entirely.
Alas, neither of those blogs were written in the end. But I gave myself grace because I know that I am doing the best I can. Researcher and thought leader, Brené Brown defines grace as:
“Grace means that all of your mistakes now serve a purpose instead of serving shame.”
I make so many mistakes in my everyday. So, so many. But by far the biggest mistake I made this past year, and the many before that, is not stepping into the kind of leadership that my work has demanded. I haven’t always made the difficult decisions that need to be made and that has had consequences.
There are a spectrum of reasons why this has been the case. I’m working on several fronts to address the root causes. I’ve found that loving myself more has helped me step into the self-confidence needed to bring more effective leadership. But still old stories play in a loop in my head.
I grew up as a neurodivergent child making my way in a world that wasn’t tailored for me and didn’t understand me, nor I it. Today neurodiversity is, if not celebrated, at least acknowledged in a more constructive way. Earlier this year I participated in a discussion of neurodiverse folks working in the climate space. But as a child, I didn’t have the language for understanding why I felt so different. I just knew that I was different. And that made me feel less than. Something I’ve carried with me into adulthood.
And because I felt that the world didn’t acknowledge or respect me, I saw more of that in my life. I literally programmed my reticular activating system to experience more of what I didn’t want and on and on. Down the rabbit hole I went, spiralling as I descended into darkness. It’s one of the reasons I started doing soul work. To stop the monkey mind of incessant “not-enough-ness”. It was both paralysing and debilitating walking around with these voices in my head telling me I was less than and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
My tendency to get overstimulated easily made being in a place with excessive noise or too many people, physically painful. Until recently I also had debilitating social anxiety which made making friends difficult because, among other things, I am really awful at small talk. I know that’s something many of us share, but trust me, I was particularly bad at it.
And as I take myself into my work, all that historical baggage and remaining insecurities come with me. And because sometimes my inner child takes the wheel, sometimes I have an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful response. And while I’m working to change that – I have a coach I work with weekly and I do my meditation, my breathwork and all the things on the daily – I still give myself grace. Because I’m trying to be a little better every day and that’s what matters. It doesn’t make it okay that I react when I should respond. I am an aspiring leader at the helm of two growing initiatives, each with teams that need me to step up my game. But if I beat myself up, that doesn’t encourage me to grow, it encourages me to retract. So, I give myself grace and commit to learning from each experience to do better next time.
While I hope you do take time to celebrate, giving yourself grace is the most appropriate theme to end this journey on. Because we will make mistakes. We will fail. We will fall down. The important thing is to get back up again and try again. To keep putting one foot in front of the other and to do better next time. Sometimes that’s all you can do. So please, Dear Reader, give yourself grace. Say lovely things to yourself. Remind yourself how amazing you are and how much people love you. Because you are and they do.
As a reminder, here are the foundations of wellbeing as I see them. What works for you might be different, but this is what has helped me. These are the tools in my arsenal, ones that I will continue to build on in my own journey.
1. Set an intention to focus on wellbeing
2. Love yourself
3. Summon courage
4. Develop discipline
5. Practice embodiment
6. Seek connection
7. Rest
8. Take time to reflect and process
9. Have more fun and find joy in the everyday
10. Feel the feels
11. Cultivate a growth mindset
12. Give yourself grace
I will close with this. Change is an inside job. If we want to make change in the outside world, we must do the work in our inside world. We must learn to love ourselves enough and summon the courage needed to put ourselves first and be disciplined about it. We must listen to the wisdom of our bodies, revel in connection with others and allow ourselves to rest when we need to. No questions asked.
We must make time to reflect and process how challenging our work can be and learn to have fun and find joy even in the most difficult of moments. We must allow ourselves to feel and alchemise uncomfortable emotions into something far more powerful than hopelessness. We must have a growth mindset that enables us to see challenges as opportunities to grow, grow, grow. And finally, we must give ourselves grace. Because at the end of the day we are all perfectly imperfect. We will make mistakes. That’s part of being human and living a well-lived life, whatever that might mean to you.
I hope you keep doing the work Dear Reader. Because the world needs your light now more than ever. But first, I hope you take time to rest and to celebrate yourself. To revel in what an amazing human you are just for being you and to reflect on all the good you do in the world. You are enough just as you are. Never forget that. I’m going to do the same and I’ll meet you here next year.
Erin Roberts is the founder and global lead of the Loss and Damage Collaboration. She hopes that you will continue your own journey to wellbeing. Next year she will be writing on the theme of leadership for our friends at the Climate Leadership Initiative. However, though she will no longer be writing regularly on wellbeing, our wellbeing project will continue. Cultivating wellbeing and curating a thriving community was never more important than it is now. We will not create a world in which all humans, all other species and all ecosystems are thriving, without being well in mind, body and spirit. If you’d like to share your reflections along the way, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
