48. Witness.
Listen to me read this essay:
Last week, I was forced to leave my job over my advocacy for Palestine.
And last night, when I went to meet the HR person to retrieve my belongings from my office, I was met with two fully armed and uniformed police officers, who monitored me and my husband for an hour as we packed up my pillows and snacks and essential oils and books on trauma and Christmas cactus and aloe plants and untacked the affirmations from the wall (YOU ARE EASY TO LOVE, one reads) and carried them out to the car.
I want to be clear.
I am not here to justify myself.
I am not here to explain myself, to defend myself, or to state my case. Rather: my intention in writing about this experience is to render it meaningful.
My intention is to leverage this experience—this experience of being exiled from a place where I thought perhaps I could come to belong—to connect to those people who also have been cast out for bearing witness to a litany of hard truths. My intention is to say: you are not alone. My intention is to illustrate, to illuminate a rot at the root—to expose it to daylight, to sunlight, to fresh air—in hopes that it can be transformed.
First, some facts, to set the scene: I am a social worker, a therapist, and I have worked for the last 15 months as crisis counselor at a substance use clinic run by a university health system. One sunny Monday morning in November, I arrived at work, backpack on, with a pin that says Free Gaza on the lapel of my jean jacket, fresh from attending the historic National March on Washington for Palestine. On my way to my office, I saw that the door of a colleague who had been on vacation was open, so I popped my head in to say hello, and welcome back.
As I leaned on the doorjamb, smiling, I immediately saw her eyes dart to the pin, and then back and forth from my eyes to the pin nervously as she tersely responded to my greeting. Whatever, I thought to myself, with a shrug and a roll of the eyes, as I settled into my day, put my mason jar of leftover beans and rice and kale into the dirty fridge, prepared for group, checked the urine drug screen results from the previous week.
But sure enough, at 3pm, I was called into a meeting with two bosses, who informed me that I had been reported to HR for displaying political propaganda against company policy, who then slid a stapled hard copy of the “personal appearance” policy across the conference room table towards me. Never mind that a co-worker had a sign in her window reading Philly Stands with Israel for the last six weeks. Never mind that a coworker regularly wears a t-shirt that reads Abortion is Healthcare, and other such political messaging abounds in our clinic. Never mind that the very existence of our clinic is political. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind.
I never took the button off, and it didn’t come up again, for a while. And then in January, mere days after my mentor—the former executive director who took me under her wing—retired, I was called into another disciplinary meeting, and then another. I was issued a write-up. Demands were made. Punishments were meted out. Not for new offenses, but for the same past ones, over and over: refusing to be corrected, talking to my co-workers about my grievances.
My boss then informed me that she was denying my promotion because, much to my bewilderment, she alleged that I spoke to her in a “threatening” manner, not because of anything I actually said or did, but rather, because some particular “tone and pressure” in my voice when talking to her made her feel threatened; a bizarre callback to my childhood, when my mother refused to speak to me if I was in any way expressive of anger. I just can’t hear you when you’re angry, she would say, shaking her head and walking away, leaving me to chew and swallow anger like dark heavy lead, and make my face into a pleasant shape by force of will, and go back and plead my case, or plead forgiveness, desperate to be let back into her good graces.
Next I received an order to remove a small, half sheet, black and white flyer from my bulletin board that bore no images but contained a quote from James Baldwin: The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe, along with several QR codes for contacting elected officials, joining a mailing list for Families for Ceasefire, and donating to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). And finally, at the bottom, the words, Don’t stop talking about Palestine.
I didn’t remove the flyer, opting instead to draft a letter to again attempt to explain, earnestly and calmly, that political action was a therapeutic intervention for our clients, who are distraught by seeing the ongoing horrific murder and starvation of millions of human beings unfold on their phones every day.
I tried to explain, again, earnestly and calmly, that as a social worker, I am bound to a code of ethics that requires that I advocate for living conditions conducive to the fulfillment of basic human needs and should promote social, economic, political, and cultural values and institutions that are compatible with the realization of social justice.1 In order to resist their efforts to isolate me, I again shared this letter with some of my co-workers, in hopes that they would co-sign in support.
Then, last Monday, a little before noon, two bosses knocked on my office door and, with hard and dour faces, commanded me to pack my bags and leave, that I was suspended, without pay, pending an investigation. We know about the letter, they said accusingly, as though this was a secret letter, as though they had made a triumphant discovery.
My heart pounded as I tried to think about what to take and what to leave, if I should water the plants, while they stood, arms folded, eyes narrowed, and watched me walk down the hall, terror in their eyes as I turned back to retrieve my mason jar of lunch from the dirty fridge, as though I might do something unpredictable and dangerous, as though I myself was unpredictable and dangerous.
The next day, I tendered my resignation, giving three weeks’ notice. I asked to come back to work, so as to have honorable closure with my clients. Instead, I was locked out of my phone and my email, causing the deepest grief of all: that my strong, tender, beautiful, brave, and valiant clients will yet again be forcibly abandoned, harmed again by a system that purported to help them.
And I think this is the crux of it, why this institution’s reaction to my refusal to be silent about Palestine has been so violent: because it challenges the perception that they (the bosses, the HR machine, the community mental health system) hold about themselves as being moral, correct, and righteous.
In the schema of narcissistic abuse and soul loss,2 accusations of wrongdoing are intolerable, impermissible, and must be annihilated, because it is more important to be perceived as good than to actually be good.
To quote Cicero: Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt. Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.
Meanwhile, outside the stale, grimy halls of the nonprofit industrial complex, actions and demos and marches and children’s library story times and community Iftars and vigils and 5Ks and craft meetups and potlucks and power hours and teach-ins for Palestine take place every single day and night. This movement is not stopping or slowing down, it is gaining in heat and light and power. And I participate every chance I get, not just to add my body to the masses of bodies trying to drive a wedge into the gears of a machine that is crushing humanity, but also to rinse off my own gaslighting, to orient together with the others to the truth of things.
I really can’t think of a better somatic therapeutic technique than to stomp your feet in unison with others, to clap your hands and sing and chant in unison with others, co-regulating with other nervous systems while your voices echo off of ornate Napoleonic buildings, growing together in heat and light and power.
On Saturday night, Queers for Palestine hosted a march and noise demo in Center City. Hundreds of us, masked and keffiyeh-ed queer folks and allies, drag queens and elders, banged pots and pans, and blew whistles as we chanted Free Free Palestine to the beat of our hearts and feet down streets through the throngs of drunk St. Patrick’s Day revelers and crews of kids doing jubilant acrobatics on their bikes, standing tall on their bike seats and swimming like free people through schools of cops like sharks.
Just as I realized that we were marching past my former workplace, the march stopped, and the protest marshals instantly and precisely barricaded the intersection with their bicycles, cars honking in frustration, while a drag queen dressed head-to-toe in black patent leather used the people’s microphone method to announce that it was sunset, and time for our Muslim comrades to break their Ramadan fast.
The crowd of hundreds stopped, a reverent hush blanketing the twilight street as the stars blinkered into view in the indigo sky. Bags and bags of dates, and cashews, and bottles of water circulated through the crowd, as murmurs of Ramadan Kareem and Ramadan Mubarak filtered through the air. A breath, smiles, well wishes, and then the march continued.
Later, a man stood, resolute, stoically facing the opposite direction as the protesters, so that the crowd was forced to part and flow around him. Confused at first, once I passed him I realized, he was standing over a giant sinkhole in the pavement, wordlessly protecting us all from harm. Nobody asked him to do that. He knew what to do, because his humanity, his soul, told him.
This morning, the spring equinox, the windows are wide open. Flocks of geese honk overhead, my neighbor’s smoke alarm chirps intermittently, and the sun is strong, growing in heat and light and power. I walk the dog in the park, and am greeted by a clutch of small children who want to pet her: what is your dog’s name? what is your dog’s last name? What is your dog’s middle name, and why isn’t it Charles? How old is your dog? I’m seven. I have a dog named Princess. The winds come on. I make it home just before the rain. I settle back into my study, among my altars, my books, my collections, my little wooden boxes full of seashells and pinecones, my life.
Esse quam videri. To be, rather than to seem.
The Arabic word for martyr, shahid, translates literally to witness. The more than 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel just since October 2023, the thousands that are dying of starvation right now, they are martyrs not because they want to die, but because their deaths bear witness to the crushing violence of the entire Zionist project, and of colonialism at large. They force us to see; they unveil the truth.
In their recent New Yorker article about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty US Airman who died last month by self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, Masha Gessen stated: nonviolence should not be confused with passivity: as a form of protest, nonviolence is a practice that exposes violence. Resistance exposes the violence underneath the veneer: it renders it visible and legible, it allows us to bear witness.
And I believe that this is the purpose of my tiny sacrifice of losing my job. It exposes a sliver of the violence inherent in these systems: mental health systems, welfare systems, corporate systems, systems of policing and incarceration. Losing my job is nothing—less than nothing—compared to what people who live every day under the thumb of these systems, from West Philly to the West Bank, are forced to endure every day: their whole lives martyred, a witness.
For now, I will live in the world.
Because the world where I want to live is not happening in the future, and it’s not happening in a conference room on the 4th floor of an office building, high above the sound and smell and color and rage teeming in the street. The world where I want to live is happening right now. It’s the world where drag queens hand out Iftar dates in the middle of an occupied intersection, it’s the world where people who have no other recourse or protections—who have no rich husbands ensconced in tasteful homes in leafy suburbs—are surrounded by bodies who shield them from the view of the police as they scrawl messages to their abusers in spray paint on the sidewalk, because that might be the only form of justice they’re ever going to get. The world I want to live in is the one where we stand in the breach, wordlessly blocking the sinkholes in the path with our bodies, not because anyone told us to, but because our humanity, our souls, know what to do.
I do not wish to seem.
I wish to be.
Recommended links:
Transitional Characters is a new Liberation Therapy practice in Pittsburgh started by people who have been forced out of their “traditional” therapy practices due to their commitments to humanity, and they offer a good model of what is possible.
Just finished Body Work: The radical power of personal narrative by
. Loved it.- ’s latest issue of Cosmic Anarchy: the most important shift political awareness created in me is the desire to dismantle individual goals and replace them with collectivist goals. As a homie recently wrote, “I replaced my individual dreams with collective dreams.”
- on Bearing Witness: “If your country is co-signing a genocide, funding it and refusing to stop it, supplying the weapons and using tax dollars, than NOTHING IN AMERICAN LIFE should be free from disruptions that remind us of this horrible fact.”
A card.
The Sun.
That great luminary, giver of light and life. The center of gravity around which we orbit. The sun which illuminates all the dark places, the truth which can burn and sear. The sun is the throne of the heart, the home of the inner child, the playful, creative expression of simple summer joy and radiant, vibrant life. The sun heals, the sun beams.
Be not afraid.
Be the light.
Be the heat.
Be the power.
Blessed Equinox.
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. If you wish to support my writing with a one-time donation, you may do so on Venmo @Jodi-Rhoden. Sharing
with someone you think would enjoy it is also a great way to support the project! Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.⚔️❤️ Jodi
Code of Ethics, National Association of Social Workers
As steph kaufman-mthimkhulu points out on this instagram post, “people are searching for medical terminology to try to make sense of the depth of non-humanity we are witnessing from the Israeli occupation. Clinical medicine doesn’t hold the answers for this level of dehumanization, but Indigenous knowledge does. The phenomena we are witnessing is called “soul loss.” Colonialism and white supremacy requires self-dehumanization and separation/loss of soul in order create human beings capable of such horrific violence. Soul loss has shown up all over the world as a mechanism for understanding the impact of intergenerational colonial violence, illness, spiritual sickness and more in both colonizers and colonized peoples.”
Well, Jodi, my dear one, this is another beautifully written piece. The story is compelling, gritty and full of life and the harshness of living in these times. I am mostly, sorry for your having been removed from the organization; I believe you would have helped the program grow and paradigm shift to survive and transform. You will have this opportunity again, or perhaps are having it now in the streets, protesting and consciousness gathering. I bow to your ability not to fully internalize the trauma and watch with great anticipation your continued growth!
Melody showed me this post - thanks for writing. I hope you can get this published somewhere. I shared on Instagram. Thanks for your advocacy and courage.