on intimacy

For me, social impact practice is about intimacy, and I find regeneration through intimacy.

Intimacy has not been easy for me. Intimacy has often and still does, scare me. The scary thing about intimacy, as I’ve experienced it, is its persistence. When I say that intimacy is persistent, I mean that it is attentive. Being attentive to someone, or to myself, is scary because in its persistence it erodes the safety of personality. Being attentive, which is intimacy in action, means seeing the person in front of you and making them your focus. Why would this be scary? Having someone pay attention to me sounds nice. The scary thing is that my own sense of self-worth becomes infinitely more precarious when reflected back to me from someone who cares about me. Personality is fixed in my mind. Personality is a collection of qualities that give shape to what I do every day, why I do it, where my pitfalls are, and what my trajectory is. Personality is like a map. There’s something fixed, almost immortal about it. When someone who cares about me sees me and I recognize that, it’s like looking up from the map and seeing the actual terrain. The person they see is not personality. Instead, they see the weathered and constantly shifting terrain of a person.

How does this relate to social impact? Social impact, which relies on systems thinking as a methodology, aims as understanding terrain. By focusing on terrain, it makes people its concern rather than personalities. A simple distinction can be drawn up that is present in our university system. If someone wanted to change our world to make better personalities, they would focus on the maps we draw up of ourselves. How can we change how students think of themselves? What’s wrong with the maps students are using to get from day one to graduation? A systems analysis, or social impact strategist, would instead ask, What terrain does the student find themselves in? How much do they pay for rent? Where do they buy food from? What do they eat? What is the quality of the water they are drinking? How much sleep do they get? How much work is required of them each day? When and where do they socialize and who do they socialize with? The underlying question is now completely different. Maps, like personalities, dominate terrain. One’s person, body and mind, becomes things in service of producing personality. A map helps zone and determine how to use land, like a personality helps zone one’s body and time to determine how one will use oneself, as if we are built to be extracted from. Intimacy throws personality away because it is harmful. I didn’t do well in this class. Oh? Have you had food today? Water? Let’s take a walk. I’ll listen. Put the map down, we need to focus on the terrain. This is what intimacy sounds like.

James Baldwin, in his essay “Down at the Cross”, spends about a page and a half unpacking the concept of sensuality. I think that Baldwin’s notes on sensuality share a kinship to what I’m describing as intimacy. Both sensuality and intimacy are about putting attention on the person in front of us, their whole self, their terrain. The quote on the right, pulled from Baldwin’s essay, communicates my point more effectively.