2024: A year of learning
Over the past eight months, Antinormality Club has evolved from one person’s idea to a network of members across the world. It’s been exciting, intense, daunting, sometimes overwhelming, and often moving. As the year draws to a close, I wanted to share six lessons I’ve drawn from the experience of founding the club, along with a timeline of the journey so far.
You can also explore our experiences of the year in this zine, produced in collaboration with G, a member of the club.
1. This space is needed
The rush of applications to join the club – and the ongoing growth of the club through word-of-mouth alone – tells me how much this space is needed.
From my own workplaces, I knew that mental health support in social change organisations was sorely lacking. What I didn’t expect was to receive so many membership applications from people in the mental health sector, where (naïvely) I had imagined the situation would be better.
The resonance of this idea is bittersweet. It’s affirming to have such a strong positive reaction. But it also reminds me how much harm the world is inflicting on people, how isolated many people feel, and how much better we deserve from our workplaces.
2. Our talents are abundant
The breadth and depth of skill, insight and wisdom in the club is not a surprise, but it is a source of pride. While others might define us in terms of our diagnostic labels or location outside social norms, we are multidimensional, multitalented humans with courage and creativity to spare. We bring as much joy and hope as we do despair and anger. We delight in each other and in building a place that holds all of us. We are the leaders the world needs, not in spite of but because of what we’ve survived.
3. Meeting well is an art
This is another non-surprise, but my experience of designing and hosting club meetings has reinforced how vital and demanding the craft of facilitation is. It takes deep care to host well, but it also takes humility: what works for one group of people, in one context, may not work for anyone else.
Facilitation isn’t about what we say. It’s about what we hear, and whether we’re willing to change what we do in response.
4. You can set up a new email platform with no prior experience
But you will age 10 years in the process.
5. Emergence requires trust
Taking an emergent approach was always the plan. The revolution can’t be project managed: if we want to transform systems, we need to learn and adapt as we go. Pre-defining the goals and strategies of the work limits the opportunity for building a genuinely collaborative initiative, in which everyone has a say in the ends and means.
But a commitment to building together also requires transparency about the assumptions and intentions the initiators are bringing to the work. Some people, understandably, wanted to know the agendas and credentials of those involved before they could engage with our work fully – or at all.
Holding this tension is sometimes difficult, but always important. As a first step, we published the principles that had informed the development of the club, and we’re working towards a shared vision for change – but one that embraces multiple perspectives as an integral part of the answer.
6. We need resources
Antinormality Club started as one person’s idea and quickly became a community way bigger than that. The work so far has been sustained on love, hope, rage and instant coffee, but this can’t continue. I’m deeply grateful to the members who have stepped up to help facilitate meetings, develop the organisation and produce content, but it’s not right that their work is unfunded, too.
For an organisation rooted in disability justice, our dependence on the unpaid labour of impacted people is a contradiction in terms. It’s also a major constraint on our ability to grow – yet we know from our launch experience how much our work is needed.
Fundraising is a time-intensive and usually heart-wrenching experience. I dream of a funder seeing our work and stepping forward with an investment that sets us on the path to sustainability, because they see why our work is so important. They see that the stigmatisation and lack of meaningful support for people with mental ill-health, distress and trauma is an outrageous injustice. They also see that it’s a barrier to us achieving any other form of social change. Because if we can’t support the folks who bear the pain of changing the world, how can we expect them to carry on?