#34: Exercising Agency
My grandmother never had a cane, a hearing aid, or a single pair of glasses her whole life. She liked to brag about her toughness. One of the weirdest and HARDEST sights to see and accept occurred to me her last two weeks on Earth, as I saw she needed help lifting herself out of bed and using the bathroom. She passed at 95 shortly after she lost her sense of independence and agency. Lauren, I really love the point you made - we absolutely need those things to live with pride and joy, and also to help and bring more joy to those around us.
- Amanda
Lauren Culbertson lauren@restorenyc.org
As a fiction writing minor in college, I learned to withstand criticism against something I had produced. But while a Quentin-Tarantino-esque bloodbath is typical in just about any undergraduate writing workshop, one my senior year was different due to one big mistake: I based the main character too much on myself.
The biggest issue, my classmates said, was that the main character was too passive. In fact, they said, she did not actively make a single decision in the entire story. She had zero agency. Everything happened to her. It didn’t feel like they were critiquing the story, it felt like they were critiquing me.
That day I felt a new weight on my shoulders. Did I just wait for things to happen to me? Was I not an active, contributing part of my communities? I slapped myself across the face and said if I wanted to be “successful” in life I was going to have to work against any tendency I had to let others make decisions on my behalf. There was no way any peer would take a look at me again and think I did not have agency.
Fast forward some time to last weekend in my New Jersey hometown. I braced my emotional self as my grandfather lead my grandmother - who has had cancer for almost 6 years now - into my aunt’s 50th birthday party at a local pub. When the two of us helped her into a chair, she said, “I’ll just be here if you need me. Don’t think I can do much else for anyone.” Everyone stood way above her, talking, laughing, drinking beer.
It was then that I thought back to that workshop and realized that my peers weren’t critiquing my character because being passive is not good, commendable, or the key to "success" in life. They critiqued my character because being passive is not natural. The secret to good fiction is believable characters, and to create a character who hardly makes decisions is not really believable. Humans were created to have agency.
I have learned that I flourish when I am in environments where I can exercise my decision making power, and I struggle to live into my potential when my ability to do so is limited, like in the case of my sick grandmother. Seeing her numbed and resigned in that chair seemed at odds with the way humans were meant to live. The same could be said for the survivors of trafficking that Restore serves. Especially through our Economic Empowerment program, we seek to walk alongside these women as they reclaim the ability to choose their own future after that ability was so wrongfully taken away from them.
If the ability to exercise our natural agency is a privilege, then perhaps it is a human responsibility to help others regain agency who have lost it. After all, it is our choices that unite us in our human condition, in our consequential triumphs and failures. The stories of our lives would be pretty dull and colorless without them.
Someone once told me that I "move" when I see the “earth out of alignment,” which is just a fancy way of saying that I’ve always had a natural inclination to pay attention to what happens in the margins; that’s where the most exciting things happen, after all. That brought me to Restore NYC, an anti- sex trafficking nonprofit, where I work to inspire generosity and help our fundraising team make data-driven decisions. I experience the most joy in my work when I witness two things clicking inside someone: sex trafficking is a major issue that is closer than we think, but it has a solution that we can all be a part of.