How to Reset

Loss does not depress me. It focuses me. 

Hello, Sabrina here. I last wrote to this list in January 2022. I was only a few weeks into recovering from an intense car accident. My intention in restarting and resetting this digital space today is to create a container to share my work, analysis, reads and whatever else I may feel like sharing. If that isn’t your thing, you are welcome to reset your inbox and hit unsubscribe.

For everyone else, andiamo… 

We all need reminders of what matters in life sometimes. Each year, the turn of the calendar has felt like a beautiful collective pause to ask, “Am I doing this right?” I’ve always prided myself as a curious person, someone who asks good questions and for awhile I’ve shared this question/reflection each New Year: “Life is short. Do you have the courage to live how you want to live?” 

What do you do when you don’t like your answer? 

There is a quotation that is attributed to the late Zora Neale Hurston, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Hurston was a trained ethnographer, she defined her research as "formalized curiosity... poking and proding with purpose." Crises are clarifying agents, a values pop quiz you never want sprung on you. Crises are moments that make you clear on your answers and purpose. Who are you? What matters to you? What are your values? Who are your people? What do you stand for? Who do you stand with? How do you want to live?⁣ 

Very rarely are there time for questions when you're standing in the fire. Capacity for curiosity is achieved in surviving. When survival is the chief objective, it's not about assigning morality or making a right decision or a wrong decision, it's about making a decision and then making it right. Reflection and reset usually comes later.

Recovering from the car accident, I had to learn a lot about concussions and capacities. Concussions are an energy crisis in the brain. To properly heal, it’s important to dial in on energetic priorities because compounding traumas make “the brain less able to respond adequately to a second injury and potentially lead to longer-lasting deficits… “injured cells may be capable of recovering after an initial injury, but a second concussion during this energy crisis can lead to cell death.” My injuries meant for much longer than I imagined, I didn't have capacity I wanted or needed. I had no choice but to lean into curiosity to understand my new normal because I intuitively knew facing the world in my state would only hit me with an onslaught of compounding blows my head and heart could not take. 

The pop quiz had reached my desk. 

The courage I had to practice for my own well-being and survival was getting focused, dialed in and very very quiet. Navigating this energy crisis brought unyielding grief. I had to outsource holding faith and I was not in the business of hope. Today, thankfully standing on the other side of recovery, I understand why the vibes of this intense, traumatic year so far feels familiar. 

We are existing in a collective energy crisis. 

We are enduring unrelenting personal and collective losses and perpetual crises bigger than one person. The persistent unrelenting traumas of intersecting political, environmental, economic, cultural crises is only continuing to cascade and compound. How do we protect ourselves and each other from the onslaught? How do you practice courage existing in a cacophony of chaos? 

This is called crisis fatigue.

With the recent LA wildfires, I found myself in another pop quiz but this time, with an entire city caught by surprise, experiencing the crisis in a collective. It should come to the surprise of no one, that this was not my first rodeo and my ability to problem solve in a crisis should probably be studied in a lab someday. After firing up countless Google docs coordinating aid, air filters, emergency housing and evacuating myself twice, I was finally in a safe(r) place. I got focused and took mental inventory for myself— if my home burns down, what would I be really sad to lose forever? 

My answer was sweet and simple: there is a single photo of me with my late father that I hadn’t gotten around to digitally scanning yet that I would be sad to lose. Everything else was backed up or can be replaced. I was satisfied with that answer and that clarity gave me peace. With that peace, came expanded capacities and I exhaled into another round of check-ins with fresh energy: What do you need? How can I help? What do we need to amplify? 

Reset. The prefix “re-“ means “again” or “back”. The word “set” means to place, lay or stand. 

We reset by doing what we can to help each other get back up again.

We reset by understanding our capacity.

How do you stand again? 

With energy.

This week a question came up in a work conversation that I knew had no clear answer — “How do you facilitate hope and faith in a toxic environment designed to erode trust in these two things?” 

I bring this up because following my car accident, in a major concussion and grief fog I sent a personal note to update folks. In that message I wrote: “It is my hope of hopes that I will return back to my best again. Hopefully soon. And hopefully I will be better than I was before.” Hope. Hope. Hope. Hope. In the fog, I leaned on hope and faith when I genuinely could not see a path forward. 

It feels as though this collective energy crises has put hope into a blackout.

We reset by sourcing hope and faith.

In a crisis, we all have different capacities and roles. For some of us, we are caught unprepared for the pop quiz; for others it is temporarily uncomfortable but not totally derailing. Courage requires an understanding of your own capacities. Courage calls for honesty. It requires knowing whether you have the energy to help someone stand or if you need to be brave enough to ask for help to get back up again. Collective capacity is how we are able to build bridges to safely cross over these treacherous experiences. Courage doesn't call for bootstraps, it calls for interconnectedness. Collective capacity is how we can resource an economy of hope and faith. But we can only achieve in the collective through first answering the questions for ourselves: Who are you? What matters to you? What are your values? Who are your people? What do you stand for? Who do you stand with?

Do you have the courage to live how you want to live?” 

Faith is in the practice of asking and answering. But we don't have to wait for the calendar to turn or for a crisis to take the test. We can break out of the blackout and find lights for hope when we are courageous enough to put energy into understanding ourselves and doing what we can where we are to help each other stand again.

This is how we reset. 

Happy New Year. 🧧

Sabrina Hersi Issa is a human rights technologist. She is committed to leveraging innovation as a tool to unlock opportunity and dignity for all. She does this through her work in technology, media and philanthropy. This is her personal newsletter.