Tuesday Telegram: The Purpose of Repair
6th Day of Christmas, Kwanzaa and Nia, Yuletide. A season of Light in the Darkness.
Tuesday Telegram: The Purpose of Repair
Dear Becoming Ones—
We are living inside overlapping aftershocks.
Personal trauma. Collective trauma. Political trauma. Ecological trauma.
None of this is abstract. It lives in our bodies. In our sleep. In how quickly we flinch. In how easily we disappear from one another.
And still—purpose is required of us.
Not the purpose of hustle.
Not the purpose of proving our worth to violent systems.
But the purpose of repair.
Kwanzaa names this orientation as Nia—purpose as collective vocation. Not individual destiny. Not personal branding. Purpose as the slow, disciplined work of tending community so that life can continue against the odds.
Repair, in this sense, is not an aesthetic. It is not reconciliation without truth. It is not spiritual bypass or premature forgiveness. Repair is what becomes necessary when we tell the truth about harm and refuse to organize our futures around punishment, erasure, or disposability.
This is where daily metanoia enters—not as moral self-flagellation, but as a practice of turning.
Turning away from carceral reflexes.
Turning away from domination as safety.
Turning away from the lie that survival must come at someone else’s expense.
Metanoia is a daily re-orientation of the nervous system and the imagination. A commitment to ask, again and again: What would repair require here?
In this moment.
In this relationship.
In this conflict.
In myself.
Many Indigenous wisdom traditions teach that repair happens close to the ground. Not in grand declarations, but in return—returning land, returning truth, returning responsibility, returning to one another. Repair is local. Relational. Earned over time. It does not rush healing; it builds trust.
An abolitionist horizon sharpens this further. Abolition insists that we cannot repair what we refuse to name. That harm must be addressed without reproducing the very logics that caused it. That punishment is not the same thing as accountability. That safety built on cages—physical or relational—will never be safety.
So purpose, right now, looks like this:
Staying present when it would be easier to disappear.
Choosing curiosity over condemnation.
Practicing restraint with our words.
Learning how to apologize without defensiveness.
Learning how to receive repair without control.
This does not deny the reality of trauma. It takes trauma seriously enough to say: we cannot keep letting it decide how we treat one another. Trauma explains behavior; it does not absolve us from responsibility. Repair is how we honor what we’ve survived without letting survival calcify into harm.
Purpose, then, is not purity.
It is fidelity—to life, to memory, to the possibility of collective becoming.
Every day asks us a quiet question:
Will you organize your life around fear, or around repair?
Daily metanoia is how we answer. Not once. Not perfectly. But repeatedly. Turning again. Choosing again. Repairing again.
This is fugitive work—often unseen, uncelebrated, unfinished. But it is the work that makes freedom imaginable. Not freedom as escape, but freedom as belonging without violence.
May we commit, together, to purpose that repairs.
May we practice turning as a form of love.
May we stay long enough to become trustworthy to one another again.
With you, in the work—
RCE+ 🕯️