Nthmosts Open Letter to Noisebridge

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ESSAY: This is an essay by a Noisebridger expressing their ideas. | E

An Open Letter About Emotional Labor and Community Care[edit]

Written January 9, 2026, following the events documented in Meeting Notes 2026 01 06

On Carrying Collective Grief[edit]

I need to be honest: I've been extra cranky, extra on-edge ever since Tuesday. There are reasons for that you can read in the Meeting Notes.

Some people don't understand immediately why i, personally, would be cranky.

Friends... For an entire month I carried the collective grief of a community that had lost faith in anarchy itself due to its inability to act on a very tricky situation.

A community that has lost several good members to this situation, people whose belief and love for Noisebridge were the strongest of any of us.

That's GRIEF that has to be processed. Relational loss. Guilt, shame, all the rest. It's not MINE but I carried over a dozen individuals' grief to be able to act.

I'm still carrying it. And i haven't had a chance to discharge it in any way. I need a good long cry, probably w/ 🍄

So... please be gentle with me. Don't take it too personally if I'm terse and just want to be left alone to work on my thing.

If you interrupt me a few times -- especially if i'm trying to answer your question -- I'm not going to be very easygoing about it. Sorry.

Emotions are real things. This will pass. But for now, please understand you need some gloves to handle me right now.

See also: Anarchy Paralysis

On Boundaries During Recovery[edit]

When you're carrying this kind of load, you need space to process. That means:

  • Being terse or wanting to be left alone isn't personal
  • Emotions are real things - they need time and space to move through
  • Boundaries may seem arbitrary to others but they're survival mechanisms
  • Asking someone to explain or justify their boundaries is asking them to do more emotional labor

What helps: respect, acknowledgement, genuine connection. Hugs. Chats about nice hiking spots and cabins in the woods. Long conversations about the emergent implications of TPUs. Collaborating on improving the space.

What doesn't help: requiring explanations, debating boundaries, treating statements of emotional state as invitations to troll, deflecting by rapidly changing the subject, or speaking of the labor as though it was merely procedural.

On Discomfort With Care[edit]

Many people in this community care deeply about Noisebridge and other people, yet are simultaneously very uncomfortable with expressions of need for care.

Some will feel uncomfortable with the fact that the care I took on was a direct result of their failure to act.

I don't care 🌈

Recommendation: STFU and get over it. 💙

I did this KNOWING this would be where I ended up. Voluntarily. And because I care about you.

There's no debt here unless people stick their heads in the sand. The way to demonstrate understanding of the load taken on is simply: show up. Be present. Practice relational care.

I am simultaneously:

  • capable of holding many people's struggles
  • someone who needs to be held too

On Justice-Oriented People and Bad Faith Actors[edit]

A pattern I've observed: Justice-oriented people don't respect their own feelings enough to report on them. They'll report on others' feelings, but not their own. They tell themselves they're being fair, being patient, not overreacting.

This creates a dangerous opening: Bad faith actors can leverage the community's safety protocols for their own gain, knowing that justice-minded people will sublimate their feelings on the mistaken notion that it "has to get really bad" before they want to "make a big deal about it." People committed to equity bend over backwards to doubt their own perceptions and minimize their own harm.

This is how missing stairs form. This is how communities lose good people while protecting harmful ones.

Your feelings matter. Your discomfort is data. You don't need it to "get really bad" before you're allowed to name what you're experiencing.

On Patterns of Emotional Labor[edit]

People keep saying "don't burn out!"

You know what that really means? "Wow, looks like you can carry a lot of this - I hope you can keep carrying it."

This is how you CREATE burnout. You cast someone as The Person Who Can Handle It. They become the hero who's uniquely capable of dealing with crisis. The community becomes dependent on them continuing to carry the load. And they feel responsible for continuing to carry it.

Congratulations, you just enshrined someone into a role that will destroy them.

What's needed isn't hero-worship or warnings about burnout. It's acknowledgement. Support. Modeling relational care. It's other people stepping up to share the load.

If only one person can do this work, the system has already failed.

If this community wants to get better at not sublimating bad feelings until they become insane crises that require someone like me, then the entire system needs to get better at acknowledging and relating feelings in real time.

See: Restorative Communication

Conclusion[edit]

This will pass. I will not feel this way forever. But the patterns that created this situation will repeat unless the community learns to:

  • Recognize emotional labor as real labor
  • Practice care for those who do difficult community work
  • Address conflicts before they become crises
  • Get comfortable with feelings - both others' and their own
  • Trust that justice-oriented people's feelings are valid data, not selfishness

Anarchy only works when we practice distributed authority.

Nthmost, January 10, 2026

See also[edit]

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