What does it mean to have agency in life?
My understanding of agency starts with the human willingness to simply show up
First, thank you to everyone who has been engaging with my posts, it means a lot. Second, my apologies for over a 2-month delay between posts - in April end I moved from my house of 3 years and in June I moved from the country I tried to make my home for the past 4.5 years. Both changes were hard and I will share more about them in a subsequent post. For now, I am enjoying being job-less, home-less and state-less (in the traditional sense).
This article is in response to a question posed by a reader and another dear friend, “What does it MEAN to have agency in life?”. As per the conventional definition in social sciences, the sense of agency refers to the human capacity to shape their own future, i.e. the feeling of being in the driving seat of our life. In other words, it is our capability to exert influence on our life, our sense of power to make a difference. There are a few different things I want to focus on here - first how agency is more than a “sense”, it is a choice and how developing agency is a lifelong skill that enhances true freedom.
Think about the last time you felt upset, someone treated you poorly, or hurt you in some form. Alternatively, you can think about the last time you failed at something. Basically, any event that made you seemingly “lose” your sense of control over your feelings or the consequent actions. You didn't want to feel and act a certain way, but you did anyway, like an appliance’s default setting. Or you acted in a way that you couldn’t make sense of, something felt new and alien. FYI, this can also apply to happy feelings of euphoria, unexpectedly someone did something that made you happy, or a sense of contentment washed over you in response to something. In my understanding, this is where agency starts, with the willingness to fully participate in the experience that you are having, with the willingness to sit with the comfort (or the discomfort), with the willingness to engage (or disengage) with it i.e. with the willingness to show up for whatever is happening, without trying to run away from it.
Most of the times, we do not realise the inner workings that lead to an outer response. I’m not a psychologist, hence I will not attempt to explain the inner workings. What I have realised though, is that by simply engaging lovingly, non-judgmentally and curiously with my experience, I’m able to glean meaning and understand a little about my inner workings. There is information hidden in each experience, precious information about the hurts I still carry (aka triggers), about things I absolutely love (aka food and nature and reading and some people), and most importantly, information about the stories I’m telling myself with respect to the world, stories that may or may not be true. Agency, is the willingness to collect this information and parse it out for learning more about one’s inner workings.
Now, the question becomes what does one do with this knowledge? Agency, furthermore, is realising that these inner workings create our outer workings in the world, hence this knowledge becomes responsibility. Responsibility to accept our hurts, to fill our lives with things we truly love and to change the stories we tell ourselves when we find out how far from truth they are. I’ll explain with an example.
Until recently, I did not enjoy cooking - I found it to be a chore that if I could avoid, I would. However, with no income, it became something I could not avoid, hence I had to face my disdain towards it. Why did I not enjoy cooking? I love food, so lack of interest is not the answer. I love creating things, and a dish is essentially a creation. I love the feeling of being self-sufficient, so cooking obviously fits that criteria. However, something more was going on.
As I continued to inquire, I realised that I had associated cooking with being “unproductive”, an activity where effort vs reward was massively unbalanced (unless one derives pleasure from it). Growing up, I had only seen housewives do most of the cooking. And the food prepared painstakingly by these housewives (including my mother), usually received no reward. And I, obviously, was too “educated” to engage in such “unproductive” behaviour. Hence the story was made and the emotion of disdain was attached to it to preserve my identity of being a superior, productive member of society and the action that resulted was less cooking. However, since I now “had” time as an unemployed person (and I needed to save money), I had to cook. And so I did, begrudgingly.
After a few begrudged cooking sessions, I realised how happy I felt by eating the food made by me, it actually tasted really nice. I started looking forward to my own meals, having conversations with myself on what would I like to eat, is there something that I would like to try out. I started pairing this with my walks to new grocery stores, asking myself on which ingredient would I like to try. Slowly, as I got all this new feedback, I discovered my freedom to change the story associated with cooking. I could give it a new meaning, a new story. And lo and behold, cooking, essentially, became an act of love, towards myself. It became an act of gratefulness and responsibility, toward Mother Nature and all that it provides. It became an act of respect, for all the people who have nourished and fed me with their creations throughout my life. The “unproductive” activity became so much more. The emotion association with it changed from disdain to love, to contribution. I started extending it to friends I live with, and went from having ~70% of my meals in a week outside about 6 months ago, to ~70% of meals cooked at home, by choice. Very recently on a trip to London, I actually started missing my own cooking after having a few meals outside! Weird.
That is the true power of exercising agency. The discovery of personal power and the associated freedom. The freedom to do things differently, the freedom to gracefully (or begrudgingly) accept what’s outside our control, the freedom to sometimes simply hold space for whatever wishes to express itself through us, the freedom to sometimes see beyond ourselves, to the person sitting right in front of us and contribute to their life, in whatever small way feels true to us, and, the freedom to give meaning, to form new stories, until they get questioned.
Apparently, I’m a great cook (as per the feedback of friends who’ve eaten my creations), and for all these years I couldn’t contribute or develop this beautiful aspect of myself, because of one single story. So, what’s the story that you are telling yourself right now?