Power

This poem explores the distinction between power and control.

Rather than locating power in status, possession, influence, or the ability to make circumstances conform to our wishes, it places power within our relationship to ourselves.

We can choose. We can act. We can work toward change.

But our power does not have to depend upon whether the world changes in response.

In this poem, becoming powerful means becoming self-sovereign enough that our integrity and agency remain our own.

I have spent a lot of my life very consciously subject to and in possession of different forms of power. As a result, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it.

• Who has it.
• Who doesn't.
• How it is gained.
• How it is lost.

And especially what happens when circumstances seem to leave us powerless.

This poem came from arriving at a distinction that now feels increasingly important to me:

“True power
Is not something you have
It's something you are”

If power is something I have, then it can be taken from me:

• Money can disappear.
• Status can change.
• Relationships can end.
• Other people can refuse what I ask of them.
• Plans can fail.
• My circumstances can become radically different from what I wanted.

Anything external that makes me feel powerful is therefore conditional.

That does not make external power unreal. Money, authority, access, physical capacity, social influence, and countless other forms of power have very real consequences in the world.

But they are not what I mean here by true power.

The poem is concerned with something more fundamental:

“Claiming power
Is the assertion
Of your own
Uncompromisable integrity”

I think the word assertion matters.

Recognizing my worth privately is different from actually organizing my life around it.

I can believe that I deserve boundaries while continually violating my own.

I can believe that my needs matter while repeatedly subordinating them.

I can intellectually recognize my agency while still waiting for permission to exercise it.

That is why claiming power requires more than recognition. It requires embodiment, or as the poem puts it:

“It's more than just recognizing
But actually being
Self-sovereign”

Self-sovereignty does not mean that I control everything that happens to me.

It means that I retain authority over what is actually mine to govern:

• My choices.
• My boundaries.
• My participation.
• My values.
• My response.

And that distinction becomes especially important in the next movement:

“Wielding power
Is the capacity to choose action
Towards improvement
Without needing the improvement
To actually happen”

At first, that can sound almost contradictory.

Why act toward improvement if I don't need the improvement to happen?

Because power and control are not the same thing.

I can do everything available to me and still encounter impediment: another person's freedom, material limitations, chance, timing, systems larger than myself, or circumstances I simply cannot command.

If I define my power by whether my actions produce the outcome I wanted, then every uncontrollable outcome becomes capable of making me powerless.

I don't want to live that way.

Instead, I am interested in a form of power that allows me to care deeply about an outcome, work sincerely toward it, and still know that my fundamental agency does not disappear if reality answers differently.

That is not detachment from life.

It is participation without requiring domination.

• I can advocate for change without controlling whether another person changes.
• I can pursue intimacy without controlling whether another person chooses me.
• I can create something without controlling how it is received.
• I can set a boundary without controlling whether someone respects it.
• And I can leave when they don't.

That last distinction has become particularly important to me.

Sometimes power is confused with the ability to make someone else behave differently.

But I have no such ability—I don't think anyone truly does.

My power is instead the ability to decide what I will do in response.

That is why the poem ends here:

“You become powerful
When you need
Nothing to change
In order to feel
Totally empowered”

I don't mean that nothing should change. I don't mean accepting injustice, mistreatment, deprivation, or circumstances that can and ought to be improved. And I certainly don't mean pretending not to want what I genuinely want.

I mean refusing to make my fundamental relationship with my own power conditional upon receiving those things.

There is an important difference between:

I need nothing.

and:

I need nothing to change in order to know that I have power.

The first denies need.

The second locates agency somewhere that unmet need cannot entirely take away.

• I can want change.
• I can need change.
• I can grieve its absence.
• I can devote enormous effort toward creating it.

And still, right here, before I know the outcome, I can choose how I participate.

Perhaps that is the paradox at the center of this poem:

The less I require power to mean control over what happens, the more completely I can inhabit the power I actually possess.

• Not omnipotence.
• Not invulnerability.
• Not independence from other people or the world.

But self-sovereignty.

The ability to meet reality as it is, choose from my own integrity, and act toward what I believe could be better.

Whether or not reality complies.

Only then does my power remain fully mine.