Video and transcript from Matthew Reynolds talk from Voltage Controls 4th Annual Facilitator Summit, Control the Room

Control the Room 2022 was an absolute success! We hosted our annual facilitator summit last week, and our makeup sessions this week, alongside our partner MURAL. Our wonderful connection between the live event and the virtual world, hosted by Mark Tippin, Director of Strategic Next Practices, Mark facilitated “Mind Shift” sessions, where he guided our attendees through a dialog about how everyone was impacted by the talks. He engaged both in-person and virtual attendees through our various activities in our conference mural. It was inspiring to have so many people joining in different ways and everyone getting the chance to communicate.

We partnered with SAFE this year to support and honor a lost colleague, Jenni Robertson. The dedication of this summit comes after losing a coworker, mother, and friend to family violence and Voltage Control has pledged to work with SAFE to stop family violence for everyone. We wanted to take a moment and look back on all of the moments of insight, knowledge, and growth we all took part in over the course of the summit. 

This year’s summit theme was SHIFTS, and as we move into 2022 we have seen shifts in the way we work, the way we connect, and the way we honor one another.

We hosted 18 facilitators in a hybrid space. We were live in-person, on Zoom, and even created our own Control the Room VR space, and we must say the event, even with a few technical issues, turned out to be a hub of idea sharing and growing with each other. 

Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session, and each session was filled with a sense of community, play, and story-telling. Our first speaker up, Matthew Reynolds.  

Moving Your Authentic Self Forward

I am worthy.

You are worthy.

To open the summit with such a beautiful practice was profound. We all shared our worth with each other and were instantly pulled into this space of sharing, learning, and growing. Matthew celebrates bringing everything you’ve got and creating a space that celebrates diversity and inclusion.

“Our old habits are ingrained, worn in, soft, as are the thoughts that created them. We deserve as much grace as possible in reworking them. Rest in the promise that new pathways will appear to you in the midst of these new practices, often when you least expect it. At times, it is a great feat to stay open and willing against the growing scenes of stress and difficulty, but it is all you really need in order to begin. We begin slowly, as the largest, most powerful things do.”

The peaceful warrior opened us up to the understanding that a sense of belonging must be created by the individual. We, as people, need that sense of belonging to be authentic, and the space we found ourselves in was absolutely authentic and beautiful.

Watch Matthew Reynolds talk on Moving Your Authentic Self Forward

Screw it. I’m going to build my own place. And I built it through theater. I started out as an aeronautical engineer and a mathematician. That spring I took my first theater class, and it was on.

Matthew Reynolds

Read The Full Video Transcript:

Matthew Reynolds:

Thank you, thank you. I am worthy. You are worthy. I am worthy. You are worthy. I am worthy. You are worthy. Rise up, if you can, whatever your accessibility may be. One hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, please, and say, “I am worthy.”

Audience:

I am worthy.

Matthew Reynolds:

Open your hands up. You are worthy.

Audience:

You are worthy.

Matthew Reynolds:

Please join me, go through the room. Connect with someone. Say, “I am worthy. You are worthy.” And then they will say it in exchange. After you’ve exchanged with three people, please find your seat again and that way I’ll know to continue on. Thank you everybody.

Audience:

Matthew Reynolds:

So what’s coming up for you right now? Were you like, what is this woo-woo that this man is starting with so early in the morning? What, what, what is going on? What happened when I looked in that one person’s eyes, what did I see? What was reflected back to me? Did the words get cloyed and caught inside your mouth, inside your throat, inside your chest? What stories started coming up for you? What shields started to be built? Blocking, not letting it in. Do you truly believe that you are worthy?

Do you truly believe the others that eyes you looked into that they are worthy? My name is Matthew Reynolds. My pronouns are he, him, his, they, them, theirs. I am the fourth child of six of Emmanuel Reynolds and my mother is from central Illinois. She was Irish, German and Swedish. My father was a second generation out of slavery. He was in… born in Montgomery, Alabama.

I don’t know much about my father. He didn’t speak much about it. He was part of the great escape, the great migration north out of the south when all the terror lynchings were going on. So him and my grandfather actually went up to Keokuk, Iowa. And in Keokuk, Iowa, my father got onto a river boat and that’s where he was doing some cooking, et cetera, et cetera. My mother got off the farm and was actually cocktail waitressing on this river boat, and that’s where my parents met.

My mother at the time had jet black hair, but she has ice blue eyes. So she would wear sunglasses so that the two of them could go out to the black establishments, and she would wear gloves so that the palms of her hands couldn’t be seen. And that is where they would go. When my mom’s parents found out about my… when my mom’s parents found out about my mom and my dad, they kicked her out of the family.

And so that started even more migration north, and they went up to Minneapolis where the three… us four eldest, I should say, kids were born. Now, like I said, I didn’t know much about my father. He didn’t talk about his upbringing much. He figured if he talked about the trauma, it would follow him. If he talked about the things that occurred in his youth, it would follow him.

He did not know that my mother had talked to us older kids and said, “Hey, the only time that you raise a fist to another person is if they call you the N-word.” So I was in the back alleyway, three years old, my older brother, two years older than me, and these two white-bodied boys, and one of them called Ethan the N-word. I looked at the kid. I looked at my brother. I was like, “mom said,” and I looked back, and I popped him in the mouth.

And that was the start of me fighting… constantly. And it actually incited a huge fight between my mom and my dad. And in my younger years, I just didn’t know. I didn’t have the tools in my toolkit. I hadn’t gone to the right therapist yet. I hadn’t unpacked those things for myself to understand that my father did not have the tools… to deal with a lot of the things that were being thrown at him for being in an interracial marriage… From being from the south. And what him and my mom argued about was, “How dare you tell my children to be physically violent towards white-bodied folks.” Because for him, coming from Montgomery, Alabama, terror lynchings, that meant that you disappeared, or you were used as some way of oppressing black-bodied, brown-bodied folks. So they moved us all even further north. So Isanti, Minnesota is where I grew up. My family was the only family of color until I reached the eighth grade.

Like I said, this was the start of me fighting. So I fought basically every single day of the week, every time that I went to school, three times a week was probably the least. My father worked evenings, my mom was the one who came in. She’s the one who always fought. I saw my mom fighting all the time too. Women would come up, touch my hair, touch my brothers’ and sisters’ hair. “Oh my gosh, when did you adopt these kids?” Pop, pop.

So there was this violence that was always within me, this fight that was always within me. And then my father, he was an alcoholic and that’s how he dealt with a lot of this. And so he was physically abusive, and out of the four older kids, I was the one he took lot of that out on. So, at home, I don’t have a sense of belonging, fighting at school, I don’t have a sense of belonging.

And then the crush happened… on the next door neighbor boy. And now even more got thrown into the mix of me not belonging, of me trying to squish down, take away, keep everybody laughing, Matthew. And that way, if I’m keeping them laughing, they’re not going to call me names. If I keep them laughing, they’re not going to see the things that I’m actually trying to do to lift myself up. I want them to not pay attention to me, but they’re paying attention to me because I’m the only one that looks like this besides my brothers and sisters. Again, not having a sense of belonging.

Move it forward. Excited to go to the University of Minnesota, got a whole bunch of scholarships. I started in the summertime. The day I graduated, I moved out. I’m going to meet more black folks. I’m going to meet more queer folks. This is going to be amazing. Queer folks. “You played football in high school, really? You don’t know about Stonewall? You don’t know these… who Milk, Harvey Milk was? You don’t know these things? Yeah, whatever.” And I was shunned there. Black folks, “Wow, you talk really white, you dress really white, you must want to be white.” Again, pushed aside, not having any place to belong.

Screw it. I’m going to build my own place. And I built it through theater. I started out as an aeronautical engineer and a mathematician. That spring I took my first theater class, and it was on. Mm-hmm (affirmative). All my freaks and geeks, and everybody was there. All of us who had this whole sense of not belonging somewhere.

And that started my journey of understanding that is what I longed for, later on in life learning that that’s what the cognitive brain wants. It needs a strong sense of belonging. Everybody wants to belong. Even if it’s the introvert saying, “We’re introverted.” They have somewhere to belong. So then jumping ahead, multimedia performance artist, performing all over the place, drum corps, doing all these things, lower 48, performed in every state, et cetera, et cetera. Decided, U.S., I’m done with you, I’m out. Move to Amsterdam. [Dutch 00:10:51]. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Came back because my father was sick, wanted me to come back to the U.S., came back, saw him, et cetera, et cetera, and then I got the calling. “You are to become an educator.” Went to Southern Oregon University, got my master’s in teaching. Where I student taught at my mentor teacher was like, “Hey, I want to retire. I think you would be really great here. You should apply.” And dangled in front of me was that they got this Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant.

They’re turning it into a small school, meaning that it was, we got to revamp everything and we’re going to change education, we’re going to do all this great stuff, we’re going to be really progressive, which happened for a little bit. And it was… And it wasn’t. The conservatives there weren’t conservative enough for about 18% of them. In my time in southern Oregon, I saw two cross burnings, both on interracial couple’s property. There were multiple times that the KKK in Southern Oregon flyered to get people to join.

And then in 2016, when 45 was elected, it got really dangerous. And the death threats upped, and people came to my MLK celebration that I started, that never happened before, and it was the sixth one. And during the student piece about 50 people walked out. Then I had a dream, three times in a row. Active shooter at the school, former students, current students, all being shot and killed. Active shooter turns the gun on me, click click, no more bullets, drops the gun, turns and walks away.

After the third time I had the dream, I wrote my resignation letter. And then I started doing this. And I realized as I was going through my years in teaching that the biggest thing that I wanted people to do was have a sense of belonging. But then I realized, like myself and my own story, there are so many components in life that are telling us constantly that we should be somebody else. And part of that is through the fact that we’re not even given the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

How many people know Nathaniel Bacon and the Bacon Rebellion? How many people know when the word white was first used to describe folks in, in a legal form, in a law that was created? How many people know the characteristics of whiteness? So there’s something that has happened, and that’s for the longer session, right? There’s history that is missing, that we’ve internalized, that we don’t even know we’ve internalized, and we’re upholding particular ideas about society and what’s going on with society and how we fit in, and it’s called colonizer illness.

And the person who turned me on to this was Edgar Villanueva from his book, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. And he says, “Internalized oppression limits us just as much as the oppression coming from someone else. It limits the thoughts we can think, the dreams we can dream, the actions we can take, the futures we can create. It is an aspect of trauma from which we must heal, in order to stop the cycles of division, exploitation, and hurt.” Inside of us, outside of us. And so Yrsa Daley-Ward is this powerful magician, poet, performer, and I was reading her latest book and something jumped out at me and I was like, “Yes, that’s it.” The work with a capital W, looking in the mirror, pulling out these internalized aspects and these internalized ideas and they leave a wound, and how do we heal that wound?

“Our old habits are ingrained, worn in, soft, as are the thoughts that created them. We deserve as much grace as possible in reworking them. Rest in the promise that new pathways will appear to you in the midst of these new practices, often when you least expect it. At times, it is a great feat to stay open and willing against the growing scenes of stress and difficulty, but it is all you really need in order to begin. We begin slowly, as the largest, most powerful things do.”

I am worthy. You are worthy. Thank you.