Lessons from Kidoti: Social Justice Advocates Don’t Know How to Chill
I’m sitting on the edge of the Indian Ocean, in a rural town in Northern Zanzibar called Kidoti. Life in Kidoti is very simple — it’s not a place travelers tend to visit when in Zanzibar. It’s free from the hustle-and-bustle of tourist-central Stone Town, and it’s not quite the elegant beach getaway found near Kendwa at the northern tip of the island. The best word I can use to describe Kidoti is simple.
My accommodation is a small hut made from stone. The hut only contains three beds, some homemade shelves, and a bathroom with an outdoor-style shower. The roof is crafted with what I think is straw, and the windows are just wooden panels with a curtain drawn in front of them.
My little ocean hut in Kidoti is exactly what I thought I needed to unwind after a long, exciting, and hectic year of working in health policy, advocacy, and social justice in Washington, D.C.
That is, until I got here.
I told myself I’d disconnect. When I reached Zanzibar, I deleted my Twitter app. I didn’t want to hear about what was happening in the White House or the Senate; I didn’t want to know about the latest global scandal; I wanted, for once, to not concern myself with our imploding world, and just be.
So, I disconnected and found myself on an island.
Two days later, the Twitter app is re-installed on my phone. I’ve scanned CNN, BBC, and The New York Times, I’ve made myself knowledgeable about a number of human rights violations that occurred since I left the U.S., and I’m finalizing my plans to volunteer for a Senate race I’m very invested in once I get back home.
Why is it that those of us who have made activism and social justice our life work find it so hard to disconnect?
We talk so much about “self-care,” and what says self-care better than retreating to a secluded rural town on an island across the ocean? All activists and advocates know how crucial self-care is in sustaining ourselves in our line of work. Why is it so hard for us to just…chill?
I have an idea, and it has to do with passion, purpose, and practicality.
The three P’s: separating passion and purpose from practicality.
Those of us who work on social justice issues know that it’s almost impossible to separate our life from our work — our work is our passion, and it’s hard not to live out our passion in our everyday lives. We’re usually able to connect our line of work to a personal experience or identity, which means our social justice advocacy never truly stops. It’s hard to put a passion on hold, especially when that passion is tied to one’s identity or life experience. Additionally, we tend to tie our purpose to that passion, and we often allow our passion or sense of purpose to cloud what’s practical.
I never liked my physics classes in high school and college, but I’ve found one certain law of thermodynamics to be very applicable to many fields that deal with social justice:
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed — energy can only be transformed from one object to another. This is the first law of thermodynamics, and I’d like to make it a law of social justice too.
We have a finite amount of energy. We often forget that we can’t do everything. Passion and purpose is great, but we as social justice folks need to remind ourselves every now and then that the energy we want to put into the world to create change doesn’t always exist. More importantly, we can’t always create that energy. It’s okay to stop sometimes and retreat. Retreating doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve given up or decided that the work is too hard, too emotionally taxing, or too demanding. It means we’ve assessed the practicality of just how hard we can work, and whether the energy to do that work exists.
So, as I sit with my feet in the shells, a quick jump from the perfectly blue and clear water of the mesmerizing Indian ocean, I’m making a conscious effort to stop, and just be. I need not concern myself with the state of the union or the way the world is at this moment. I don’t have the energy right now, and that is okay.
Social justice doesn’t have to be nonstop. We, as a community, need to learn to chill.
Temi Omilabu was a 2017–2018 Global Health Corps fellow in the U.S.
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