Lessons In Resilience From Jessica Luther

Jessica Luther is a contemporary journalist, through and through. Having a demanding Twitter presence (with over 16.5K followers) and an equally powerful persona to go along with it, Luther is a writer that audiences can rely on for women’s rights, sports and cultural justice coverage. She’s worked with everyone, from VICE to The Atlantic, and her passion for the work is palpable. She’s a writer who has not only excelled at her own professional art but has also built out a rich ecosystem of causes and narratives that drive her personally.

I first had the opportunity to learn about Luther and her writing during the Wendy Davis filibuster, which took place in June 2013. For Texas’s advocates of abortion and safe, accessible health care for women, this was a slow ramp of injustice doled out by the state’s legislature that was culminating in Senate Bill 5 (SB5), that would render any abortion performed after 20 weeks illegal. As hearings began taking place, audiences online wanted real-time information about the proceedings — and Luther emerged as a primary resource. She was at the Capitol almost every day, live-tweeting the hearings, putting the call out for volunteer needs and speaking directly to the thousands of supporters from around the state and eventually around the world, who wanted to find ways to help. While many individuals were crucial in helping provide visibility for SB5, no one would doubt that Luther’s role was integral.

When debating how to approach the Femsplain topic of resilience, I immediately thought of Luther. She is a writer who brings voices to the quieted. She is a person of deep compassion. She is a woman who embodies resilience.

Femsplain: We [as Texans] got to experience resilience, and becoming resilient as a community, during the Wendy Davis filibuster. Can you talk about your experience participating personally, but also as a professional who covered the event?

Jessica Luther: Yeah, well, I didn’t cover it so much as a journalist. It was actually at that point that I realized I couldn’t cover the event as a journalist — it was too personal. I ended up writing a few things, like for The Atlantic and Feministing, but mainly I was a civilian reporter. I felt like what I was doing on Twitter and Facebook, or through my blog posts, was reporting on the scene, even though it was intensely personal. I knew that if people felt like they could connect to me, they could connect to the larger issue at hand. I was super aware that was what was happening when I was doing it. When I think about resilience, I think about how tired I was for seven weeks. I remember at some point, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and I said, “I just don’t think I can go to the Capitol today. I’m so tired.” He replied, “Y’know, you don’t have to go.” And I thought to myself, “No, I do have to be there.” People had started to contact me from around the country, but really mostly from around the state. Austin is pretty far from a lot of the state’s residents. A lot of people couldn’t be there. I was able to tell people, especially through Twitter, what was going on all the time. And I knew people appreciated that. And I could do it. In that way, I just felt that it would have been easy to have not gone.

I was so proud of us in the moment of the filibuster. That was such an amazing moment, one of the most amazing of my whole life. But we kept going back. There were weeks after the filibuster [after returning from a flight to Chicago], I headed to one of those hearings and I checked on Twitter and people were asking me where to send pizzas [for volunteers]. We were still going and I had to say, “I’m on a plane! I promise I’ll let you know!” [Laughs] In those moments, we still had people asking to send us pizzas.

Resilient is a word that definitely defines the community of Texans who have been fighting for access to abortion and comprehensive, safe healthcare for women. How do you feel like resilience is affected by having a community?

You say that and I think of a thousand things. Something that got lost in the overall story of what happened [at the filibuster] is that there had been a coalition of organizations that had been supporting these efforts for years beforehand in the regular legislative sessions. For months leading up to the moment where we had the first house bill, HB2, there was a pivotal moment where everyone showed up; it almost felt like we grew overnight. But people had been working so hard up until that moment to create this movement. Their work, that community, had been doing so much leading up to that. When I look at it now, I personally am not nearly as invested. I can’t be, emotionally. It’s hard. I still have friends that are doing this work. It’s been two years and [the Texas legislature] is in session again. I look at people like Andrea Grimes, who has a weekly column and stories about what is happening. She’s out there getting interviews and covering all this. I see the emails that I’m getting from NARAL. I’m somewhat shocked that everyone’s just still going… I do think that, for a lot of this, it depends on community. People would ask how I originally became involved with this [political advocacy], and I have to say honestly, “I was a friends with a lot of these people and we would drink together.” When all this started happening, and I started seeing people post about it on their Facebook… it was always about the community. It’s still very much about that. A community helps. It helps a lot.

When you think about that time, and about your continued coverage of abuses against women, like in your Sports Illustrated piece on the Vanderbilt rape case, how do you balance your professional involvement while also being emotionally resilient?

Man, sometimes I just don’t think I am emotionally resilient. I think about the moment that the bill finally passed. I had marched down Congress with Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood.

It was an amazing moment in particular because we all knew the Senate Bill was going to pass. There were, and still are, a lot of angry feelings that existed because of how everything happened. Wendy Davis comes out and speaks to the crowd. Kirk Douglas comes out and talks to us too. There were thousand of people, still there, and I remember finding my friend in the crowd. We went inside, I sat down and I was so sad.

[Pauses]

And I just didn’t want anyone to see me cry. People knew who I was. So I cried with my friend and I got myself together. I walked outside and said hello to roughly 30 people. I felt like I needed to look resilient. I kept thinking, “You gotta get it together,” but I was sad as hell. There was a point where Andrea Grimes, who is someone I was friendly with beforehand, but who I consider a good friend now… I knew her persona then and she is a hard-ass. There was a point where she said something about how she cried every night when she went to bed. At the time, I just needed to hear that Andrea Grimes, who is so tough, was also so upset about this.

To know that other people were out there, doing this same work, and were still getting up and still going back, made it easier for me to get through the crying, go back myself and get the work done. To keep going. To do it again.

I say this a lot: When I write about violence against women, it’s emotional work. I try to explain to other sports reporters, some who are men, about how to do it. They respond with, “Oh, it’s hard work investigating that and you did a good job.” I try and say thank you but there’s a whole other part to this. Listening to a rape victim give testimony when her rapist is in the room is… being in that space and feeling that heavy heart is hard. I had also worked on a story in December with VICE Sports to tell a story with a victim about what had happened to her. November and December of last year was the first time I experienced secondary trauma. I had to come to terms that secondary trauma was going to come along with the work, that I was going to be really fucking sad about, not only the violence that had occurred, but the way people responded to it.

Outside of your community and external voices who can ground you, what are some activities you turn to for self-care?

I work out. I go train twice a week and even if before I go, I feel too tired or I don’t want to do it, I always feel better when it’s over even if it kicked my ass. The other thing I do is I read romance novels! [Laughs] I’ve been doing this since grad school when I was writing my dissertation, which was about the history of slavery. I had gotten to the point where I was only reading thing for my dissertation and that was it. It was all I could manage. I can’t even remember how or why I started reading romance novels but it was my antidote. The familiarity of the pattern, knowing there will be a happy ending — I just love it.

When you see young advocates and young writers that are looking to make a difference, what advice would you give them before they set out on that path?

Don’t read the comments! [Laughs] It’s a real thing. I write for VICE Sports a lot and there’s only so many places I trust to carry those stories. I wrote a piece for [my editor at VICE Sports] Tomás Riós back in September, which was a 1,400-word piece about the University of Missouri’s athletic director and how he needed to resign due to years of questionable activity. I write stuff a lot that people simply don’t like — but this was different. Tomás immediately sent me a chat [once the piece went live] that said, “We’re deleting the comments! Don’t read the comments!” And like an idiot, I read the comments… holy moly. It was so freaky. It helped me stop reading the comments.

But setting up boundaries for yourself, that’s the bigger thing. When I’m on Twitter, I just block [trolls]. I just block them. I’ve stopped engaging. It’s not worth it emotionally for me to do that work but it took me a long time to get there. I needed to be right, which is similar to my comment feeling. Set emotional boundaries for yourself and know when to turn to the people in your life who support you. It takes time to learn but you have to learn it.

Jessica Luther can be found online at @scATX and look for more work from her coming out this year with Deadspin and VICE Sports.