Community Health and Activists
The following post is by Maryam Al-Khawaja, Internet Freedom Festival’s new Mental Health Coordinator. She will be responsible for coordinating a series of sessions and tools focusing on self-care and well being, and advising the IFF Code of Conduct Committee.
As activists, self care and wellbeing does not usually take the lead when it comes to our priorities.
We tend to prioritize our work, whether it’s out of guilt, a sense of responsibility or merely for practical reasons. Dealing with everyday realities of activism, be it lack of resources and funding, being overworked and underpaid is not unfamiliar to many in our activist community.
How many times have you or a colleague said, “There’s so much to do and not enough time to do it”? And work is just the tip of the iceberg. I say this because I am very familiar with the fact that our struggles come on many different levels. I’ve already written about dealing with survivor’s guilt and loneliness.
But I know that it goes way beyond that — especially for the womxn activists.
We have to deal with struggling against the powers that be, while fighting patriarchy — many times within our own circles — as well as dealing with the so many personal battles we face every day. Everything from sexual harassment, to blackmail and sexual assault. We saw the amount of womxn who participated in the #MeToo campaign — but what we didn’t see were those unable to take part. Those who whispered #MeToo to themselves, while feeling the triggers of reading post after post after post from the campaign.
I look around me today and I find that so many of my colleagues are burnt out. They’re exhausted, and rightfully so.
In 2017, human rights internationally are regressing. While we spent the past years fighting for progress on rights internationally, now we’re fighting to hold on to what we’ve already achieved. This is a situation that unifies the entire world. Which also means that now, more than ever, it is important to focus on our community health. It is at times like these that I remember what my father, who is a human rights advocate serving a life sentence, told me multiple times:
Take care of yourself, or else you will not last long, and you will be unable to take care of anyone else.
This is why I am pleased to join the IFF team to help lead on community health, and to make sure we develop a space during IFF focusing on self-care and well being. When we talk about community health, that includes the self-care and well-being of both the individual and the community as a whole. I will bring my own personal experience of dealing with the day to day struggles of being an activist, whilst also being open to learn and listen to the experience of our community.
And what better to end than with the quote of Audre Lorde:
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Maryam Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini Woman Human Rights Defender, and is the founder of Al-Khawaja Consulting, where she works as a human rights consultant and trainer. Al-Khawaja is on the Board of the International Service for Human Rights and Urgent Action Fund. She previously served as Co-Director for the Gulf Center for Human Rights and as Acting President of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights. Al-Khawaja played an instrumental role in the democratic protests taking place in Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout in February 2011, which triggered a government response of widespread extra judicial killings, arrests, and torture. Due to her work, she has been subjected to assault, threats, defamation campaigns, imprisonment and an unfair trial. Over the past years, Al-Khawaja has emerged as a leading voice for human rights and political reform in Bahrain and the Gulf region. She has been influential in shaping official responses to the atrocities in Bahrain around the world by engaging with prominent European and American policymakers. Al-Khawaja has received numerous awards for her human rights work, including the Rafto Prize.
