How to Self-Care When Activism is Both Self-Care and Traumatizing
It’s one of those nights when a dully throbbing, fickle and irrational loneliness overcomes me, stubborn in its desire only to be satiated by having a series of nonexistent dependent events occur in interaction with a non-existent person composed of my favorite elements of people I know who when put together may be someone I want to come home to at night.
And I’ve been taunting the emptiness with Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” and “Love on the Brain” on repeat, because poking my bruises or doing a face mask, or massaging heart hurt with sad music or pleasuring myself or self-medicating with a lovely cabernet sauvignon from Chile — these are two sides of the same coin.
But that’s because I have the tendency to romanticize suffering for art, to treat life like a performance piece, and to cope with pain through considering the beauty produced, even if I fight aesthetic justification as a good enough reason to ever suffer.
And whenever my thoughts veer inward for too long, or when wallowing in self-pity begins to reach what I deem excessive and no longer fruitful in any sense, I must leave it while I still have some will to leave — which usually involves me working on one of my multiple projects to help make the world better like my actual job as a prison book club coordinator (where there is always more work than time), writing a talk on emotion labor and social justice discourse, editing grants for an international women’s economic development org, consulting a friend on his healthy deconversions project, finding more things to volunteer for, and so on.
That’s the mindset with which I came across a question in a Facebook group that aims to incubate online progressive energy post-election and mobilize for real-life change (in which I am an admin) which was, roughly and simplified:
How do I escape the pain of my social identity when activism is my self-care but also exhausting, retraumatizing, and unrewarding?
I basically needed to answer this question because my own personal cycle is (1) feel the pain of existence, (2) burying myself in work, (3) feel better, (4) rinse and repeat.
So I did what I often do on Facebook, which is overdo it when I feel like it by responding with 600-word comments (or drafting sermons on my own wall).
Plus, I decided at some point yesterday that my NaNoWriMo challenge would be to blog every day for the month of November — please join me — as I try to get into the good habit of further developing my generally bite-sized intellectual product on Facebook into slightly more well-elaborated content that I will publish here in my Spark Files.
Here’s what I said, edited for clarity:
Thank you for posting this very real, very painful question. I, too, believe that activism is self-care (albeit out of necessity with many other in-vogue self-care suggestions actually luxurious forms of much-needed and justified escapism).
But activism (awareness) keeps you on the front lines of struggle — so that you stay painfully aware of how far we haven’t come. Not to make light of progress, but what does this “progress” mean to a boy eating lead paint chips and drinking leaded water, barred from economic access by virtue of area code and birth lottery? What does this progress mean in a world where power affords empathy and humanity proportionate to each person’s proximity to Euro-whiteness?
I work with incarcerated people — a lot of them young people. Today, I was at our re-entry book club where returning citizens get together to share experiences and write.
A member I’m really fond of came by. He’s 16 or 17, been out of the DC jail for a couple of months and finishing up his senior year of high school, and has been having a hard time lately because of, you know, teenage shit except magnified by the generations of trauma suffered by him and his peers in the neighborhood. Despite all that noise, he’s been able to stay relatively focused.
Today, he told me that he got arrested yesterday on Halloween and charged for robbery. He said it so nonchalantly I didn’t even realize he got charged — he just said that the police were unfairly arresting people. I asked him enough questions to finally realize he wasn’t in school today because he’d been arresetd and hadn’t been released until today. My heart broke a little because, I don’t know the circumstances, but depending on the seriousness, he could be charged as an adult and sent to the feds.
But for every person I feel heartbroken over, I also feel gratitude, remembering that my heart can still break and that I can still love fiercely and I do. Because I love our members. And yeah, there’s a lot of tragedy — my heart broke yesterday, too, for a different tragedy — but I also helped someone with his resume today, and I met someone this week who just got out last month — who I wrote letters to, who wrote poetry that I read, who I got to see beam with pride a little when I quoted his lines back at him in the office.
And so while my vision is a criminal justice system that fundamentally transforms community law enforcement (#ACAB) and abolishes prisons, and while I see injustice every day in how hard these guys work to survive and just fulfill very reasonable dreams like home ownership, a significant other, a strong and happy family, and savings to leave their children in a world that is unfair and the odds are stacked against them in a million ways — it makes me fucking angry — to be able to contribute in whatever small way I can to making these dreams come to fruition makes it all worthwhile.
So where do you go to escape your identity? I’m not sure — but you can turn to your community to experience the joy of your identity, so that you thriving is its own form of resistance, so that laughing about oppressor nonsense in a shared space temporarily replenishes you, so that you celebrate the fullness of your experience. Find your people whether they are Chinese diaspora millennial women or sex workers or wine connoisseurs or queer poets or all of the above.
Personally, I often write to find my people. It doesn’t always work, but I share pieces of me and hope that it resonates, that it validates someone’s experiences, and that it makes a little more space for them to be themselves, too.
Anyway, I hope some of this is helpful at least.
[The asker also wrote a turn-of-phrase in his question that I found lovely, leading to this next thought.]
Forgive me, because I have the tendency of romanticizing pain and suffering for art and for performance — and in any world, I would always wish for you to not produce such beauty out of pain, because I’d rather you not suffer at all. But I really do love Dostoevsky’s quote, “Beauty will save the world,” because the fact that we can savor, we can appreciate, we can admire, we can be inspired, we can love at all, that we can be aroused (the erotic is power after all — Audre Lorde) — we must never lose the power that is being moved by the beauty of survival, of resilience, of living, of experiencing, of those we hold dear.
But that’s more than I want to say about that for the time being.
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