#if you burn out you're useless as an activist | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xxlovelynovaxx · 7 months

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Ironic that you talk about "no reading comprehension" when you think "taking a break" means "not paying attention".

As if activists don't actively advocate for making sure you have time that has nothing to do with your cause so that you don't burn out and become useless to it.

(Also I'm 99 percent sure the "white" people they're referring to here is a large jewish blogger who said that blogging isn't activism and it's okay to step away temporarily when it gets to be too much.)

Also like... before people are like "Palestinians don't get a break" yeah and I didn't get a break from suicidal depression that nearly killed me for like five years of my life but everyone that was supporting me DID need to take breaks or they would all have broken too and then where would we be? Like yeah actually people outside the situation fighting for change NEED to do so in shifts.

I know the comparison is not the same but I picked it specifically because yeah the longer this goes on the more likely more people will die. And the longer I dealt with my mental illness the more times I almost died. It's just like... come on.

"If you think it's okay to step away from social media and take a breather when you're overwhelmed and you're fighting back against the culture that says you're a morally evil person for ever putting your own mask on first rather than just helplessly doomscrolling in a way that does NOTHING for the actual victims then what you're actually saying is that it's okay not to pay attention or care."

Like bitch how little object permanence do you have that if you take a break from i/p news you have no awareness that a genocide is being committed anymore??? It's literally not even looking away it's just not uselessly steeping in guilt soup so that maybe you can use what energy you DO have to volunteer for or earn money to donate to orgs actually helping on the ground.

Like sorry we're all not performing white guilt and prostrating ourselves to your standards because we're actually bothering to do something about it and realizing social media has limited efficacy even at the one thing it CAN do which is raising awareness. We're aware. Great. Do you know there's steps that come after that?

"The one thing Palestinians are asking for" is not for people to wring their hands as they watch a genocide occur, I promise you. It's not for you to make blog posts about how sad and terrible this is and how bad you feel OR how 'it's really not about our feelings, thoughts and prayers'.

You can whine about my poor reading comprehension because 'nowhere did you say not to actually help' but you DID say the "ONE thing" palestinians actually want is for people "not to look away" and I'm pretty sure they want people to help STOP the genocide that's occurring. And also that "taking a break" is the same as "not paying attention" and like, are you guilty of "not paying attention" for at least eight hours every day or do you just not sleep? Because we all take breaks, shithead.

But you go on feeling morally superior about how you make sure to feel bad for the cause or whatever.

#also like #think about who is actually most likely to not have as much energy to deal with constant human rights violations #is it actually abled cishet white christian/culturally christian atheist people?#or is it perhaps other people also having their rights violated and even in some cases facing an active genocide #and you're just calling them white bc you know that's the most effective way of shutting down the conversation #like idk my disabled friend who is still working and getting sicker and has nearly been homeless three times this year #is not gonna be able to do much here even though they are white #but how many nonwhite people saying the same thing are you erasing here #also like. you realize that 'whiteness' itself is subjective right?#being in an ethnic minority can make your relationship with 'whiteness' tenuous at best #anyway #needs ID #cw discourse

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deramin2 · 4 months

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I've started actively blocking people who are like, "Either you care about every problem in the world so much that it destroys your ability to cope with or you're a fake ally and complicit!"

It breeds scrupulosity OCD, as in explicitly seeks to induce a debilitating mental illness in people to perform purity on social media. It's also totally ineffective from an activism stand point. It spreads you so thin that all you can do is share social media posts you haven't fact checked. No one actually has time and bandwidth to care about everything. Our brains were never built to hold so many relentless horrors. We burn out and can't handle any of it at all because we do actually have limited energy.

If you want to be effective instead of performative, you have to pick one or two things to really care about and put your energy into really understanding what's going on and what steps we can take to make that better. Sometimes those are incremental inadequate steps because that's what you can persuade people to spend resources on right then. But those changes can matter a lot to people on the ground even though it doesn't fix everything. And then you fight for the next step. And slowly you change things. Sometimes you win big. (And then spend a lot of energy convincing people that isn't a discrete happy ending and you have to keep fighting for more.)

I highly encourage people to pick issues that aren't getting a lot of attention and need hands the most. You can also think about how a fight you're not focusing on is intersectional with what you are doing and how to support other groups through your work. Like if you're working on supporting your local queer community but are concerned about the Sudanese genocide, you might see how your resources or networking or grant writing skills can support Sudanese immigrants coming into town. Or work to support organizations like Doctors Without Borders that has over mission but supports many places through it.

Which is not to say you ignore everything else in the world and go into a bubble. But you have to forgive yourself for being human and having human capacity. You CAN'T know everything. You CAN'T absorb every horror of the world. You have limited time to actually work on things. Being a witness can be useful, but if all you have time for is watching the horrors helplessly then you aren't actually helping. Absorbing less but doing more is way more effective.

There's certainly something to be said about who actually gets attention and help and how that plays into biases and people only helping themselves or their in group. But destroying your ability to cope with the world to the point of constant guilt spiralling is not an effective solution to that problem. If you want absolution, care more about less.

So I'm done with internet armchair activists who think guilt tripping will change the world. They're not just useless, they're actively harmful. Don't follow people just because you think you deserve to be yelled at constantly to absolver your sins and keep you on the straight and narrow. Figure out how you can make a real impact in people's lives.

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