Climate change. Racial inequality. Health disparities. Environmental justice. Civic engagement. Whichever cause brought you here today...Welcome! The burden of activism can take its toll. Whether you are just starting out or have been fighting for justice for decades, activists of any degree are vulnerable to feeling the weight of the world’s issues on their shoulders. Self Care for Activists is a platform dedicated to being a healing outlet for you warriors.
I was inspired to create this platform by a new mentor in my life, Nikita Gupta, resilience coach at UC Los Angeles. When I first met Nikita at a free speech conference in Washington, D.C. in February, I was in awe of the passionate South Asian leader in front of me who was spending her life exploring alternative modes of healing. Of course, I made it a point to talk to her and she explained to me that she would be travelling to my university, UC San Diego, to conduct a workshop on self care for activists. Have you ever experienced a moment in your life when you hear or see something and it sparks a fire in your gut? I expected my fire to die down after a day or two, but here I am two months later, still being driven by this idea that activists deserve the space to care for themselves.
Sometimes as activists, we may feel that we need to fight—now and forever. Especially when we discover an intervention that we believe strongly will work, it is difficult to stop from pouring 100% of ourselves into the work. Nikita watched as her students shared this same drive, but in giving they were becoming overwhelmed and exhausted. What do we want as activists? Justice, equity, equality, quality of life, and so on. Nikita also cites righteousness. “Righteousness meaning what’s right for the world”, she says, but for some reason, “...self care is outside of the righteousness activists have for themselves.” Why do we put this pressure on ourselves to fight right at this moment? Take a breath. The cause is not going anywhere.
This platform can be a way for you to find joy in little things—like going outside for a walk and noticing the color of a flower in your neighbor’s yard. When we are fighting, we feel a plethora of emotions and are battling massive structures of power every day. How can we expect to impact change when we ourselves are not aligned? To be the best activists we can be—to navigate the windy road of structural violence without losing ourselves along the way—we must find our center amidst the craziness. Welcome to Self Care for Activists: an activist’s guide to feeling fulfilled.
Comments