Activists Need Care, Too

How Self-Care Can Help Us Build Better Movements

“Most movements don’t get destroyed from the outside. They implode from within.” I have heard that sentiment repeatedly from elder activists, especially women of color. It is the wisdom that one sister-elder shared with me years ago when she invited me to a retreat for Black women organizers and activists. Honestly, I did not think that I deserved to be in that group, which included some major reformers. Some worked full-time for well-known activist organizations; others had organized large-scale demonstrations; and others were artists who used their talents to raise awareness about injustice and to help people envision a different world. My organizing, which tends to be hyper-local, was largely limited to the seminary that I attended at the time.

“We need someone with your skill-set,” the sister-elder explained. She shared that nearly every time that she had attended a gathering of Black women activists, it erupted in conflict. “We are so used to having to fight that when we get together, we can’t turn it off. We start fighting each other.” I did not believe her. We were all so hungry to be together that I didn’t think there was any way that it could turn negative. I was wrong.

Midway into the weeklong retreat, we were in full meltdown mode. The tensions had started brewing on the second day: a snide remark here or there, at first overlooked, downplayed, or dismissed. At one point, I sat in the room with tears streaming down my face as people screamed at each other, my silent lament for the pain that we were holding, pain that had found an outlet in that retreat center and was threatening to tear us apart. After a rough evening, we pulled it back together, but the initial joy that we had felt upon arrival was gone. We left the retreat center knowing that we would probably not gather again.

It is a scene that I have watched play out again and again, among interracial groups, women of color, activists, community developers, and even seminary students. Engaging social justice – talking about what is wrong with our world and engaging in action to make it right – comes at an incredible cost. We have seen it in those who have lost their lives to movements for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, labor rights, immigration reform, environmental justice, and so on.

There are the literal martyrs, people like Martin Luther King Jr., Harry and Harriette Moore, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Fred Hampton, Harvey Milk, Marsha Johnson, Sandra Bland, and Heather Heyer. But there are also the scores of people whose activism and advocacy likely sent them to an early grave, especially Black and Brown women like Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, Gloria Anzaldúa, Prathia Hall, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Then, there are those of us today who can count up the costs in our own lives: chronic and terminal illness, pain, and disability; broken relationships; anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems; financial insecurity; compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and burnout; even the demise of organizations and movements.

It is true that movements for change will, and should, outlast the people in them. But movements should not outlast the people by killing them or wearing them down to the point of burnout. If all movements do is cycle an endless number of people through despair, burnout, and death, then we must ask whether they are really building the type of world that we want to live in, one where all the inhabitants of this earth get to partake in its beauty and bounty and where we, in turn, enrich the earth with our care and our creativity. If social justice is ultimately our attempt to take care of the world, we cannot do it at the expense of taking care of ourselves and one another. We are, after all, part of the world.

But self-care is more than the way that we sustain ourselves for the labor of social change. It is also how we remember and imagine what we are working toward. We need new ways of envisioning the world beyond neoliberal capitalism, a worldview that extols domination and competition while reducing the purpose of human existence to profit and productivity. We were not created for work. We were created for relationship - relationship with God, one another, the earth, and ourselves. Good self-care reminds us of that. It helps us to experience a glimpse of the thriving that we want for the entire world. It revives our hope in the mist of hopelessness and cynicism. It inspires our imagination of what is possible.

This is why self-care is critical to activism and social change. Activists often eschew the “self” part of self-care, often because they’ve fallen prey to the misguided idea that self and selfish are synonyms. But while self-care begins with care for ourselves, it also includes taking care of our relationships – the people who love and support us, those with whom we co-labor for justice, and even those whom we hope to touch and change through our activism. Caring for ourselves and one another is how we sustain the work. Because the work is unending.

“You always have the poor with you, but you won’t always have me,” is how Jesus put it in Matthew 26:11, when the socially conscious disciples critiqued the seeming wastefulness of the woman who bathed his feet with expensive perfume. “Why this waste?” they cried, “This perfume could have been sold for a lot of money and given to the poor.” Jesus’ answer was not an expression of his approval of poverty or class oppression. Rather, it was his recognition that the work of creating a just and equitable world is unending, and that those of us committed to it must also care for – and at times even indulge – ourselves.

It is inevitable that oppression will take the lives and health of many of us. But we don’t need to aid and abet it. We must resist by valuing our lives more than unjust systems do. We must care for ourselves.