dear star-anise, do you see your therapisting as some form of political activism? or supporting activism? i’m asking bc at uni i used to do activism like being in groups, going to meetings, protests, organising protests, campaigns etc, but now, working as psy/social assistant and being a therapist in training, aka working two jobs, i don’t do any of that anymore. i have neither the time nor the energy. there are days when i feel so helpless, impotent and useless bc of that. (1/2)

star-anise:

i feel like all i do is take care of myself, my plants, my friends and family, manage my depression and sometimes do laundry. one of my supervisors says i am “working for peace and good in this world”, that i am “helping the helpers”. a therapist-friend today said that was true and that once we are out of training and can choose our clients more ourselves that will be true even more so. most days i can see it. what do you think about it? thank you for your blog!

I have… three thoughts on this, I think.

1. Part of the definition of treason is giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy. Aid and comfort are no little things.

   For me, posting cat pictures is a form of activism. I use the term “doughnut dolly of the revolution” a bit jokingly, because like Doughnut Dollies used to feel about themselves, I sometimes feel a bit inessential and useless. On the other hand. Most of the hardcore activists I know–the ones who negotiate and form coalitions and go out on picket lines and protest and testify to legislative committees and run nonprofits–are so burned out you can smell the smoke coming out from under their hoods. And have been for years. My girlfriend hasn’t totally recovered from the work she did against GWB’s war in Iraq.  

   So I do, in fact, aim to be a source of comfort, refuge, and resupply for people who go out and fight on the front lines of social justice. I blog the way I do in reaction to the intense level of media overload people got in 2015 and 16, where they couldn’t even check their fannish social media without getting overwhelmed by world events. So on days when something terrible is happening, I don’t think I can meaningfully contribute commentary or spreading awareness with any more skill or insight than 100,000 people are already doing–but I can reblog cat pictures from a source that’s fundamentally friendly.

   One major issue I have with leftist activism is that it chronically undervalues work of nurturing, tending, cleaning, and maintaining. Who runs your bake sales? Who tends your wounds? Who cleans your clothes? Who makes food? Who cleans up after? That is a massive amount of work that’s taken absolutely for granted. 

2. How we choose to work can be massively political. I had a professor, during grad school, who insisted that we could not let clients focus on the systemic problems they faced. If we let them blame anyone else for their problems, he said, they would never improve. (He worked for the US Army, convincing servicemembers that their children’s misbehaviour wasn’t due to having been moved around all the time, their spouse’s anxiety wasn’t related them being redeployed to Iraq for their fifth tour, their own bad moods weren’t related to traumatic brain injury; they just needed to take personal responsibility)

   And one of the most formative clients for me during my own training was a Black university student who described how everyone in her class called her “sassy” and copied anything she said or did that seemed a little outside the norm, even though she felt that she wasn’t any weirder or louder than anyone else–or was she? Was there really something wrong with her? Was she ridiculous, worth being mocked? She drew in on herself like a setting sun, a star losing lustre, as she questioned herself.

   I was still feeling my way, as a white girl reading a bunch of work by Black feminists and womanists, but even I knew about Black women being called too loud, too aggressive, too sassy. I very tentatively said, “It’s so upsetting, being picked on in this way that feels unfair and… honestly sounds kind of racist.”

   “It does, doesn’t it,” she said, and dropped her head into her hands, knees drawn together. “Oh my god! It’s so racist! It’s so fucking racist!” And then she screamed quietly into her palms and did a little dance in her chair, and lifted up her head, and listed off all the things they’d said that they were racist–all the Black professionals and experts in her field they didn’t know when she mentioned them–how frustrating it was–how she’d dealt with racism in the past–how her family dealt with racism in the past–how much she missed her family–the festival she was going to in two weeks to reconnect with her Caribbean relatives.

   I didn’t have to do anything for the rest of the session, just nod and make encouraging noises. That one little bit of validation linked her back into an entire system of resistance and community that gave her the strength to resist the pressures on her and renew her sense of pride and joy in who she was.

3. I think there’s a role therapists could have, and often do not have, in leftist movements. I keep thinking about it, but I don’t know how to make it fit.

   Circling back to “every activist I know has burnout”: The way modern activism is done is very psychologically costly. We have discussions about “mental health and self-care” that kind of look like “BURN CARE WHILE LEAPING OVER LAVA: Remember that the lava is hot! Take frequent breaks to let your feet cool off!” Like, what if we did not have to leap over lava. What if an ordinary person’s activism didn’t have to involve large amounts of outrage, terror, and helplessness to fuel their work. What if we put resources into mental health as well.

   And like I said, I don’t know what to do with this thought. Should I offer activist group members discount rates? Volunteer with an org as a counsellor? Suggest ways groups could make their members’ mental health better? Take my skills as a mediator into union disputes between nonprofit workers and management? Write articles about how somebody ought to address something about this problem? I’m not actually drowning in good ideas here.

   I feel like there could be very targeted and effective work that we could do, that often gets ignored or discounted because the Left has a very ascetic bread-and-water, sacrifice-everything-for-the-revolution view of what activism should look like. And maybe we should start talking about it.