Burnout Is Not Inevitable: Building Movements That Can Hold Us
“Care really should be at the center of our strategy, of our analysis, and of our practice,” says Aaron Goggans.
What happens when our movements start to run on empty? In this episode of Movement Memos, I talk with organizer and WildSeed Society strategist Aaron Goggans about trauma, dysregulation, burnout, and the myth that we can just push through. We discuss why nervous system regulation is a crucial part of political strategy, how neurodivergent organizers hold essential wisdom for this moment, and why rest, ritual, and mutual care must be built into our fight against fascism. Whether you’re feeling frozen, overwhelmed, or simply exhausted, this conversation offers clarity, compassion, and a reminder that we’re not alone — and we don’t have to earn rest to deserve it.
Music by Son Monarcas, Ballpoint, and David Celeste.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout and is shared here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are going to talk about what happens when movements start running on empty — how trauma, burnout, and dysregulation can shape our organizing, and what it takes to sustain ourselves and each other in a moment of crisis and emergency. We’ll be hearing from Aaron Goggans, the Steward of the Pattern at the WildSeed Society. Aaron is also a contributor to our new book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis. Aaron has years of experience supporting activists during moments of upheaval, and his insights feel especially urgent right now, as people around the country resist the violence of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and organize for collective survival in a moment of precarity and deprivation. This isn’t a moment we can white-knuckle our way through alone — but it is one we can navigate together.
This conversation is not medical advice, but is offered in the spirit of collective care.
If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.
Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
[musical interlude]
KH: Aaron Goggans, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Aaron Goggans: Thank you. I’m happy to be back.
KH: How are you doing today, friend?
AG: I think I am doing okay. I think I have spent the past couple of weeks sitting with fear and trying to acknowledge the fear and not ignore it and pretend like it’s not there and then do what I can to process it. But there is quite a bit of it, so I am surviving with a great deal of fear.
KH: That really resonates. Today is one of those days when I feel like I am running on empty, but as always, I am grateful to be in conversation with you. I’m sure a lot of our listeners will remember our previous conversation on the show, which a lot of people have identified as having been an important episode for them. But for the unacquainted, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?
AG: Yeah, so I am an organizer, writer and facilitator, born and raised in Colorado and living there again. And I feel like I have been shaped by longtime interfaith organizing. I was pretty heavily involved in the movement for Black lives and was one of the co-founders of the D.C. chapter of Black Lives Matter and have been a labor organizer and worked in housing organizing and international solidarity. And right now I am the Steward of the Pattern, which means I do a lot of the strategic thinking and visioning and infrastructure building for the WildSeed Society, which is a Black-led, BIPOC-focused spiritual community that supports movement organizers at the intersection of spiritual liberation, social transformation, and economic revolution. So I spend a lot of time trying to think about design[ing] and build[ing] infrastructures for care for people in movements.
KH: Your letter in Read This When Things Fall Apart is for activists and organizers who are struggling with their mental health — which I think is so many of us right now. Early in the letter, you raise the idea of being “creatively maladjusted.” Can you talk about what it means to be “creatively maladjusted” and what you were getting at when you wrote, “In the coming years, lessons in how to thrive learned by those of us who are born with a strong tendency to step outside consensus reality might be lifesaving to more neurotypical organizers”?
AG: I think one of the things that I’ve been sitting with recently (and really over years) is how common it is when I talk to other organizers, how many of us were sensitive kids who really felt for the world and were told that being sensitive was a problem, or asking for things to change because it didn’t work for us was a problem. And I think we can have two responses to that, right? We can either shut down that sensitivity and just be like, “Well, I guess we live in a cruel, unfeeling world, and I’m going to do what everybody else does and say out of sight, out of mind.” And I think a lot of people who get into organizing take another path, which is just like, “No, I care. I care deeply.” Many of us, I think many of us who are neurodivergent, who struggle with mental health, we can’t help but care for other people, we can’t help but care for the world, and we can’t help that we are sensitive to small changes. And I think those of us who have to take that second path or decide to take that second path have found ourselves over our lifetime developing ways to get our needs met in a world that is sometimes actively hostile to us getting our needs met and constantly shaming us for not being able to meet our needs in the parameters set out by the system.
And in a moment of system collapse, in a moment where the system is being positioned and weaponized to hurt more and more people, the set of skills that we’ve developed as sensitive people, as people with maybe non-normative needs, as people with really different ways that we have to get our needs met, the ways that we have figured out how to do that I think are going to be the gifts and medicines to ourselves and to the movement at large.
And to me, that’s what’s incorporated by being creatively maladjusted. It’s not saying you aren’t well-adjusted to a system that isn’t working, you are maladjusted to it, but you’re adjusted to it in the direction of freedom. You’re adjusted to it in the direction of care. And the more that I think about the cruelty of this moment, and the more that I think about how cruelty is the point, the more essential to me it becomes to really valorize the ways that we’ve figured out how to get the care that we need in the world and to share those skills and share that culture and share that praxis.
Because I think fundamentally, that’s going to be the thing that not only allows us to thrive in this moment, but allows us to build the kind of strategies outside of the logic both of a failing neoliberal order, but also an emerging fascist order, the strategies that will allow us to care for each other and to build a world in which we can all get our needs met with dignity, safety, and joy.
KH: I really appreciate this concept of creative maladjustment, which as you write in the book, comes from the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963, King wrote, “The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.” Those words feel incredibly relevant today.
I’m also chuckling a bit to myself, thinking about how some of the qualities that have made me a strong activist and organizer have also caused me a bit of trouble in other areas of my life. I remember a therapist telling me, about 20 years ago, that when something pressed my “that’s not fair” button, I didn’t know how to let it go. And that was true, and that tendency led to some messy situations, but it also led me down a particular path toward justice.
But we don’t always know how to translate those impulses, that rejection of injustice and oppression, into constructive action. Sometimes, we freeze up, because we’re overwhelmed, or we may fear the consequences of taking action. Sometimes, we may be unstrategic in our responses, because we have trouble discerning when it’s time to fight, or time to ask questions and seek understanding. Some people avoid even understanding the “ins” and “outs” of a problem, because it’s overwhelming, and they don’t think they can do anything about it anyway. So, how do we foster and encourage the curiosity we need to understand each other, and the problems we face?
AG: To me, that’s why focusing on self-regulation and being well-regulated is so important, because in order to be curious, we often need to feel safe, and in order to feel safe, we need to be well-regulated. That it’s really hard to come from a place of curiosity when you feel unsafe.
And I think that there is this cult of stability that I think is so prevalent now where people are like, “Look, the system is broken, but if we break the system further, the chaos that comes from that will be so much worse,” right? Everybody is imagining that if we don’t follow the rules of order, if we don’t cling to these liberal norms, that the only solution is the French Revolution and that it will always go into us just killing people who don’t need to be killed. And I’m like, “Man, there’s so many other options.”
Really, if we could acknowledge our fear and not shame ourselves from feeling that fear, but say, “Okay, this is the story that fear is telling me. Can I connect with the love I have for myself and my community?” That is at the kernel of that fear, right? If we have a fear of something happening, it means that there’s something we value that we don’t want taken away or destroyed or removed from us.
So can we acknowledge that fear and shift into the things that we love and care about, that we are afraid of being hurt, but focus on that love? What other kinds of stories can we tell from that place of love? And that praxis requires a well-regulated nervous system and some sense of safety.
And I think that we often sense that we would like to feel safe, but we kind of go into these patterns of interaction to get that safety. Like we tell other people, “Stop.” We try and police nonviolence in order to feel safe, like, “Just only use nonviolence and then we’ll be safe.” Or we tell people, “Hey, what you’re doing on the internet is not good,” and we think that once people stop being wrong on the internet, we will be safe by trying to get to safety obliquely, we actually just keep activating ourselves. And when we’re that activated, we can’t be curious.
And I think we have to take it seriously, like, “Oh, man. What can I actually do in this moment to feel safe in this moment? Can I go to some comrades who I feel safe around? Can I eat a meal? Can I meditate on that? Can I walk in the woods? Can I listen to empowering music to feel safe?” And then once I have that safety, can I connect with my fear or my anger and not shame myself for that, but just accept that it’s there?
And then really touch into what’s below that fear, what’s below that anger. What is the thing that I love? And then think about possibility from that space. And I think when we do that, we have the capacity to be curious, and when we have the capacity to be curious, we have so many more values-aligned strategies that become intuitively available to us.
KH: I want to talk about some of the patterns and experiences that make it hard for us to create that sense of safety you’re describing. In Read This When Things Fall Apart, you wrote, “While not everything is trauma, trauma is everywhere.” Can you talk about what trauma is, and how you see trauma responses showing up in our movements?
AG: Yeah, yeah. I think trauma is such an important concept and surprisingly unincorporated into how we think about wellness and mental health, that even a lot of psychologists don’t get a lot of training on trauma, though it has been scientifically confirmed and peer-reviewed. One of the simplest and best descriptions of it I’ve ever heard is — adrienne maree brown talks about it as time-traveling emotions. We often experience trauma as reactions in our body or emotions that aren’t about what’s happening now, but are about what the events of the moment are hearkening back to previous times of harm or fear or activation. And so a more complicated definition of trauma would say that trauma is unprocessed or latent activation of our nervous system and our emotional regulation system where it is activated to such an extent that our body can’t dissipate the energy. Our body can’t release that energy, and our brains often can’t file that memory in the way that we usually file other memories where we can access it and separate what’s happening now from the memory.
And instead, because whatever happened is either so overwhelming to our nervous system that we can’t make sense of it or often we have no context for it, what happens is so foreign, so disturbing that we can’t fit it within our story of ourselves, our story of our lives, our story of the world. And so we literally, like, our body can’t file that data. And so it’s just constantly unprocessed. And one of the weird aspects of how our body deals with that is our bodies actually want us to relive the trauma until we get it right, which kind of seems ridiculous. Why would our body do that?
And you can kind of think of it as if there is a bear stalking your community and you know need to fight it, it’s actually kind of a genius way for your body to want to keep fighting the bear until the bear is gone, and then either you chase the bear off or you kill it and then your body can release it and then file all those memories away. I think that’s one way to think about evolutionary why we have trauma in this way. But trauma is so prevalent that sometimes, as Resmaa Menakem says, that it can look like a culture. And I think in movement spaces, our sense of urgency, the way that sometimes we don’t create space for people to be vulnerable and say, “I’m really afraid about this action. I have these concerns,” and we kind of tell people to suck it up, a lot of that is just a culture of trauma within movements. And when we have these time-traveling emotions, we tend to narrow our focus and focus only on our safety and how we can get over this very specific obstacle. And often we can think about zero-sum games or binary thinking that actually makes us less choiceful about how we could collectively overcome the situation, or in the individual, how we could get to a place of safety.
And so trauma isn’t just about increasing our capacity for action, though working through trauma will often do that. It’s also to have us be more choiceful and strategic about how we move forward. Because so often in movement spaces we kind of pretend that trauma is a strategy. We [are] like, “Oh no, we have to go and we have to confront the cops because that’s the only way to get them to back down.” And it’s like, “Well, actually sometimes like mutual aid, sometimes political education, there are other tactics we could use to defend our communities.” But sometimes trauma will narrow it down to the one that kind of meets the story our body wants to tell to feel safe.
KH: I really identify with what you’re saying about how we sometimes feel like we have to lean into the same feelings, patterns, and outcomes, and how going through those motions can feel strategic and necessary, when it’s not necessarily what we need or what the movement needs. I have some thoughts about that, but before I dig into those, I want to clarify for our audience, what does it mean to be dysregulated?
AG: Another part of how trauma shows up, and how we get trauma, is this concept of regulation or dysregulation. And part of it is you can think of in a really well-regulated person’s life, something might happen, which you might call a stimuli. You eat food or you hug a friend or a car backfires. All of those are stimuli, and your nervous system is slightly or greatly activated by that stimuli. And if you’re well regulated, you will kind of be a little bit more aware. Your cortisol might spike. You might breathe a little bit faster, but then you recognize, “Oh, a car backfired. I’m fine.” And within 30 seconds you’re back. Your heart rate is normal. You feel safe in your body. And you might have a little bit more energy, but you’re not going to be totally drained. You’re not going to be running on reserves. And when we’re dysregulated, our reaction to stimuli isn’t quite as effective or useful. And this can mean we overreact. So somebody drops a table or a car backfires, and we take that stimuli and we get over-activated. Well, now we are thinking about running away or we’re getting into fights with people or we just freeze and shut down.
So that kind of dysregulation can show up either as over-activation or sometimes under-activation, which means that we might actually be in a situation where the cops are showing up and showing tear gas, and we under-react. We freeze, or we think, “Oh, I don’t need to be safe. I don’t need to put on a mask. I don’t need to get away from the air. I’m going to go do something that my body doesn’t actually have the ability to do.” That’s another way that dysregulation can show up. And when we are dysregulated, it’s much more likely that stimuli will cause trauma again, because trauma can be from just situations that we can’t process, that overwhelm our system. And the more dysregulated we are, the smaller things that can cause trauma.
And so regulating our nervous system is something that I think activists often don’t think of and isn’t in our toolbox, but it’s so helpful in being able to move through literally anxiety and anger and fear-producing moments like this historical moment because the better regulated we are, the better we can deal with even the most shocking thing because our bodies have the ability to process it. And some of the tools for that dysregulation are just what I call in the piece “mental hygiene.” Getting enough sleep. Sleep is a really great tool for regulating your nervous system. Eating healthy meals. Social interaction, whatever safe, healthy, positive social interaction you can get, talking to a friend. And it can be with our non-human kin, hugging a tree, sitting next to a creek, contemplating your interconnectedness with nature, dancing, meditation. All of those are ways that we can either process emotion or settle our nervous system so that we can be better regulated. And over time, the more sleep, the better we eat, the more healthy social interaction we get, generally the better regulated our nervous systems are.
KH: I think what you’re saying is so important, and now that you have elaborated a bit on dysregulation, I want to circle back to what you were saying about how we sometimes lean into over-activation and what’s traumatizing us — and how we can interrupt that cycle. I’m thinking about a moment I experienced recently on ICE patrol, when some of us encountered federal agents in the parking lot of a public park — someplace they are legally not supposed to be conducting operations in the city of Chicago, because they are not supposed to use city property for their enforcement actions. But we all know they don’t care about the law. And these agents – I’m not sure how many of them there were – but there were a lot of them — they had at least four vehicles on the lot, and they were transferring detainees between vehicles, getting ready to send those people to processing. And many of us had just been out on patrol, responding to alerts about ICE abductions, and me and the person I was with, we kept arriving just moments after those abductions were over — which is a very typical experience for rapid response. Often, all you can do is document the harm done and point people on the ground toward the services they should access, and the people they should talk to.
But here we were, and we knew we were probably looking at vehicles full of those people we had tried to show up to help and support, and there was nothing we could do to help them. We were just watching them being shuffled between vehicles by these agents, who were heavily armed, and who outnumbered us, and had their CS canisters in plain sight, and all we could do was document this violent thing they were doing, in this community space where they weren’t allowed to do it. I did what I was trained to do, and I documented the situation, but I was so much more overwhelmed than I would have expected. When it was over, and the vehicles had pulled off, and escaped our view, I was struggling to answer the most basic questions from my buddy about what I thought we should do next — which sightings we should respond to, and where we should go. And that should have been my first clue: I was dysregulated to the point that I needed to step away and breathe and take care of myself. But I didn’t want to do that. The only thing I felt right about doing in that moment was responding to more sightings and continuing to do what I had already been doing.
A short while later, I started getting messages from some of our ICE watch co-strugglers encouraging people who had been in that parking lot to take a breath and think about whether we were still up for patrolling. They also encouraged us to take some time to call certain folks to share information, and to share photos and videos with the right people, and I really appreciated all of that so much. Because it became clear to me, when I was reading those messages, that I wasn’t the only one feeling overwhelmed — either someone else had already described this reaction to someone, or someone who had been through something similar was anticipating the likelihood of that response. And I think maybe I had been stuck in a mode of not wanting to make that moment about my feelings, because I was not one of the people whose life was just upended. But I am a person, and as a human being, I was not okay in that moment, and recognizing when we’re not okay is important. So, I appreciated the way my co-strugglers really normalized that as an expectation, in that moment, so it wasn’t something we had to second guess, and also offered an alternate course of action — something else that it would be meaningful for us to do, instead of just trying to go through the same motions. Something that involved slowing down, thinking through what happened, and stepping out of go-mode. I was grateful for that, and I think it’s something to learn from.
[musical interlude]
KH: In Read This When Things Fall Apart, you discuss some of the unhealthy patterns that can emerge in our movements. In your letter, you write, “Eventually activists find themselves passing harm back and forth, asking more and more of each other because they live in a world where the stakes are impossibly high.” Can you say more about that?
AG: Yeah, I just had this realization with my therapist, which is something I think most people kind of are aware of, but I never realized for myself, which is that when I’m stressed; it’s not just that I react to moments in a more heightened way or in a way that’s less kind. It’s also that I read the situation more as a threat than it ever was. And so, I think that one of the ways that a culture of trauma shows up in movement spaces is that we have a habit of pushing ourselves so hard that we are constantly dysregulated. And one of the things that was surprising to me to learn how much it affects me personally, but I think it kind of affects people in general, is that when we are dysregulated, it’s not only that we lash out more or that we’re not as nice to be around or we don’t offer as much grace to our comrades. We also read situations in more black and white terms, in more just frankly more paranoid terms. We think of everything as a personal threat to us or a threat to the movement.
And when we get into those situations where we’re constantly sacrificing for each other, we can sometimes view people having any kind of hesitation or any sort of fear as a lack of commitment to the movement. And it can lead to a kind of pushing other people to overcommit to go beyond their boundaries, to be even more dysregulated for the sake of some goal, which might be really concrete and really necessary. It can be something like protecting your neighbors from ICE. That is a really valuable goal.
But when we try and approach that goal by denying that people have limits, by denying people’s need for rest, for food, for connection, for safety, we actually perpetuate dysregulation as the norm. And then anything that somebody says, like, “Oh, somebody was late to a meeting,” becomes, “They’re not committed.” Or sometimes like, “Oh, well they stopped by ICE and now are they an informant?” Our brains can go into crazy places. And even when we’re like, “No, they’re probably not doing that,” we take that heightened energy, that heightened paranoia, that heightened suspicion into our conversations with our comrades, and then we start to lash out, and then they’re reacting to the fact that we’ve lashed out.
And then you have a conflict that is maybe about somebody being late, maybe about somebody not doing the next steps from the last meeting, but is functionally the thing driving that conflict is that we didn’t sleep or eat or take care of ourselves well. And so we can get into these patterns where we’re constantly in conflict about things that can’t really be solved because the thing motivating that conflict is actually our dysregulation. And so yeah, maybe your comrades are always late, and yeah, maybe they don’t do the next steps, but the conflict is really about the fact that you haven’t slept and the fact that you don’t feel safe in this group, or maybe the fact that you need rest.
And when you see other people take rest, it actually touches your need for rest that you’ve been pushing down. And instead of dealing with that vulnerability, dealing with all of the things happening in your life that are not ideal, all of the sacrifices you made to the movement, you ignore that, press that down, and then just lash out at your comrades. And I think that that is a really persistent feature of a lot of different movement spaces.
KH: I think some people tend to conflate recognizing that we have needs, and that we need to attend to those needs, with letting ourselves off the hook completely. Because this work does involve hard work, and sacrifice, and moving through discomfort. So, I think we have to have really honest conversations, and find clarity around the difference between discomfort and being tired and being truly dysregulated, burnt out, and in need of relief. And I think we need to talk about the practices that can help us attend to our needs and not wind up in a really desperate, toxic, or broken place. Sort of like eating because you know you need to eat, and not waiting until you’re irritable and have a terrible headache.
So, we know that people are struggling right now. A lot of people are tired and overworked. A lot of people are grieving atrocities and injustices that we haven’t been able to interrupt or prevent. You have a lot of experience supporting activists during moments of activation and upheaval. What are you seeing, right now, and what do you think activists and organizers need right now? What can people do to access as much healing as they can, and remain whole during this time?
AG: Yeah, I love that question. I think it’s so important. I think to highlight, one of the things I’ve seen folks do really well in D.C. and in Memphis and in Chicago and in Portland and LA and all these different cities is to respond as a group. I think the Rogers Park community in Chicago is a really good example. They have a way of interacting. People go out, do patrols when they hear that ICE is out there. People have their whistles. And it’s just so much easier on our nervous system to move as a group in that way because you don’t have to spend all the time managing and being like, “Am I responding to this well? Is this the right thing to do?” When you see other people do it, it actually is a lesser load on our nervous system.
And I think a thing you can always add to that is really small daily rituals. I know a lot of people have a lot of, honestly, just trauma with religion and spirituality. And to me, it doesn’t have to be a sort of religious ritual. You don’t have to say a prayer or light a candle if that’s too religious to you. But really I think for the human nervous system, having some way to tell our body, “Okay, I’m about to get into some shit. Let me shift intentionally.” And then most importantly, a way to shift out of it. That’s one thing that rituals allow us to do.
And so before you put on that whistle, looking in the mirror and saying, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” you’re shifting into that space. And then afterwards having something you can do, touching earth if you’re out in the community, putting your hand on a tree after ICE has gone away, after you’ve put in the Signal chat and you’ve let people know, just having a way to reground and saying something to yourself. In D.C., we used to say, “I’m beautiful, I’m not alone. And collectively we are powerful beyond measure.” Just any sort of mantra you can say to yourself to be like, “I’m safe. Things are fine. We’re moving in.”
Or having a mantra when things are really crazy to remind yourself that there will be a tomorrow I think is really helpful. Taking a bath, lighting a candle, there are all sorts of rituals that can close that activated space in a way that can help our nervous system be like, “Okay, we’ve left that. That situation was really intense, but we’re not in it anymore.” And then always give yourself space to reflect on that and be like, “Oh man, we did do that.” I think again, part of something that can help us make sure that these intense moments don’t go into therapy is just to talk about it, to politicize it, because that helps us put it in our story of the world and in our story of us.
And so debriefing situations like that is just really crucial. It’s really important to talk with your friends and say, “Man, this is crazy.” And I think sometimes it can feel, I don’t know, it can feel like you’re taking up too much space. Or particularly if you feel really safe in this moment and you’re like a citizen, it might feel weird to talk about constantly how stressful it was just to go and see if ICE was happening. But it’s so crucial to talk about that with your comrades so you can make sure you’re placing all of that activation into a coherent story of who you are and remind yourself that, yeah, this is the work of keeping yourself safe, of keeping community safe, of pushing back against fascism. This is the work.
And I think that that’s another thing, and maybe one of the most important things that folks can do, is schedule rest and restoration ahead of time. It is so hard to take a break after something has happened. It’s so much easier to be like, Saturday mornings, I take a bath, I read a book, I read my favorite X-Men comic in which they overcome some villain that makes me feel really good, and I ground in an Audre Lorde quote, and that’s what I do to ground myself and take care of myself.
Creating those kind of regular ritual spaces, both individually, but also being like every two weeks with my comrades, we go and we have a picnic or we go to somebody’s house and we break bread and we talk about our days, and we hold hands and say, “We are beautiful. We are not alone. And collectively we’re powerful beyond measure.” Creating those regular spaces can really help us regulate our nervous systems, put all of this activation into our context, which lessens the trauma, and constantly tell ourselves, “Right, yeah, we’re not alone. We’re doing this together. We are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
And I think for me that all of those things can create another component that’s really helpful in this moment, which is just hope. Sometimes you just have to feel. Sometimes we go to protests, sometimes we do collective action to remind ourselves that even if we cannot as individuals keep our communities safe, other people are also doing work to do it. And that can give us faith that we are part of a larger system of protection, and that is also easier on our nervous systems.
KH: That is so helpful. And I really want to underline what you said about making space for rest, and making space for joy, very intentionally. I was actually having drinks with some rapid responders recently, and we talked about how grateful we were that someone had organized this gathering, because sometimes, it can be so hard to step out of the hyperaware, hyper-vigilant mode we get into on the really bad days, when it feels like ICE is everywhere. When you’re consumed by the reality of the violence that’s unfolding, it can be hard to shift gears and feel something else.
I am incredibly grateful to work and build with people who encourage people who are clearly stuck in that mode to take breaks, be with their families and take care of themselves, but we sometimes need help with those transitions.
I appreciate what you said about having rituals for stepping in and out of action mode. I think I might create a ritual for downshifting that involves singing, because that’s been very helpful to me lately. There was one night recently when, it was the end of a really bad day, where a lot of people in our area had been kidnapped by ICE. And I invited a bunch of rapid responders and ICE watchers to meet me at a particular L [elevated train] stop, in the Rogers Park neighborhood, so we could spell out a message in lights, with light boards, that said “RESIST ICE.” I thought maybe ten or twenty people would join me, but well over a hundred people showed up, and the crowd was spilling off the sidewalks, because people really needed that space, and each other, and the opportunity to feel something else. My friend Atena Danner, who also authored a letter for Read This When Things Fall Apart, was one of the people who spoke that night, and at one point, she led us in song. And as we were all singing together, I could feel something shift in my body. I felt the same thing, a few days later, after another really rough day — it was actually the day we were in that parking lot with the Border Patrol agents and the people they’d kidnapped. We had a launch event for Read This When Things Fall Apart that night, and I had no idea how I was going to get through that event. I wasn’t in the right head space. But early in the launch, Atena decided to sing, and invited us all to sing with her, to sort of sink into a new moment together. We all sang Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, and it was exactly what I needed. So, singing… that’s one way we might be able to summon an emotional shift within ourselves.
[musical interlude]
KH: So we’ve been talking about people who have been going really hard, people who are really exhausted by the laboriousness of this moment. I think there are also people right now who are experiencing the impacts of this moment in more of a freeze state — people who are not necessarily who they thought they would be in a moment of rising fascism, people who are maybe venting a lot of their emotional reaction into sort of passive mechanisms, like posting emotional reactions to headlines on social media. I think some of those people may want to move beyond that state of despondency and terror and into action, but may not know how to do that. Do you have any thoughts about that right now?
AG: Yeah, I’m not sure if I have thoughts as much as I have feelings. I resonate really deeply with that. I think it might be surprising to people who have known me and follow my work, but I feel like I’m often in a freeze pattern. And I have to tell myself, “You don’t have to solve it.” So much of what causes me to freeze is being like everything I do, I can’t see in my head how it leads to ICE being abolished. I can’t see any action I could do that could meaningfully contribute to that. And I think that there is this thing that my mom taught me. It’s like you just got to do the next right thing. And the way to get out of a freeze I think is twofold, that you don’t try and solve the problem, you do the next right thing, and you’ll find that your body and your brain will come up with more options the more you try and do simple tasks that maybe don’t complete it, but help.
The second thing is that you might actually… I think there’s something that I didn’t learn until recently that changed my life. There is this assumption that how our nervous systems work is that you’re activated and then you go from high activation, you calm yourself down to being unactivated. But actually the loop to regulation from activation actually goes through this period where you might experience lethargy or brain fog, and so often when we experience that we are actually over-activated, but we think of ourselves as being frozen or think of ourselves as being lethargic. And so we go on TikTok to try and be activated again, and we feel this numb sensation. And we can judge ourselves for feeling numb and then want to go to TikTok to be like, “At the very least, I can feel bad about ICE or I can be angry.”
But that actually pushes us back into activation mode, not into regulation. And so sometimes actually what we need to do when we feel that frozenness or numbness is that we need to be less activated. We need to set our phone down. We need to put our computers off. And if sitting in silence is a safe thing for you to do, that can be really effective. Going for a walk might also be a non-activating thing depending on how your body works. Taking your wheelchair out into a park, if that’s a thing that’s available to you, doing something that doesn’t activate you for a bit, it might be counterintuitive, but will regulate your nervous system.
And for many of us, the freeze or the numbness is actually an overstimulated nervous system, and we might actually have a better sense of what the next thing is if we regulate our nervous system. And that can mean actually doing less. One of the traps that social media gets into is that we are activating our nervous system without actually contributing to liberation. And the way to get out of that loop is actually to do a little bit less for 30 minutes and then do the next right thing.
KH: I really appreciate that advice, and I think a lot of people may be listening and thinking, oh, is that why I’ve been doing that?
I also really appreciate this call to do the next right thing, and the reminder not to get hung up on not having all of the answers. I’m reminded of Joanna Macy’s teachings around “active hope,” and how we can take actions that help us move toward the outcomes we want, and also, toward the values we want to see expressed. Sometimes, when we have no idea how to functionally impact the outcome of a thing that’s happening, we can still ask ourselves what values we want to see expressed in such a moment. Sometimes, that expression of our values might help us get unstuck, and figure out what the next right, substantive action looks like. More than anything, I don’t want people who are completely stuck to get hung up on what’s “effective” right now. What’s effective is getting in motion, getting into communication and relationships with other people who share your goals and values. Whether that’s going to a march, or attending a training, or going to a vigil, breaking the cycle of passive reactivity is what’s going to allow us to be effective.
I think, sometimes, social media can become a kind of a containment system. It can be a place where our political impulses sort of get captured and don’t escape. And so it’s been really amazing, in Chicago, to watch people walk out of their homes and start yelling at ICE agents, and put on whistles and patrol their neighborhoods, and take so many actions that express who they are in relation to, and in opposition to, this violence that’s come to their doorsteps. That’s a breach of the containment system, and we need more of that. We need to live rather than simply post our values. So, yes, I really appreciate your thoughts on this.
Now, I want to circle back to this question of how to help people who are struggling right now. What meaningful projects or practices are you seeing emerge around healing and care amid all of the struggle and upheaval that we’re experiencing?
AG: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting and important question. I think that there is a lot of projects of healing and rest that I’m seeing pop up locally, regionally, and nationally, which I think is really exciting. I think that there is this whole space of unfunded projects where I’ve always felt most of the work of liberation comes from, of just people finding other people and being like, “We’re going to help our neighborhood. We’re going to help this movement in this way, do things.” And so I’m seeing a lot of people offering support for sabbaticals, being like, “We’re trying to help X population get a time to retreat from their daily lives and nourish themselves.” And so New Seneca Village is a really good example of a project I’m very excited about. It’s a space for sabbaticals and rest and retreat for women of color in movement spaces.
I think there’s a lot of people starting to talk about healing as something that needs to be integrated into our strategy, that it can’t be an afterthought, it can’t be something that we do when we’re burnt out to throw people back into the fight. It has to be integrated. And there’s a level of understanding now, I think, that burnout doesn’t have to be inevitable. It should not be accepted as a movement that you will burn out. I think that’s really great.
I think we’re also really putting the mutual into mutual aid more, which I think is really exciting. I think there was a lot of projects 10 years ago that called themselves mutual aid, but was more charity done by radicals. It was very much, “We’re going to give resources to our community,” which is useful, but those organizers were broke and tired and didn’t have support. And I think a thing that I’m starting to see in mutual aid is like, yeah, the organizers who organize mutual aid should also be helped by the mutual aid that they’re organizing and that it is not some sort of… I think there was some sense in people my age that it is self-serving or it is using your community connections to resource yourself is somehow corruption.
And it’s like, no, that’s actually what mutual aid is. Using your relationships in your community to meet your needs is a good thing. And you should get food too. You should get rest too. If you’re building rest for other people, you should build it for yourself. And I think that understanding is becoming more and more useful and more and more and more and more common.
I also think that that the way that younger organizers have existential fear about climate is both heartbreaking, but also means that I see a lot more younger people taking time and building intentional space to sit with the existential questions of the moment, which I think in previous movements were seen as really navel-gazing. But I actually think is a really important aspect of trauma resilience and movement resilience, to be like, yeah, we’re not going to spend a year thinking about existential questions, but every four months I’m going to meet with my friends for a weekend and go into the woods and actually talk about how afraid I am that maybe we won’t live through this. Or what does it look like when a wet bulb event happens in my neighborhood, or what happens in the next fire?
Because I think when we don’t talk about that, all of that existential dread and energy seeps into our bodies. It drains us of capacity. It drains us of joy. And so I think it’s really exciting. And it’s not just young people, but it does seem like a generational shift that I’m really encouraged by is people taking time out in community to sit with this and try and process it. Another thing that I think a gift that Joanna Macy gave us during her life was the tools and the cycles of how do you process that kind of existential grief.
And I think that one of the things I’m super excited about is the way that food banks and mutual aid has turned to supporting government workers. I think that’s kind of very similar to auxiliary programs that helped the union movement in the thirties. When we understand, even if we’re not a member of this group of workers, we’re not a member of their union, understanding the role that they play and understanding that in order to push back against fascism, we need people who aren’t Nazis to stay in their jobs and keep running programs. And so as a community, we need to make sure they can feed their families.
And I’m seeing in D.C. there was a lot of organizers creating healing spaces, particularly for federal workers and dealing with the trauma of not knowing if you’re going to be fired and honestly just being treated terribly by your employer. I think that is just super exciting. We’ve talked about this a couple of times, but my core belief is that the way that we will beat fascism is showing that a more caring response is possible. And I have seen people in this country show up with such a beautiful amount of care, both formally and informally, that that gives me a lot of hope.
KH: I am so grateful for this message that people who are putting themselves out there to help others should also be helped by the work we do. That is so important, and I hope more people will internalize it. Because, as you’re saying, this is part of our path to victory — people have to be better off for joining us. And I know that’s possible, because I’ve experienced it. I know what it’s like to go from being isolated to being part of a community that is invested in my well being and survival. Some of us have been fortunate enough to find and cultivate that, and we need to sow those seeds more broadly. Our work should always help people envision themselves, and their role, within something larger than themselves, something transformative, that can make the world better and also make their lives better. And our lives becoming better shouldn’t just be the end game, it should be part of the journey. Compassion, mutual aid, accompaniment, and care — this all has to be part of our world building process. So, let’s take that seriously, and figure out how to weave the work of taking care of each other into the work of defending our communities and building power.
So many people have never experienced it, and so many people, who are working really hard, are not experiencing it now. We don’t have all of the infrastructure that we need to sustain the work that needs to happen in these times. And that’s hard. So, I want to send some love to activists who are feeling worn out and run down right now. We’ve talked a bit today about the risks of simply trying to push through those feelings, and some of the ways we can try to take care of ourselves, but I wanted to come back to this, because I really want to honor the contributions people are making right now, and how hard this moment is. I want to say that I totally understand the feelings some people are having, and that it’s not easy to be tender with ourselves when the stakes are so high, and we’re living in a state of emergency. So, Aaron, is there anything you would like to say right now to activists and organizers who are feeling nothing but exhausted, achy and frustrated, who maybe haven’t been attending to their needs or maintaining their relationships, who just can’t shift out of go mode?
AG: Yeah, I think that’s so important. I would say that I love you and I see you, and rest is not a luxury. It’s not something that can come afterwards. It’s a basic requirement of the work. Just like sleep and eating and drinking water is a basic requirement of life, everything that is a basic requirement of your wellness should be seen as a basic requirement of your organizing and activism. And that so much of how we think about capacity and discipline is actually in this lens of shaming ourselves for not being able to do more when we really need to shift into resourcing ourselves to be able to do as much as we can handle, and that nobody… I’ve never met a single organizer worth their salt, who was constantly convinced that they were doing enough. I’ve never seen it. You will never get to a point where it feels like it’s enough and you really have to let go of the false assumption that we’ll stop once we’ve done enough because we’ll never feel that.
Even if everybody else looks at us and is like, “Oh, you’ve done so much,” we’ll never feel it. That can’t be our internal thing. Instead, we have to resource ourselves with rest, with retreat, with reconnection, with re-grounding and reintegration. Those are the things we have to incorporate into our daily life. And it’s not a luxury. It’s not being self-centered. It’s not centering yourself in an unhealthy way. It’s understanding that we are in a marathon, that we’re in a protracted struggle, and that an hour of work after eight hours of sleep will be far more effective than 10 hours of work on zero hours of sleep, and that it’s just part of what it means to be a responsible organizer and activist in this moment. And it can feel counterintuitive, but you really have to accept that no one has to earn rest. It’s not a thing that you deserve. It’s just a basic need, and everybody, including activists and organizers, should get their needs met.
KH: This has all been so helpful. Aaron, as we close things out, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?
AG: Yeah, I think that if I could offer something in this moment, I think there can be a pressure to do something at a level that will say something about who we are, that we try and be humans producing, humans organizing, to be a person in this moment the kind of person you need to be in this moment is a person who produces something particular. You need to produce a protest. You need to save somebody from ICE. You need to raise a certain amount of money. And I think this constant barrage of trying to be a “human doing,” a “human producing” is unsustainable. And if we really sat with it, out of alignment with what we think life should be, and you kind of touched on it earlier, I think it’s much more important to get in touch with what our values are and act from those values, which may or may not produce the kind of thing we think people should be producing.
Sometimes what is necessary is to confront the police, but so often what is necessary is being kind to a comrade. So often what is necessary is being present. I think sometimes we don’t understand the value of faithful witness. We don’t understand that witnessing somebody in their struggle with an open heart and with grace is in itself an act of solidarity that is crucial and important. It keeps us in touch with our humanity. And when we witness people and we empathize with them and we move from that empathy to care, it is a more sustainable and often more effective action than trying to think, “This is the kind of thing that a good person would do now, and I’m going to go and find a place to do it.” I think it is much more sustainable, much more effective, much more values-aligned to witness ourselves and witness our neighbors and witness our comrades faithfully, and to offer them grace and then to be moved by the solidarity in the moment within our limits.
And I think that’s a much better way and a much more sustainable way to combat fascism than to try and be the hero or try and be the kind of person we would love to tell our grandkids we would be in this moment. Because you don’t become that person by searching for it. When I think about my grandparents and the people that I love, they were always moving from a place of culture and moving from a place of care. And then the great things that they did weren’t planned. They were just responding from a place of values, responding from a place of care. And I think that care really should be at the center of our strategy, of our analysis, and of our praxis.
KH: I couldn’t agree more, and I’m so grateful for those words. Aaron, thank you so much for being on the show again and for being part of Read This When Things Fall Apart. I’m just so grateful for your insights, for your work, and for your friendship. Thank you.
AG: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Kelly. I am honored as always to be on the podcast, grateful to be your friend, and just really appreciate the work that you do, day in and day out, to keep us informed, to keep us connected, to keep us grounded in addition to all of the other organizing work that you’re doing in Chicago. And my heart goes out to all of my comrades in Chicago and in Memphis and in D.C. and in Portland and across the country who are trying to show that a more caring response is possible and trying to protect our neighbors.
KH: A more caring response is possible, and together we can build it. I want to thank everyone who is out there doing their best right now. We love you and we are with you. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- Don’t forget to check out the new book Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis.
- You can learn more about the WildSeed Society’s work here.
