From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty
“Some days, my best efforts feel insufficient and overwhelming at the same time.”
There is a common admonition that often circulates on social media, especially among leftists, that goes something like: You don’t have to ask what you would’ve done during the Holocaust, or any other historical atrocity. You're doing it right now. These words are valuable in that they encourage us to abandon fantasies of who we would have been in another context, and to live our values here and now.
As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world. Some of these disparities can be chalked up to the simple truth that people often are not who they imagine themselves to be. This truth reminds me of the lyrics of Joe Henry’s “Our Song,” in which Henry refers to the vicarious thrill we derive from watching movies:
We push in line at the picture show
For cool air and a chance to see
A vision of ourselves portrayed as
Younger and braver and humble and free.
Fantasies about who we would have been—and what we would have done—in moments of profound injustice serve a similar purpose. They allow us to imagine braver, more purposeful versions of ourselves. But when we’re confronted with the reality of catastrophic injustice in the world around us, we are forced to measure those fantasies against reality. The results can be profoundly depressing. Many people have discovered that they have more in common with those who witnessed atrocity and simply went about their lives, perhaps uttering words like, "That’s a shame," or complaining that someone should do something.
In the rhythm and rhyme of history, we all have historical counterparts. Contemplating who those people are—and how we might judge their actions in parallel with our own—can be daunting, or even devastating.
However, it’s important to remember that such measurements are not fixed. Our lives, our character, our part in history—all of these things are the product of choices we make on a continuous basis. Each day, we make decisions about how to move in the world and how to relate to others. We choose what to extend to others, and what to hold in reserve, in order to sustain ourselves and our loved ones.
It’s easy to pass judgment on ourselves and each other for what we’re “already doing” or failing to do. But as an organizer, I’m concerned with what might motivate or allow people to act differently. After all, the people whose actions we have admired during historical moments of resistance, rebellion, and rescue were not simply born into heroic collective action. Many of them witnessed harm and wickedness for years, or even decades, before something moved or enabled them to participate in constructive moral action. Some were slow to join the struggles they eventually helped to enliven. Some were afraid. Some initially supported moderate, reserved actions. Some were complicit until, one day, they could bear their complicity no more. Others didn’t believe change was possible until they were recruited into strategic projects. Many were moved to action by profound loss or the threat of profound loss. They had to find their way, just as many of us must now find our way through this moment.
So what’s holding us back?
Recently, I’ve talked with many people who feel like they are not showing up for this moment in the ways they had hoped or imagined. For some, the disparity between aspiration and practice is rooted in practical concerns—being overwhelmed by child care and the basics of survival under capitalism. For others, their reluctance is tied to safety concerns, such as a lack of COVID precautions in our movements. Still others feel demoralized and unsure of what meaningful actions they can take.
One of my close friends expressed uncertainty about how to best apply her skills in this moment. “I feel clear on what I value and believe,” she told me. “I’m clear that I have some random skills and a little knowledge. I’m stuck on how to best put it all to use at this time, given what I think is needed, based on what I’m reading and hearing from a variety of folks, which is: we need folks to support efforts to build coalitions and collective power against fascism, defend institutions, create communities of care and self-defense, and more.”
“When I think of doing what I know how to do and what I think I can reasonably do, it feels so meager in the grand scheme and in the face of fascism, and I worry that I would just be spinning my wheels doing something just to make myself feel active and better, yet not really doing anything useful,” she explained.
Another veteran activist I spoke with cited COVID-related safety concerns and the struggle to keep his family afloat. “I'm immunocompromised and the activist community here in my city still doesn't really take COVID safety seriously,” he said. “I caught COVID while on the ground last spring and I can't afford to get sick again.” He also pointed to the difficulties of raising a family during these uncertain times. “Life circumstances have piled up so that I'm spending a lot more time on my day job just trying to make ends meet and stay afloat, plus childcare,” he said. “I still do a good amount of activist work but ‘work’ work has had to take priority, because I don't want to end up homeless. I don't love it.”
For some people, the problem stems from a sense of alienation. As one longtime co-struggler told me, “I believed in people, maybe to the point of being naive, but I really believed in people, and in groups I joined and supported, and I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve felt so used and used up,” they said. “The betrayals, the abandonment, the finger pointing, the unwillingness to acknowledge all of the ways that all of us have screwed up, screwed people over, or left folks behind… I guess I don’t know who to trust anymore or where to attempt that.”
Aaron Goggans, an organizer with the WildSeed Society, believes that kind of alienation—coupled with grief and unprocessed trauma—is a major factor in the political hesitancy many activists are experiencing. The WildSeed Society works to cultivate “a spiritual community that supports activists and organizers in Movement.” That work involves creating supportive frameworks for both “rebels” and “nurturers” involved in justice work. While discussing the isolation and political immobilization that some people are experiencing, Aaron pointed to the upheaval of 2020 and what it demanded of activists and organizers on the ground. He believes that mass protest and the solidarity fostered through mutual aid helped push Trump out of office, but argues that activists and organizers were never given the opportunity to meaningfully process those events.
“There wasn't a shared narrative,” he said. “There was no shared story that told people, ‘Yes, all of your sacrifice mattered. We did keep people alive. We did stop Trump from getting a second term. We did change things.’”
When Biden took office, the national focus on restoring normalcy shut down any meaningful analysis of what was gained or lost in the streets, what had been built through mutual aid, and what people had lost due to COVID and the violence of organized abandonment. The values that made the Biden era possible were cast aside in favor of a return to the status quo, which would be accomplished at any cost. The transition from fighting for each other and endeavoring to support one another, to abandoning any catharsis, grieving process, or regard for disabled people—whose lives were immediately threatened by the end of widespread COVID safety practices—created a kind of emotional and political dissonance.
“I know you did a lot of work on public grieving,” Aaron told me, “but as a society we just said, ‘Fuck those sick people,’ and that is uniquely heartbreaking.”
Aaron emphasized that the disposability of “essential workers,” disabled people, and Black people—given that anti-Black police violence seemed to fall off the radar for most liberals after Trump left office—created a moral injury in our society. Some of those abandoned could not move past that injury (for emotional or practical reasons), and some of those who participated in acts of collective abandonment simply could not reckon with those choices.
These fractures led to the kind of separation and compartmentalization we are witnessing today. Movement communities have been broken by resentful divides, including bitter disagreements around the genocide in Palestine—from those who cannot forgive silence or inaction to disagreements about strategy and ideological commitments.
While some people cannot forgive the perceived moral failings of their would-be co-strugglers, others cannot bring themselves to engage with the ways they, and our society, have failed. As one friend told me, “When I bring up COVID, most people just change the subject. They don’t know how to account for it, and if they did, they wouldn’t know how to live with it.”
Feelings of ineptitude or helplessness have emerged for many as the system demands we shuffle forward and participate as usual despite the horrors unfolding around us. Those who are required to behave as though everything’s normal, in order to navigate their lives, have begun to cling to a false sense of normalcy to sustain themselves psychologically. As a coping mechanism, such behavior is understandable, but dangerous. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, a novel about an American spy pretending to be a Nazi propagandist, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Of course, insisting that things are not normal does not, in itself, guide us toward justice. For example, when my friend Sarah Kendzior is asked by one of her children whether or not an event that’s mentioned in the news is “normal,” Kendzior emphasizes that it’s more important to ask whether or not what’s happening is right or wrong, since many things that are “normal” are unjust.
But how do we relate to other people about the things we know are unjust?
Aaron and I discussed the social skills that many of us lost during the early months and years of the pandemic, as we spent less time socializing in person and convening face-to-face with other people. “I forgot how to interact with people,” Aaron said.
I’ve talked with many friends about the social difficulties we’ve developed in recent years. In my own life and work, I find it harder to have casual conversations with people—not because I don’t want to talk to them, but because the flow of social communication is no longer reflexive for me. I was an outgoing person before COVID, and may still be compared to a lot of people, but social interaction is more complicated now, and more taxing. It’s easier for me to opt out of social endeavors and even take comfort in doing so. My fear of missing out has been replaced with a fear of going out. I am more avoidant, and when I sense that my needs aren’t being met, emotionally or spiritually, I am less likely to seek relief in a group setting. I know I am not alone in these feelings.
Aaron argues that many of us are struggling because we feel “somatically unsafe,” and that material conditions play a significant role in these feelings. “A lot of us had long COVID. We are enduring a deep material poverty that’s the end result of a neoliberal system, which ate away at the care system,” he said. “It’s so difficult to find a doctor, to find an apartment, and within all of that instability, we are enduring this deep spiritual loss of the connective tissue that all humans need to feel like we're a part of a thing. And we haven't quite figured out how to grieve and what rituals can reset our nervous systems at the scale that we need them to be reset.”
In order to bring people into our movements under these conditions, Aaron says that we are going to have to create projects that “meet people where they’re at.” People have been disoriented by brutal news cycles, relentless lies, and attacks on human decency and the very fabric of our shared reality. To overcome this, we are going to have to find ways to welcome disoriented people into the fray. “It's clear that the current system isn't working,” he said, “and that any strategy to build something else—even to experiment with something else—is going to require caring for people in a way that expands their capacity.”
Aaron emphasizes that people are not going to show up equipped to do everything that the moment demands of them, and will not always act in ways we appreciate or that make sense to us. “We’re going to have to recognize that all of the mental strategies that people use, from catastrophizing to ad hominem attacks or anti-intellectualism—some of that is just a trauma response to data overwhelm. And so projects that help explain to people what’s happening, in ways their nervous systems can handle—that’s what’s going to help people make collective sense of the moment. Because if we can't have a shared reality and a shared agreement on what is happening, it's very hard to learn any lessons collectively.”
Aaron also points out that narratively, we have lost a major tool that helped bring the struggles of everyday people into focus during the 2010s. Twitter was not designed to uplift social movements, but for a time, it was effectively repurposed by marginalized people to drive social discourse and center the movement-building efforts of grassroots activists and organizers. When the corporate press failed to cover our movements, or capture the truth of our efforts, our narrative-building efforts on social media strong-armed the public narrative. “We might actually be doing more than we give ourselves credit for,” Aaron argues. “We just don’t have the narrative-building tools to amplify and center those stories, but we can build those. And that’s hopeful because we are better at narrative work than they are. But people are doing important, impactful work, even if it’s not getting the attention it should. The Tesla Takedown movement has had a major impact. Other people are having an impact. It’s important to know that.”
On an individual level, choosing how to engage, and deciding how much we can contribute, remains complicated. Some people will be constrained by their everyday responsibilities, such as childcare, or by their community’s refusal to address access concerns, such as COVID safety. Whatever holds us back, we still need to find ways to connect and participate in collective struggle because isolation will not save us.
As my friend Ejeris Dixon recently reminded me, “Sorrow, exhaustion, and despair can make getting more involved feel impossible.” As a movement strategist and the host of the “Fascism Barometer” podcast, Ejeris has spent a lot of time thinking about what this moment demands of us, and what’s getting in our way. “Everyone I know is balancing care work, family needs, safety planning, health issues, and so much with the desire and need to make change,” she said. These conditions are real, and they are not going away, but they don’t have to preclude participation. As Ejeris stressed, “Movements have and always will be made of everyday people who find a way to make change amidst challenging conditions.”
That change doesn’t have to begin with heroic acts. It can start with asking: What do I have the time and capacity to contribute? Ejeris offered some questions to help break things down: “Do you have five minutes a week, four hours a month, every other Saturday? Are you better at a short task, or joining an ongoing project? Is your best move donating and asking friends to support, joining a protest, making calls, or going to ongoing meetings?”
Ejeris also emphasized the importance of communicating with people in your life who are politically engaged, or who have a stake in the issues you care about, as they may be moved to join in as well. “I have always felt that while it can feel intimidating, organizing has been the antidote to hopelessness, isolation, and despair. We can absolutely change what's happening, liberation is possible, but it is up to us.”
I also agree with Che Johnson-Long, who recently told me, “Everyone needs to be in a group right now. Everyone. I don’t care if it’s a local mutual aid group, if it’s a base-building organization, if it’s national, if it’s your neighbors on your block, but we all need to be in a group.”
For the sake of safety planning, coordination, fellowship, and building power, we all need to be part of something larger than ourselves. None of us can do what this moment requires of us in isolation. If local in-person gatherings are not accessible, virtual discussion, support, and planning groups might be better options for some people. Structure-based organizing—like labor and tenants unions—will be especially vital in the months and years ahead, and these formations are well worth joining, building, and supporting. If you’re not ready to unionize your building, consider forming a text thread to discuss emergencies and safety concerns to establish a sense of connectedness with your neighbors. If large membership organizations or local mutual aid groups aren’t a good fit, consider forming a discussion group. Reading and discussing resources like the Defend and Recruit Playbook or Mariame Kaba’s Making a Plan zine might help your group find a sense of direction or shared purpose. If you are worried about being adequately supported and want to support others in these uncertain times, care webs and podmapping are also meaningful activities that can help strengthen the connective tissue that has been weakened for so many of us in recent years. Whatever it takes to stage a mental jailbreak, escape our isolation, and forge bonds with other people—including people we don’t particularly like or want to get to know, but who we are willing to fight for, care for, and protect—this is how we will survive these times.
The work of assessing our capacities and potentially taking a chance on a new group or project may be intimidating, but we have to remember what’s at stake. As my friend Aly Wane, an undocumented Black immigration organizer, recently told me, “It is imperative to act because we still have room to operate and haven’t reached the stage in fascism where things are so far gone that people get jailed for basic expressions of democracy, but we are getting closer every day. It is precisely because things are so dire that people should use this time wisely.”
Our contributions to the groups and organizations we join or establish may feel small at times. That’s okay. The truth is that all of our capacities vary over time. As Aaron told me, we have to negotiate with the realities of our own lives without giving up on our connection to justice work. “Maybe that means, this week, you help out in some way, then you take care of yourself. Maybe you have six months where you're focusing on your health. Maybe you have a year where you're taking care of your grandma. What is enough is a deeply personal question. But it's important that you give what you can when you can.”
Aaron also emphasized that “beating yourself up when you’re doing your best isn’t getting us closer to liberation.”
I appreciated that point, because I’ve talked with a number of people in recent weeks who are taking action, but who are constantly worried that they aren’t doing enough—or that they’re not doing the right things.
I feel this pressure myself.
Lately, I am constantly second-guessing my own contributions and wondering if I am doing enough, or focusing on the right things. I am constantly grappling with the limitations of my disabled body. Like many seasoned organizers, I spent years neglecting my health, my relationships, my finances, and more for the sake of the movements I believed in. Many people who have overextended themselves in these ways have burned out and abandoned movement work—sometimes departing on bitter terms. To stay, and to break the cycle of devaluing myself and even treating myself as disposable, I know I have to make thoughtful, measured choices. But this process of discernment does not come easily. Some days, my best efforts feel insufficient and overwhelming at the same time.
Perhaps that’s the first thing we need to acknowledge to ourselves: nothing will feel like enough because everything we know and love is at stake. No individual’s actions will be commensurate with the threats we face. But we can each endeavor to do the next right thing, whatever that means for us. We must do what we can, while we can, because as Aly Wane reminds us, our time is running out. The question before us is not who we would have been in a different era, but what we are willing to do now, in concert with others, before it’s too late.
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