How to End the Activist Burnout Cycle
There are many ways to be an activist, and none of them are all-or-nothing
Humans 101
There are many ways to be an activist, and none of them are all-or-nothing
I’m the kind of person who will occasionally call themselves an activist, then immediately cringe at myself for having the gall to claim that word.
I’m not a good enough activist to be an “activist.” I don’t have the consistency, the self-sacrificing instinct, the almost religious fervor some have for their causes. I don’t have the faith things are actually gonna work out. I have limited energy and I use it all up within the first couple of months and then I get sad and flop on the couch.
That’s not what real activists are like, I tell myself. Activists are committed and bold. They are so passionate they’re tiresome to be around, and they don’t care that they are. They won’t let you sit through a movie without observing the various biases the film helped entrench — the transmisogyny in Ace Ventura, the ableism in Detective Pikachu. They will make you walk seven more blocks to a restaurant that is ethical rather than quickly getting a quesarito at Taco Bell. They aren’t apologetic about that kind of shit the way I would be. Real activists don’t back down and try to talk about something more pleasant. Real activists know nothing will ever be pleasant again. They have somehow accepted that.
I’ve never been that kind of activist. I’m as fickle as I am passionate. I throw myself into causes, run myself ragged overcommitting to them for a few months or a year, and then I dip. I have been this way ever since I was a preteen. In recent years, I have finally started to realize it’s this pursuit of perfect, unyieldingly committed “activism” that has made me such an unreliable advocate.
For many years I blamed external factors for my boom-and-bust cycle of activism followed by burnout. The world of politics is designed to demotivate us, I told myself. Systems of influence and power are too massive, too slow-moving, and too inscrutable for any individual to make a satisfying impact. Activist spaces are poorly managed, I said. They don’t have enough resources, and they make up for that by pressuring everyone into doing more work than they should. The people who lead such spaces often have complicated and partially selfish motivations for their work, and they steamroll right over the boundaries of anyone in their thrall.
All of that is true. But I’m also to blame. I chose to engage with the causes that I did in the ways that I did. I must have played too many video games as a child, and talked to other children too little. I learned to think of myself as a lonesome hero, never a small member of a collaborative team. I let white supremacy culture infect my brain heavily, and believed that if a thing was worth doing, it had to be done quickly and flawlessly.
I don’t want to be like that anymore. I am so tired of my own shit. And in the last few years, I’ve got to thinking that all meaningful activism has to be small and humbly sustainable. There’s a few steps I’ve learned I have to take, if I want to make my commitment to the work stick. Here’s what they are.
Listen and learn, then think for yourself
In many activist spaces, particularly digital ones, there is an intense pressure toward intellectual and behavioral conformity. Certain voices are uplifted as not only leaders of strategy and tactics, but leaders of thought. You’re supposed to listen to these voices and uphold their values without questioning or pushing back too much. Honest questions can be taken as signs of hostility. If you think a particular strategy will be ineffective, you’re supposed to hold your tongue. If you don’t agree with a particular goal, well, you might be told you don’t even belong in the space anymore.
If you care about social justice, you’ve probably been told quite frequently to listen to marginalized people and let them set the agenda for how best to liberate them. I agree with the spirit of that rule, but also know that putting it into practice is a great deal more complex. Trans people don’t all agree about how best to dismantle cissexism. Disabled people have a variety of viewpoints on how to fight ableism. I follow tons of Black writers and activists who approach the toppling of white supremacy from a variety of angles, some of them inherently contradictory to one another. I exist on the fringes of multiple activist groups that have competing goals, each of which sound equally reasonable to me.
In the past, these complexities and contradictions would get me really tied up in knots. If I put effort into electoral politics, the anarchists in my social circle would be disappointed in me. If I became too revolutionary, the people who saw voting as harm reduction would say I was part of the problem. If I didn’t pour all of my energy into the many needs of a single very under-resourced organization, well, I wasn’t really committed to their cause, was I?
I’ve realized I can’t actually please everyone. I won’t ever find one singularly trustworthy voice I can listen to on all matters of social justice all of the time. Instead, I have to collect information from a variety of sources, reflect on it, listen to affected parties, speak with trusted friends about my views… and then decide for myself how I’m going to affect change. These days, I see activist orgs and prominent activist voices less as all-encompassing leaders, and more as advisors, whose judgment and expertise I take into account. Ultimately, the only person I can answer to is myself.
Know your values
It’s easy to get confused about who you are and what you stand for if you let a ton of outside voices determine your self concept. Of course, we are all social animals, and it’s natural to let other people influence our goals. It’s important to take the feelings of people we respect and care about into account. But when left unchecked, or placed over a bedrock of insecurity, that impulse can veer into people-pleasing. People-pleasing is not an effective form of activism. It’s a guaranteed route to guilt and burnout.
I used to love getting praise from the leaders of organizations I was involved in. I was kind of addicted to the verbal head-pats of “wow that was fast!” or “you did a lot this week!” The approval of another person was how I knew I was virtuous and good. If I didn’t live up to expectations, it was a sign I lacked moral fiber. I couldn’t live in social ambiguity — either I was doing enough by everyone’s standards, and I was “good,” or I was slipping and was going to get caught being “bad.”
When you get overly reliant on social approval, your ability to uphold your own values slips. If you need a leader to think you’re a good person, how can you question his judgment or point out he’s being manipulative? If you need the entire group to agree you belong, how can you point out when their talking points have holes or logical inconsistencies? When there is a rift in the group caused by a disagreement or even an abuse allegation, how can you pick which side you are on? Are you going to check in with yourself and determine what you believe is right? Or are you going to go with whatever side is largest or has the most clout?
I’ve been burned enough times by dynamics like these to realize I can’t base my values on other people’s opinions. I certainly can’t evaluate my own self-worth based on how other people feel about me. Social rejection hurts immensely, don’t get me wrong. We all need social bonds in order to be healthy and happy. But when it comes to my activism, I’ve realized the call to action has to come from within. It has to be based on what I truly believe, not what other people will approve of.
Know your strengths
There’s this meme I often see circulating in leftist circles, which asks social justice activists to consider what character class they are:
It’s a riff on Dungeons & Dragons character classes, and a metaphor I find super useful when contemplating my own activism. Some people are the conventional “social justice warriors,” built for conflict and intense head-to-head combat. They go to protests, they disrupt city council meetings, they win debates in their classrooms, and interrupt bigotry when they hear it from across the room. These are the people we tend to think of when we hear the word “activist.”
But not everyone is well suited to warrior-class activist work. Some people are more roguish, thwarting police apps by flooding them with K-pop videos. Others are healers or clerics, providing free home-cooked meals or massages to the protesters who were on the front lines. Some of us are the wealthy benefactors of the revolution, filling up the GoFundMe’s and Venmo’s of poorer activists from the comfort of our homes. And some of us are social justice spell-casters, spreading knowledge and motivation through infographics, calls to action, or even essays like these.
I used to get activist burnout because I believed I had to fulfill all of these roles. I also failed to give myself full credit for the hard, impactful work I excelled at, because it was done mostly online. People often say digital activism is just “slacktivism,” nothing but an empty social performance of virtue.
That is an incredibly, noxiously ableist point of view. Lots of people can’t physically get to protests. Some activists can’t leave their homes at all. Some people, like me, have the ability to be social some of the time, but not always. The online world is a part of the real world and the things we do and say online matter just as much as the ones we do in person.
I still go to protests and meetings and fight for justice in person, but I know that I’m ultimately more skilled as a social justice druid or mage. With my words, I can cast powerful spells that go much farther than my weak, socially anxious little autistic body can. Each of us has to determine for ourselves what we are best at, which efforts we find most natural and effective. We each get to decide how to apply our skills to the things that we value.
Sidestep excessive demands
People in activist spaces don’t always have the same sense of boundaries I have. They might be incredibly fired-up with passion, or acting out of trauma, or they might be new to activism, and see things in urgent terms the way I once did. Other people can’t read my mind or know when I need a break. They don’t know how much I’m doing for other organizations, for close friends, or in my professional work. When they ask me to take something on, I should hear that as exactly what it is — an ask — not a demand or a manipulation.
We’re all on our own journeys of figuring out how much we can take on, what’s good for us, what we are called to do. Yet I used to feel really guilty if someone asked me to make a commitment I didn’t have the spoons for. I figured they somehow knew my limits and moral obligations better than I did.
I try not to fall prey to that anymore. If someone asks me to participate in an action or join a group, I try to manage their expectations, as well as my own. I can’t necessarily add a new weekly obligation to my calendar, but I can often do a variety of random, impactful things with the time I sporadically have throughout the month.
If I get the sense an organization has a particularly punishing, workaholic culture, I try to be evasive about my availability. There’s a big difference between having a free spot on my calendar and actually having the energy to do something with it, after all. I know from past experience that if I let other people’s requests guilt me into doing more than I ought to do, I will end up getting physically sick, feeling resentful, or making excuses for why I’ve disappointed them. It’s much better to just be straightforward about what I have the time for, and risk disappointing the person right out the gate. After all, their feelings don’t determine whether I’m doing enough.
Accept disappointment
Being an activist means frequently feeling dejected and disappointed. Sometimes you spend months campaigning for a politician who loses in a massive upset. A yearslong push to replace the police board can succeed, but result in a new office that’s just as corrupt and prone to justifying abuse as the original. You can gnash your teeth and scream and set things on fire when public schools are defunded yet again, and find that no one in power seems to care or even notice. Doing this work means failing a lot. I still hate that I have to accept this.
When I was researching my upcoming book, I interviewed a therapist here in Chicago named Xochitl Sandoval. Xochitl really blew my mind with how ze talked about activist fatigue being caused by a need to more deeply process grief.
“I think a lot of the conversation about activist burnout is actually about grieving,” ze told me, “about being really able and willing to just sit in this space of, ‘this is fucking awful. And there might not be anything I can do to solve this.’”
This conversation happened months ago, but I keep returning to it. Anytime the police murder another Black person in cold blood, I think of it. When people point out that justice cannot ever truly be attained on behalf of the dead, I think about it. When climate scientists acknowledge that some ecological damage can never be undone, no matter what we do, I think of it. When I feel myself getting irritated at how much work there is to do, or find myself kind of resenting how unending the public carousel of trauma is, I think of it.
A lot of my activist burnout came from never allowing any room for disappointment or grief. I thought I had to win. It was always absurd to think I’d see anything that looks like a neat and tidy victory. Yet victory is what I aspired to. But I’m just one footsoldier in a war that, if I’m being honest with myself, will have to be centuries-long. I won’t always be able to see the ripple effects my behavior has.
Protests here in Chicago have not impacted the presence of police in public schools, or even made a dent in the city’s $1.76 billion police budget. Yet the protests have exhausted police officers and forced them to work for weeks without breaks, eroding their morale. These protests have sent a message to our communities about what we value, and how relentlessly we intend to fight for change. Each of us is taking our shifts, doing our part, casting our spells, and setting our traps where we can.
I have to trust I’m doing something meaningful, even if the list of things that needs to be done will never end. I have to look inward, armed with the knowledge and wisdom of people much smarter than me, and use the information I’ve collected to determine my values and goals. I have to determine what my strengths are, and direct my talents toward the causes I feel called to address. And I have to admit to myself that no matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, this fight will not be over in my lifetime. Knowing that, I have to plan to be here for the long haul. Slowly, bit by bit, I’m learning to get better at that.