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What's the Point of the Revolution if We Can't Dance
Jane Barry and Jelena Dordevic met with activists around the world to discuss the culture of the women’s movement and uncovered a disturbing trend: We’re deeply unsettled in our work, and it’s affecting our progress. It’s time to change that.
"Sustainability is about being able to do the work we love, while still feeling full and happy in every part of our lives."
Holly Wilmeth
Oxana Alistratova is an intense, driven activist running an anti-trafficking center in Moldova. When we first meet in Dublin, at a Front Line Human Rights Defenders meeting, we talk for hours about her work, her life, and her safety. Every day she works directly with survivors while managing a staff of 15. It’s difficult and dangerous work.
I finally ask her how she manages to juggle it all. She pauses.
“Well, I don’t sleep,” she says.
Oxana’s answer sums up the experience of most activists in the women’s movement. Across the world—from Rwandan peace activists to US domestic violence advocates—we are looking for more time. We are constantly trying to balance too much work with too few resources and never enough rest. We’re making choices every day about well-being—our own and everyone else’s. With so much to be done, and so many wrongs in the world to right, we almost always choose to serve others first. We don’t feel we have a right to rest.
I know because, with my colleague Jelena Dordevic, I’ve talked with more than 100 female human rights activists from 45 countries about this topic, and they all said the same thing: We’ve created a culture of self-sacrifice. And we’re tired. We’re fearful, exhausted, even traumatized.
When we sat down and talked with women about their hopes and challenges, what we learned was both disturbing and surprising.
What’s disturbing is that as activists, we manage high levels of chronic stress, exposure to trauma, and enormous workloads. We’re deeply stressed about the amount of work we have to do, and yet we almost universally accept this level of work as an inevitable fact of activism.
What’s surprising is that despite it all, we seem to keep going.
Susan Wells, the founder of Montana’s Windcall Ranch—an all-expense paid retreat for activists—said it best. She talked of “a damaging work ethic,” in which we are encouraged to override our own needs in order to reach our end goal. She explained that there is a damaging perception that a truly committed activist should be willing to tackle the Goliath of social injustice regardless of the personal cost. She pointed out the irony in the fact that when she first established her home as a free retreat for overworked activists nearly 20 years ago, she sent out 3,000 invitations, but only 30 people applied. Most felt that they—and their organizations—just couldn’t afford the indulgence.
Our work is messy, complicated, and personal. We’re fighting against warlords, mercenaries, and weapon-manufacturing nations. We’re up against state-sponsored terrorism, transnational corporations, and the factory down the hill that’s polluting our water supplies. We’re exposing our neighbor who just trafficked his daughter. We’re up against the world, and it’s taking its toll.
And yet when Jelena and I first started interviewing women activists about how they cope with the enormous pressure, most reacted with confusion and even frustration.
During one group interview in Sri Lanka, after we had discussed how they were coping with stress, one activist stopped me and said, “Look, I don’t get it—what does this have to do with our work?”
I heard this comment over and over again. As activists we can talk for hours about funding crunches, fundamentalisms, ending war, and violence against women. But discussing our own fears is much harder. Our stress, exhaustion, and personal safety are private matters.
Once activists got past the initial shock of speaking about themselves, issues of burnout inevitably came up. Sarala Emmanuel in Sri Lanka described it as an overwhelming feeling that you can never stem the tide of violence.
“When you hear about another rape or another killing, it makes you depressed,” she said. “In a way it does seem too much—we can’t respond to it all.”
It’s time we start talking. Sooner or later, the stress of the work gets absorbed into our hearts, minds, bodies, and into the movement as a whole. Without the time and space to reflect and recover, it stays there. Eventually it takes form as breakdowns, strokes, heart disease, cancer, suicide.
“I felt that I couldn’t cope with one more minute of handling responsibilities,” said Anissa Helie, a human rights activist in Algeria. “I spent five weeks in bed, only getting up to go to the toilet, not even able to make myself a cup of tea.”
The time has come to make our own personal well-being a priority. Because without physical and emotional health, how can we do the important work that we have set out to do?
Activist Pramada Menon coined the phrase “activist sustainability.”
“We never think of our own sustainability,” she said. “I am not talking about funding. The question is how do we sustain our own lives, get our own energy, and bring that change elsewhere?” . . .
Comments
Self-sustainability--so relevant
This is such a wonderful and necessary piece---and so relevant for us at this very frenetic and stressful time in our world.
So much is changing so quickly--institutions are collapsing, global climate change, wars, seemingly endless natural disasters. We as human beings, and particularly as women, are absorbing all of this Energy and it's killing us. As a young American woman, I feel that our culture is constantly telling us "GO!" and be the best---the Perfectionist--and a woman is just not good enough if she is not running herself into the ground. I know so many women like this---family, friends, co-workers and employers who are sacrificing their health and sanity. Most are so out of touch with their body/mind/spirit that they don't realize what they're doing to themselves until it's too late---they need an emergency surgery, they're diagnosed with cancer or they simply collapse from exhaustion.
We must live a life in Balance. Self-sustainability should be a priority for all women.
"Only from the heart can you touch the sky."~Rumi
What's at the Core?
Why do we, as women, do this to ourselves? We are often nurturing to everyone BUT ourselves. I think this is something my lovely mother has done all of her life. She sometimes apologizes for the role model that she has given me, but I cannot imagine doing things any differently from what I have been conditioned to do - working hard...striving to do the impossible...pushing myself at the risk of damaging my health and losing my sanity.
The list of ideas for how to lessen the stress are great, but will I implement them? Will I remember that there is more to life than meeting the next grant deadline? Will I take time to breathe, meditate, practice reiki, sleep, etc. when there is so much to do?
I have to say this would be a sea change for me. My inclination to put myself last is deeply ingrained.
So, why? Why do this? What am I responding to deep in myself?
Women's self sacrifice
I totally agree with you Ellen, we have been taught that a women's role in life is to work, stress and work a bit more. Yes I to don't relax my body & mind as much as I should, if women aren't doing something they are thinking of the next job they have to do or worrying about the finances, children, etc. These women are doing a important job and they need rest!
Fantastic article!
This subject is so dear to my heart .... my life's passion is for women to find their true power ... the state of being where they know that they are enough and they liberate all of their power and potential. When we start to access that in ourselves balance is inevitable ... we start to make different choices because they just feel right ... suddenly what seemed impossible to consider feels easy and natural.
It's not surprising that women activists struggle so much with this as they are the ultimate manifestation of what women do naturally ... care passionately - get on and make things happen - put others first. I have worked with a lot of women who have struggled to believe that by putting themselves first, spending time discovering who they are and liberating all of their unique energy, they make so much more of an impact on the work they do and the people in their lives. I love watching their faces when they start to experience it and realise that their all their fear was for nothing.
One of the things that gets in the way for so many women is the belief that to make this change is HARD ... that it will involve a long painful journey of self reflection and soul searching. It doesn't have to be that way. For so many woman it's more a case of seeing how much of what they've been carrying is simply a belief or a story about how things should be.
I can see that the 'reality' for many women activists is that people will suffer or die if they take any time out for something as indulgent as self care and their own well-being. Zawadi Nyong’o has highlighted something crucial by including in her list fund raising for staff well being. Every organisation should make staff well being as high priority as the specific work they are doing for the community. It's only by it being the ethos of the whole organisation they work for that women will easily be able to take the leap to empower themselves and find sustainability. It isn't a waste of valuable resources.
I would love to offer support to these amazing women to help them find that place in themselves where self-care is a natural state of being!
Lynne Healy
www.lynnehealy.co.uk
Your comment
Indeed you have hit the nail on the head about women learning to find a place for self-care! I've been fussing because of a situation in my neck of the woods where the books were pulled from the library and replaced with electronic media. I'm sure my journey won't be easy but I feel it is necessary. Yet I must remember to take care of me in the process........
Thanks for those reminders!
Look for the message in the mess!
Very important point
What does it mean if the way we’ve been active for generations isn’t working for us anymore? I’ve often wondered if embracing a different way of working negates all of the progress we’ve made until now.
This is such an important point! Movements get large, and unruly, and tired -- and they keep plodding along the old path because they don't have the energy and focus to stand back and look at things clearly, analytically and have the courage to try a new path.
I have constantly argued here in India -- that that is what we need to do with what has been called "the gender ratio crises." Something is not working. The rate of elimination of females is increasing every year! 3 years ago when I argued that we have to begin to recognize that this is not an arithmetic problem but a genocide -- a massive uncontainable violation of human rights, people were very unhappy. The targetted elimination of a group through violence and the systematic prevention of its birth and continuity is genocide under the 1948 UN Act on Genocide.
But that is exactly what we call our campaign today -- The 50 Million Missing is a fight against female genocide in India. Do visit our website at www.50millionmissing.in
Thanks for a wonderful and very refreshing article.
Rita Banerji
www.ritabanerji.com
wow
wow...
Mandatory Self-care for activists!
Dear Jane,
Thank you so much for a great article.
I want to suggest that it becomes mandatory for women activists and all activists to take time out for self care and silent moment. Go to the hiding place where you can replenish yourself.
I've learned that retreat time give me the chance to find myself a-new. I worked for the African Women's Coalition for six years and I tell you in the first few years I wanted to resolve all the problems, I wanted to address the many issues that my African immigrants and refugees sisters were facing.
True leadership and true activism has to take the road to self-sustaining, self-nurturing and self care.
Again thank you!
Evelyne,
Atchiman
Remember to take the essentials with you today!
Voice to my own thoughts
What a great article. I am pretty new to activism and one of the things that keeps me from getting more involved is the fear of loosing my self to the cause. I love that you are bringing this issue to the fore front.
Thank you!
Suzanna
So true!
As a student social worker our lecturers keep reinforcing this point to us. The want us to start practicing it while still in school so that we can prevent burnout in the future. With so much sadness in the world, it is easy for us all to want to bear the burden, but we must realize there is only so much one person can do and be content when we really have done all we can.