1.2 Design your activism so it nurtures you
In my first two decades as an activist, people patted me on the back and thanked me for my work…
But they did not want to live like me.
Why? Because I was a “sacrificial-savior” activist. Which sounds like this…
I’m sacrificing myself to save you. And to save the world.
I looked at the world and saw that the problems were too big and too many and the activists too few and too tired. So I decided…
I had to do the work of two, three, four, or more.
I spent years running myself ragged, working long hours seven days a week, with knots in my stomach for months at a time, and having a meager personal life.
The worst of it was I started to resent all those people, the great majority of people, who were not helping.
Playing sacrificial-savior is a co-dependent thing. We activists are doing way too much and everyone else is doing way too little.
I think at some point, even though I did my best to keep my resentment to myself, people started to smell it. Which repelled them instead of attracting them into activism.
I remember going to a Green Festival to interview people about the question of hope. I got into a conversation with Taschi, a bright, personable, young woman who had just finished a graduate program in environmental science. She told me she was trying to figure out her career path.
So I asked her, “Have you ever thought about becoming the executive director of an activist nonprofit?”
She shot back…
“Oh, no, I like myself too much.”
If we’re driving away people like Taschi, what hope is there?
We need a better way of doing activism than the traditional default, because we need activism to be attractive…
Massively attractive.
We’re up against massive challenges. Tens of thousands of activists working as hard as we can, is still not enough to save a global species of eight billion. To have any chance at saving ourselves, we’d need people to get involved by the tens of millions, then hundreds of millions.
The answer for us activists is not that we should work harder. The answer is for us to…
Organize.
Because it’s just simply true that…
We need more people.
We need them to come join us and help with this urgent work of making a better world, a world that can sustain human life.
I believe there’s nothing more important for us activists to do than to take care of ourselves deeply and well. We need to do this, first and foremost to sustain ourselves in our work.
But there’s a second reason. When we activists talk about our missions, it’s usually in terms of the issues we focus on, like voting rights, electoral politics, health care, climate change, reproductive choice, and racial justice.
But I believe our priority mission needs to be this…
Demonstrating with our own lives that activism can be a good way to live.
We can only make activism massively attractive if the way we do our work…
Makes people envy us.
When we mistreat ourselves and burn ourselves out, we’re delivering the message that caring is bad for you. And activism is bad for you.
But activism, done right, can be…
The adventure of a lifetime.
Healthy caring, as opposed to sacrificial caring, is invigorating. Activism, at its best, means we’re doing meaningful work in the company of kindred spirits.
And when people do very hard, very important work together they develop a deep sense of friendship. Friendship that might last the rest of their lives.
We need people to look at us while we’re doing our work and say…
“I want to live like that. I want that aliveness. I want that depth of meaning. I want those friendships.”
Skeptical? Does this seem crazy impossible? I get it. It’s hard to believe we’re ever going to get even a simple majority of the people in the world to engage in the kind of political activism that would transform how we live as a global community.
And of course we can’t give people ten easy steps for doing deeply ambitious activism. It’s always going to require serious work. Both outer work as we do our organizing out in the world, and inner work as we continue to develop our inner resources to make ourselves more resilient.
There are no guarantees about how far we can get with this ambition, but…
Why not go as far as we can?
I know some people still caught in the sacrificial-savior mindset will consider it blasphemous for me to say…
You come first.
But I’m saying exactly that and I mean it and stand by it.
Putting yourself first is not selfish…
It’s a necessity.
And please always remember that whatever the final result of our activism, if we engage in the daily practice of deep, proactive, heartfelt nurturance, that in and of itself is…
A good way to live.
And it’s a two-fer. When we take the very best care of ourselves…
We get that second win of attracting others to activism for free.
PS:
There’s an important difference between sacrifice that doesn’t hurt you and sacrifice that does.
Maybe you’re organizing a rally for Saturday, so this week you have to miss a movie night with your friends and a party you really wanted to go to. You’re sacrificing smaller things for something bigger. The trade is worth it to you. And your sacrificing is temporary. So it doesn’t hurt you.
But it’s different if you make sacrifice your way of life. That will hurt you, and that’s not okay.
If you want more about replacing the Sacrificial-Savior OS with the Deep-Nurturance OS, click here.
