Hello, activism? I need my life back.Hello, activism? I need my life back.Hello, activism? I need my life back.
I ran into a friend of mine from grad school a while back, and as part of getting caught up, I mentioned that the people I was spending time with were holding up the works – I was starting to flounder a bit in terms of my creative process and life direction, and as a result, I was ready to pack up and move to LA or NYC. After pointing out the obvious fact that it’s far easier to change who you hang with than where you live, she asked who these meddlesome folks were.
I replied sheepishly, “Um, activists…”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh, honey…”
Needless to say, activism is not her game; she’s more into a combination of art and deal-making – but it definitely was mine. I got my head or other body parts banged around a few times, got arrested a few times more than that, sat through an endless procession of meetings, and pretty much was living the life on-again, off-again just prior to the first US-Iraq war, and all but full-time since 1999. I had paid my dues, and thoroughly was in the mix — between organizing and living collectively, my day-to-day life looked like a cross between The Real World and Battle in Seattle. I loved it tremendously – after a long period of vacillation between counter-culture and corporate “culture,” it was very refreshing to be true to myself and to my politics.
Then? I walked.
It wasn’t for lack of trying to make things work; if anything, I was stubbornly trying to hold it all together, as if activism was some sort of dysfunctional-but-the-sex-is-great relationship that was starting to spin out of control. The minor disagreements that had occurred over the years started turning into pitched confrontations with increasing regularity, and conversations were taking that “Sweetie, perhaps you should not mix Vicodin and Hennessy” tone in both directions. When I got booted out of yet another collective house, I packed it up and moved to LA…
…where I found myself in the middle of the May Day cop riots. I managed to not get my head beat in, but just barely. That sort of ended it for me right there, not so much because of the risk involved, but because I was putting it all on the line – and I do mean it all, people do die or end up with permanent injuries on occasion – for what, exactly? It felt like I was increasingly running counter to my life’s purpose; while I managed to make time for both art and activism, I was doing so at the expense of everything else, and was stressed to the eyeballs as well. So I stopped for good.
After I had packed up yet again and moved back to the Bay Area, humbled yet strong, I went about rebuilding my life without activism as a central fixture. I stopped going to protests, and gave up on meetings. I even managed to shrug off the resulting I’m-abandoning-the-movement feelings of guilt – which may seem uncalled for, until you realize that I had been involved in campaigns and organizing since the 4th grade – and set to work on finishing up a poetry manuscript, followed by designing social community sites. I also vowed to live with fewer people, even though that meant risking higher rent, which thankfully didn’t turn out to be the case. Life started to feel like something that was uniquely mine, rather than time-shared with an ever-changing cast of characters, all with hard-won opinions about everything. I was less stressed, and definitely a lot more happy. I was becoming human again.
So what’s the lesson here? Peoples, listen. The world needs more activists, and badly does it need them. But what the left seems to miss out on with a frightening level of consistency is that activism takes many forms, including things that don’t typically get labeled as activism at all – and socially-minded arts and media creation are two of those things. (Spirituality, relationships and in some circles, community building/organizing frequently get placed this way as well, which pretty much leaves activism as the primary option for social change agents, in terms of collective power. See how this works?) Never mind that activists are frequently active consumers of socially conscious media – but in my experience, activists in the US are as guilty as anybody else when it comes to entertaining the mistaken notion that music, writing, poetry, art, performance, social media and so on just create themselves out of thin air while also being tremendously important, which paradoxically enforces the supposition that creators of art and media are completely on the wrong foot and of critical importance at the same time. It’s a losing battle, and one that I got tired of fighting. I’d rather be creating it than debating it – so that is what I’m doing. End of story.
And yet…I still feel conflicted about it all. It’s as if I’m wanting approval from a tribe that I’m still a part of, but that I have a fundamentally different relationship with, post-capital ‘A’ activism. The problem with this line of somewhat irrational thinking on my part is that it tends to cloud the void-like well that creativity springs out of; in other words, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I do what I always do when pernicious doubt tries to sneak into the equation and suck my creativity dry: I ignore it, but make sure to throw it a bone on occasion (chocolate works, but long meandering walks work better) and tell it to pipe down when I need to. I also make sure to give it the love that it desperately wants, while not being ruled by it.
So let this serve as a warning to y’all, as the economy continues to spin and reel, and we all continue to look for answers – the solution that you find may just be the one that most closely mirrors your true desires, and not what your superego-like conscience tells you to do. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise! Trust yourself, trust your instincts, and together, we artists, activists, visionaries and so can start to build a sustainable future together, free of being ruled by guilt and shame.
