I was recently listening to a podcast about New Year’s Resolutions and I was struck by something in particular: People that work in social justice spaces are angry – all the time. I guess this is one of those ‘no shit Sherlock’ statements but it’s the first time in a long time I’ve really sat down with the concept. People who work in social justice spaces are very understandably and justifiably angry. The world we live in is brutal and terrible and even more brutal and terrible for marginalized people. It makes sense that marginalized people are angry all the time because this world demands it for our own survival. People in these spaces correctly push back on their being tone policed by people who don’t belong to their communities. People who demand that marginalized people think and feel about their own oppression in ways that are suitable to the sensibilities of those who don’t have the slightest clue what it is like to experience the world as marginalized people do.
And yet. I have to wonder. What sort of life is that to live? What sort of life are we living when every waking moment of our existence is spent just waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting passerby who should be so unfortunate as to make the grave mistake of expressing the wrong term, supporting the wrong candidate, belonging to the wrong party? What sort of life are we living when, in the quest to try and create a more just and equitable society for all people, we have robbed ourselves of any semblance of personal peace or tranquility?
A lot of people in these circles talk about self-care. They talk about the importance of not involving the ‘movement’, as it were, too much in your personal life. They talk about being serious about emotional labor and the need to think critically about how we choose to spend it. This feels different from that though. If practicing self-care means we carve out a small percentage of our lives to remember or imagine what it must be like to be a person with a happy soul – is that really practicing self-care? Are we even capable of being truly happy?
It’s true that ‘to be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.’ I imagine the same could apply to most marginalized groups. I wonder if it’s worth examining the utility of a constant state of rage. I wonder whether it might be useful to explore some sort of alternative. Because this doesn’t seem sustainable.