Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist

by Franchesca Ramsey

It can be really scary to admit that there are a lot of things you don’t know. We live in a world where people are quick to pounce on you if you express confusion or ask a question, and many online activists aren’t honest about the fact that they didn’t always know what the gender binary was, either. Too often, people climb the ladder and say, “Hell yeah, I climbed the ladder! And I beat you to the top!” The thing about the ladder is that you never stop climbing, and if you think you have, you have a lot more work to do.

When Trevor Noah interviewed Tomi Lahren, I thought he went really light on her. (Okay, I know what you’re thinking: A little hypocritical from someone who just spent several paragraphs ranting about how she can’t please anyone? But it’s not like I tweeted at him and said he had betrayed all black people.) Still, when she started ranting about Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick, he pulled an artfully subtle question out of his back pocket: “What is the right way to protest?” It was perfect because she couldn’t answer. You wear a T-shirt that says BLM and people get mad. You refuse to move your seat on the bus and people get mad. You do a sit-in and people get mad. No matter what you do, people who are dedicated to seeing marginalized people as second-class citizens will be upset when marginalized people insist that they are not second-class citizens.

This quote from @SonofBaldwin, also known as the writer Robert Jones Jr., says it best: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

In her 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not also doing important work that advances the causes that are important to you; in fact, it’s a critical part of doing that work. Without self-care, you burn out—physically, but also through something known as “compassion fatigue,” which is basically just what it sounds like: When you focus too much time and energy on others in distress, you start to wear down, too. Which eventually means you have to stop doing work altogether.