A Love Letter to my Fellow ‘Vote Blue’ Activists

Especially those who happen to be white.

OK, loves. This one goes out to anybody, but especially to my fellow white activists, who’s feeling doomed after those Virginia 2021 results:

Your feelings are valid, I do hear you and empathize — have them, but please reassure yourself too, because they’re feelings, not facts.

We’re not doomed. But we do have a responsibility to step up again. I mean something a little different by this for this new cycle, though.

Everybody who’s saying we need to make Virginia our wakeup call is right. But we need to not do things the way we set out in 2017. We can do this better, more sanely, less desperately.

Especially if we all pitch in, in whatever ways we can.

We need to make this work of pushing back against racism and patriarchy and fascism a collective practice, instead of conceptualizing it as a temporary situation and hoping for comfort when it’s over.

This is a very uncomfortable truth, but it’s never over, because this is not Hollywood and we don’t get a happily ever after.

Instead, we get a life.

The thing about having a life is actually cooler than a happy ending, because we can choose to spend it in actively loving and defending and lifting up our communities and our beliefs. And we can do it better, and keep getting better at it, with some lessons learned from all of us who were a little newer to this work during the last six years — and from all the wise and experienced people who have ALREADY made a lifelong practice of it.

We don’t get a happily ever after — but we CAN have a “better and better,” if we own that it’s on us to make sure that happens.

I’ve been thinking a lot since the 2020 results finally came in, since January 6, since … all of everything. This time to clear my head and get (at least some of, because it took me six months to start making something approaching a living wage again so I could stop living off savings) my personal shit together has been enormously valuable and a privilege I am all too conscious of.

Because after six years of nonstop strategizing and outreach and organizing and rallying and protesting and campaigning, with the pandemic and so much death all around us as, frankly, the shit icing on the charred cake …

… I was more burned out than I have ever been burned out by anything in my entire 46 years. And I know I am not alone in that.

We need to figure out a new way to do this before next year. We cannot do what we did in 2010 and just roll over and go to sleep, because that was what got us a gutted ACA and that was what left us so vulnerable, six years later, to Trump.

But we also can’t burn ourselves out. We deserve better than that. We deserve rest and relaxation.

Figuring out how to build a practice of loving activism is also work. And it’s tricky, because it’s gonna look a little different to each of us, with all our varying needs, and all our individual and personal traumas.

But it’s worth doing, because it helps make our vision, our values, our morals, a sustainable practice. It contributes more to lasting change, when we’re able to change ourselves.

One way we can model the world we want to see is by treating ourselves kindly.

We deserve to give ourselves the kindness and grace we want our community to give us. So let’s collectively please re-frame how we think about activism: not as a temporary task but as a thing we integrate into a daily or weekly practice.

Not as a resolution, or a revolution, but as a mental health paradigm shift.

What I want in 2022 is a real Senate majority that can do more than run defense. And I want a stable House majority to go with it. And I want a bunch of state legislatures!

And I want to get myself into a position to help support those goals without actually making myself ill over it.

How does that feel to you all?