by Hanna Nichols, Cohort 8
We all love a good metaphor…and in the social justice world, we love to evoke the “upstream” metaphor…where there is a rushing river of toxic sludge and people drowning in it while we as the helpers are on the shore trying to pull them out. Except wait! We also must pay attention further upstream to fix what is making people fall into the river in the first place.
The good news: right now I see helpers everywhere.
The bad news: I see the helpers are exhausted, disconnected, many falling in the river themselves.
Where are you seeing yourself in this picture?
I recall a time I found myself in the sludge when I went back to work after parental leave in 2016. At the time I worked for a fantastic nonprofit doing impactful work with communities, and I was provided the option to take Fridays off so I could spend time with my baby. On the surface, it was a great set up! Yet, I distinctly remember a time a few months after returning to work where the story that ran on a loop through my head went something like…
Why are you so exhausted? You have a job you love that provides flexibility and an active parental partner at home. You have no right to be perpetually crabby when you walk in the door at the end of the day. You should be able to put your phone down and be productive. You have the gift of Fridays off with your child…be present instead of dragging yourself across the finish line of the week. You can’t change this situation because your family depends on your income and your colleagues and community need you to show up in the world.
The part of the story I often left out for myself was how the systems in which I existed were not built to serve me or anyone around me. While I had an array of privileges, I also experienced debt after three months of unpaid parental leave, postpartum anxiety that went unaddressed because of a variety of factors, including not feeling able to talk about it and bring it to light. The underlying tones of urgency and scarcity that permeate our public sector made my working life feel like a giant hill to climb on a daily basis.
To acknowledge these things makes it easier to see that it wasn’t my fault. Systems play an important role in contributing to our individual and collective burnout. And yet, to change systems we must first look at ourselves.
Our Individual Actions Make Waves
As adrienne maree brown puts it, “what we practice at a small scale can reverberate at the largest scale.” This means our individual healing and wellbeing reverberates to our collective liberation. It means that in order for our communities to heal, we must stop pretending we can heal others first and start with ourselves–otherwise we’re going to sink in the sludge too.
For me, this healing process has rarely involved big, sweeping changes, but more often a thousand tiny shifts that over time got me to shore and have helped me get back to shore quickly when I do fall in (we all do sometimes). It has mostly looked like practicing boundaries and holding myself to them, being willing to inconvenience others for the sake of my own wellbeing, really sitting with exploring the life I want for my own purposes rather than anyone else’s, and learning to listen to my body’s signals that I’m getting close to burnout. I am now much more able to show up for others, love my work, and do it well than when I was burned out.
I’ve heard myself and other Buellers say that it feels impossible to slow down because families and communities can’t wait, or our team relies on us, or our organization can’t survive if we slow down. But place yourself in the “upstream” image I started with…where will they be when all of us end up drowning in the sludge, too? The public sector is struggling, and many of us are leaving it altogether. This is highly concerning.
Our systems play a significant role in our collective burnout, and they need to be radically shifted for us to thrive. And we cannot show up to change those systems if we burn out entirely. So I put this question forward to my fellow Buellers…what if the biggest act of community care you can take is to radically care for yourself?