How to not feel like a piece of shit for enjoying your life...
Guilt and gratitude.
Raw, unedited, copied straight from my notes app.
May it liberate you to read, as it liberated me to write.
We’re about to hit eight months of Israel’s in-full-view genocide of the Palestinian people, paid for by the tax dollars of the yt colonial powers. Rafah burns. Every time I think we’ve hit rock bottom abhorrent evil, I open my phone and I see yet more evidence that keeps proving me wrong. There are no depths to which we will not sink. The shock and horror hasn’t worn off, but I’ve stopped being surprised.
(PS, Australians sitting pretty because “at least we’re not the US”, that argument fell apart months ago anyway, your taxes are ABSOLUTELY funding this g******* too, and our oh-so-liberal oh-so-progressive labour government just voted against recognising the state of Palestine. So there’s that.)
Assuming if you’re here reading this, you know all of this already, and you’re just as heart broken and raging as me.
The grief and the anger are so ever-present.
And still, I have so much to be grateful for. So much delight. I am loved, I am safe, I am well fed, I am held by community. I have so much in my world that brings me so, SO much joy.
Holding that is fucking harrowing.
I’m an activist. I’ve devoted my life to dismantling oppressive powers and standing firmly in the movement for our liberation, with both feet on the ground.
So what kind of monster would call themselves an activist if they’re still enjoying so much of life while so much devastation and evil is so obvious?
If we have our eyes open to the truth of yt supremacist colonial x10n*st violence, how can we possibly say there’s room for joy with our heads held high?
What does that make us?
This is what I’m sitting with today.
Here’s where I’m at with it~
Joy + gratitude can be easily weaponised into a sedative. This is what ytness does. It puts its head in the sand and it clings to the arbitrary hierarchy that puts ytness at the top at the cost of everyone else. It pretends everything is business as usual because it DEPENDS ON business as usual, and it weaponises joy to do it.
It deludes us into thinking that joy cannot coexist with rage and grief. It teaches us nothing of happiness unless it’s the kind of “happiness” that numbs us to the horrors of our reality.
This kind of “happiness” is a high to chase. It isn’t real.
Joy and gratitude must be present in a way that SUSTAINS us in our work.
Joy and gratitude anchor us into what we’re fighting for.
Joy and gratitude are what keep us orienting again and again towards hope and they keep us rooted in the fight when we’re tempted to despair.
Don’t use your joy to bypass your rage.
We need your rage.
But don’t assume too that joy needs to come with guilt.
(Guilt for unearned advantages is another way ytness likes to centre itself. Gotta unlearn that shit.)
Every moment your joy comes, think of the children of Palestine.
Think of the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and all the people who deserve the same joy and gratitude that you’re feeling, and use your joy to bolster your fight for them.
Love, hope, gratitude, these things can feed + nourish a movement, or they can sedate us into passivity.
Don’t let it be a sedative.
Let it be fuel.
Free Palestine.