It's all about balance!
If you can't give yourself permission to be human, and you can't extend that to other people, it's a good time to check in with yourself.
Sam Dylon Finch wrote a lovely twitter thread about his experience in social justice. He's been both an angry social justice warrior and a loving one. More recently loving. He talks about what changed here in this thread.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174106626585874433.html?fbclid=IwAR3JnWadCJOgAPKFE0xjoOM8_C6qekc3qHMExhUHz_m0TIVhN2A4nq5had8
My favorite part is this:
Great writers and thinkers have been telling us how to do this for a long time. In his essay Return to Tipasa, Albert Camus says the same thing. He had found that love itself was drying up in his fight against the Nazis - and then - he returns to Tipasa (a place he had played in his youth). He says,
If you can't give yourself permission to be human, and you can't extend that to other people, it's a good time to check in with yourself.
Sam Dylon Finch wrote a lovely twitter thread about his experience in social justice. He's been both an angry social justice warrior and a loving one. More recently loving. He talks about what changed here in this thread.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174106626585874433.html?fbclid=IwAR3JnWadCJOgAPKFE0xjoOM8_C6qekc3qHMExhUHz_m0TIVhN2A4nq5had8
My favorite part is this:
Loving people is truly radical. It's ok to be mad, but it's also important to love. Love is what helps us fight compassion fatigue.Because dignity and care and kindness have to come from a genuinely loving place. And if you become too absorbed in righteousness & despair, and you don't balance it with the healing work that allows you to love on your people and see THAT as truly radical... you lose yourself.— Sam Dylan Finch 🍓 (@samdylanfinch) September 18, 2019
Great writers and thinkers have been telling us how to do this for a long time. In his essay Return to Tipasa, Albert Camus says the same thing. He had found that love itself was drying up in his fight against the Nazis - and then - he returns to Tipasa (a place he had played in his youth). He says,
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.So - in this never ending fight for justice always remember that what call us to fight - is love. And to paraphrase Camus again from his letter to a German friend - it is important - that as we fight for our truth (LOVE) that we take care not to destroy it with the very arms we use to defend it.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus
