I WISH THEY TOLD ME ABOUT ACTIVISM

It turns out May is Mental Health Awareness Month, in the United States, and it really got me thinking about the state of my own and our national attitude towards it.

So I have been committed to activism and advocacy for women’s rights for many years now and I put my whole self into it – I did interviews, I have been on panels, I write about it in this column all the time, I use my social media platforms to fuel my activism and one day last year, when I was living in Ethiopia I realised I was exhausted.

Seemingly out of the blue, I just could not put one foot in front of the other and keep going – the wave of depression took me by surprise by its sheer intensity. I deactivated my Facebook account for two weeks to silence some of the noise and limit people’s access to me and although it was reactivated, my presence has just never been the same. I feel like a broken activist and I don’t know how to fix it or if I want to fix it.

All this got me wondering how we could and should include self-care, especially as it pertains to mental health, in activism tenets.
I remember when the conversation about ‘men are trash’ took over Facebook and the Siswati conversations around it, naturally I was passionate about it and was very vocal as a result. What I believe I did not account for was the equally passionate push back from the men who participated in that conversation.

We would bring up the horrendous statistics about women being in constant danger of men and how in this country one in three women have suffered some form of gender based violence at the hands of men and the men were committed to derailing the conversation.

It went as far as one daring to say those of us who spoke of being abuse survivors should not hide behind just claiming we had been abused but we needed to name the perpetrators.
That, to me, was particularly violent. I didn’t understand how men could see nothing wrong with demanding women hold men accountable to their standards.

I didn’t understand how they could be so bold as to dictate how abuse survivors heal.
Speaking specifically for myself, it haunts me every day that I have not been able to name my abuser and it is only because I don’t have the strength to have people dress down my character and make me jump through hoops more flaming than the last to prove I didn’t bring this onto myself.

What really put me over the edge was when people began sharing my abusers commentary on ‘men are trash’ onto the newsfeed and I realised that had I not been victimised by this man, his popularity and intelligence and ability to communicate so effectively would have had me sharing his posts as well. I knew then that I didn’t have the energy or bravery to stand against his popularity so I kept his secret and continue to. My challenge now is to find a way for my activism to be healthy to me and for it to continue to be effective. Last month I took part in a panel discussion hosted by Kushamiri about promoting healthy masculinities and during the Q&A portion a Ghanaian stood up and derailed the conversation by trying to highlight how women have toxic behaviours as well.
I was triggered and I wondered why men cannot ever have a conversation about the topic on the table. It is almost as though they aren’t denying their toxicity but are trying to say women’s toxicity validates their own. I just want to impress upon anyone and everyone who finds themselves tired from their existence, being a fight and a revolution that you deserve peace and you deserve to demand it from the society you live in.
Senele Mdluli, a brilliant young psychologist impressed upon me the importance of having soft spaces in your life, places where you aren’t required to be combative and often that is all the mitigation you need towards the onslaught of emotional violence you face in your advocacy.
As we navigate this month please spare a thought to your mental health, often people won’t mention it because we are somehow expected to roll with the punches life gives out but when that is tied directly to your humanity, you cannot leave your reserves empty, you have got to be able to rise and fight another day.
I will never stop demanding my safety and welfare as a woman but I will no longer sacrifice my whole self to make my point too simply because it is thankless work, which gets me threatened by strangers when all I want is to live in a world that sees me as a full human being.  Who knew my fight for agency would break me?

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: