Bearing witness to a crisis like the one we’re seeing in Gaza can seriously affect a person’s mental health. Ongoing exposure to graphic images, painful first-person testimony and numbing statistics can lead to feelings of helplessness, depression and exhaustion. This section offers some advice on how to deal with those feelings.
Stop Policing your Rage: What does care look like?
Anger is typically characterized as a negative, destructive emotion. When we become angry over an injustice, we are often dismissed by others as irrational and counterproductive, whether or not our anger is proportionate or justified. This ‘policing of rage’ can lead us to doubt ourselves: is our participation required?
The answer is ‘yes’. Whether you choose to actively protest on the ground, participate in BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaigns, or educate yourself on the genocide, your participation adds to the global movement.
Activism and care are not mutually exclusive. Your activism can co-exist with your need to draw boundaries and to prioritize your health and the health of your loved ones.
Another narrative common in activist circles is the idea that taking care of ourselves is somehow selfish. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Locate care within your community, attend social functions, spend time with your family or chosen family, and allow yourself time to rest, recuperate and find joy.
Navigating Compassion Fatigue.
If you’re engaged long term in activism and your care is left unchecked, sooner or later you run the risk of compassion fatigue. It’s important to recognize that many of us engaged in the movement also have our own mental health challenges and marginalized identities. Taking a step back to rest and recover is necessary to ensure that the collective trauma we are witnessing does not exacerbate our own struggles.
(Extended Read: Navigating compassion fatigue: Why it’s okay to self-soothe when a genocide needs our attention)
Despair is not Solidarity: Active Engagement vs Passive Consumption
In the age of social media, when you can follow a genocide unfolding as it happens, there is a high risk of isolation and despair where you find yourself incessantly scrolling through atrocities. That sense of helplessness keeps us disconnected from each other until, eventually, we find it hard to participate.
So it’s important to understand how your consumption contributes to this helplessness.
Passive Consumption: There is a fine line between emotional processing, which moves us to action, compared to emotional venting across the internet, which normalizes despair. Passive consumption encourages us to consume death and destruction without a call to action. It perpetuates the belief that we must always be logged in, and that switching off your social media accounts is somehow looking away from the movement.
Active Engagement: Part of activism is cultivating hope and practicing accountability. Active engagement calls for realistic methods of participation, which may include learning, online community organizing, and increasing visibility. While education and learning are powerful tools, there is often undue pressure to ‘know it all’. Caring for yourself means allowing yourself grace and time to learn.
“Sometimes we can end up holding our potential back in the name of insecurity around not knowing enough… Reject arbitrary standards of how super extra informed you must be before you take action in your community”.
Palestinian Therapist Maria Fakhouri
Finding Joy: Activism is a continuous process
“I hope you are all taking care of yourselves. One lesson that I keep seeing in different forms, from our Black brothers and sisters, who faced and still continue to face unimaginable horrors (slavery, police brutality, unending racism), is that joy is an essential part of resistance”.
Salman Naqvi, a Canadian pro Palestinian organizer
While our social media feeds are flooded with death and destruction in Gaza, there are also many positive stories: students graduating from tents; children breaking Ramadan fast with their families; people singing songs and distributing sweets for Eid. Even within the Palestinian Diaspora, we see art as a method of resistance and celebration of culture.
While activism can feel rooted in the present, it is a continuous process that spans weeks, months, years. Making time for joy is a way of fueling your activism in the long run.
“The Empire is selfish and wants us molded in its image: isolated, self-centered, miserly, harsh, violent, brutal. Refusing these ways of being is also resistance”.
Prof Sunny Singh
Taking care of yourself can feel like an alien task as you watch a genocide unfold. However, your care is necessary to ensure that your engagement is active, meaningful, and rooted in community care.