I didn’t actually hear about October 7 and what unfolded in Gaza immediately thereafter until October 17.
By then, around 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza—almost half of them children—had been murdered by the Israeli military’s bombings. At least 1,500 more Palestinians were missing, likely buried under the rubble.
As I shared in Part 1 of this series, I knew enough of the history to understand that “Israel” was escalating its already decades-long ethnic cleansing project against the Palestinian people.
On October 21, I went to my first protest. Three days later, I explicitly named the concern I had been expressing in sharing Instagram posts for Palestine: “As a global citizen, as a fellow human being, I cannot watch as a genocide literally unfolds before our eyes and not affirm that this is not the kind of world I want to live in.”
One year, 40 protests, and over 5,000 Instagram Stories later, I find myself (alongside millions of others around the world) still calling out for the same thing: a permanent ceasefire, an end to “Israel’s” illegal occupation, and a free Palestine.
Not even the bare minimum—to stop murdering innocent people—has happened. (In July, the journal The Lancet estimated that the death toll in Gaza could be over 186,000 people.)
What compels someone to continue engaging with all of it despite how dark and hopeless it can seem?
In this post, and in Parts 3 and 4, I share some of the practices and supports that have helped me continue my activism work for Palestine and other causes.
Please remember that I write from the perspective of a non-Palestinian ally who lives in the West. (That matters.)
You can connect with me on Instagram at @janicehoimages to share what’s been supporting you.
“Process, digest, rest, resist”
Haris Rashid (@harisrashid)
One thing I’m encouraged by is knowing our activism efforts build on each other, over time. In other words, it does get easier to stay the course even if the content is always horrifying.
When I talk about “activism work,” I refer to the holistic process of engaging in social justice efforts.
Meaning, it’s not just about doing actions like protesting, educating people, or disrupting arms shipments on their way to a genocidal state. It also includes what we do to sustain those resistance efforts, like tending to our grief and resting.
In Gabes Torres’ oscillation framework for sustainability in social justice movements, she writes: “Oscillation is the nonlinear swing, the circular dance, a dynamic spectrum, or the back-and-forth movement of:
- processing and digesting collective trauma, grief, and exposure to violence and suffering,
- to taking a step back from it,
- and returning to collective, direct action.”
This dance reminds me that it’s not in our nature to be in only one mode all the time. Which is helpful when I feel pressure—often self-induced—to take non-stop action, even when my body doesn’t have the capacity (for now).
I learned this the hard way: in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police, I fell into many moments of burnout in acting from a place of distress.
I’m not implying there isn’t a very real urgent need to be taking immediate action for change. People are being murdered every fucking day by state-sanctioned violence—whether it’s Black and Indigenous folks on Turtle Island or Palestinian people in Occupied Palestine. (TPS, KKK, IOF, you’re all the same.) I don’t believe in waiting to do something.
What I am saying is that overriding my actual capacity to act meant my activism felt more like a rollercoaster where I’d get flung off the tracks every now and then. As you can imagine, I was slow to get back on the ride.
As Gabes writes: “It is not sustainable for us to be exposed to pain or stay in crisis for long periods of time or in high frequency.”
It is not sustainable to without pause take in images of Palestinian people being murdered, mutilated, buried dead or alive under rubble, tortured, amputated without anesthesia, displaced from their homes into tents or the streets, and starved to death, among numerous other human rights atrocities.
All while witnessing cops brutalizing protestors for demanding the end to a genocide, and governments’ blatant double standards that confirm they are only willing to protect the lives of some groups.
For those of us who have decided that we are not turning away from the struggle, I don’t think we ever truly arrive at a state of being “okay,” even when we take our moments to rest and recharge.
But I do think it’s possible to mitigate some of the impacts that never stopping can have on our hearts, bodies and minds.
And I believe we can cultivate supports we never thought possible to sustain what is truly a lifelong marathon of fighting for a better world.
Digest
From the River to the Sea, Sliman Mansour
In Gabes’ oscillation framework, “digesting” means that we review and metabolize the information we’ve absorbed from the events and experiences we’ve gone through (or continue to go through).
Here, we listen to our body and notice: how is it responding to these events?
This may involve acknowledging the emotions that arise.
Grief is a key emotion I’ve learned I need to acknowledge when confronted with human suffering, such as what we’re seeing Palestinians endure.
From a human perspective, when we don’t process grief, we lose access to a part of ourselves that allows us to feel fully alive and deepen our capacity for compassion.
From an activism perspective, I’ve noticed that when I don’t attend to my grief, I usually move into a state of rage, then into hopelessness (or I just jump straight into hopelessness)—and that from either of these places, my activism work suffers.
Being in continuous rage turns me into an ineffective communicator, not to mention that I actually start to feel physically ill, as though I’m imploding. In rage, the story is that it’s me (and my small circle of people) against the world—“no one else cares” or is doing enough for the cause. It’s no wonder that from here, I feel little hope for change.
In hopelessness, I also feel isolated but the story is that no one will be there for me, so there’s no point in reaching out for support. My body goes into freeze and I want to curl up into a ball and hide. From this place, it’s obviously hard to feel motivated to continue taking action.
Feeling both rage and hopelessness is completely understandable given what we’re confronted with.
These are normal responses to a violent, unsupportive environment.
What I’m sharing here as my process for moving through these emotions is what I strive for because I know the impacts of not doing so. And I inevitably cannot meet the ideal all the time.
What can support us to move through such immense feelings?
Between love and gunpowder, Suhad Khatib
Over the past few days, I’ve cried an ocean of tears.
My grief came from an accumulation of unprocessed sorrow and new waves of sadness, rage and worry from hearing the news break that “Israel” was expanding its destruction in Lebanon, wounding thousands (some who were killed) with exploding pagers and evaporating entire buildings and people with 2,000-pound bombs.
Add to that the grief and deep sense of injustice I feel seeing how my Palestinian and Lebanese friends are impacted by these atrocities on a daily basis.
Can these beautiful souls just be allowed to live their fucking lives?, I often think.
On top of that, the maddening stresses of work and dread around questioning my next career path have left me exhausted and more raw than usual.
It can be a lot to feel into.
Exhale.
We may certainly experience many kinds of feelings in engaging with a genocide. During the past 12 months, I have moved through continuous waves of rage, anger, sadness, hopelessness, despair and determination.
Woven into that have been moments of calm and even joy. When it feels like we’re in emergency mode 24/7, or we feel guilty for “enjoying life” while others are enduring immeasurable pain, sinking into these experiences can require support that tells our bodies it is safe for us to soften for now.
But a huge lesson I’ve learned in activism work is that we must be visioning, dreaming and creating the world we want to see, not just dismantling what we want destroyed.
So, my invitation is: let us practice the kind of connection and love we want to replace the soulless, transactional way of relating that capitalism prescribes, and know it is an essential part of what sustains our struggle as well.
Some supports that have helped me digest all the feels include:
- Spaces for grieving, raging and otherwise feeling in community: These have included the Grief Cafes hosted by Sasha Heron, and Inner Flow Community Dance sessions and Community Sessions facilitated by Yvette Lalonde at Inner Flow Somatic Counselling. These may or may not be offered at the time of reading, but they are examples of (online) spaces where our collective grief and other emotions can be seen, felt and held by a group.
- Community events that bring people together to rage and grieve for those directly impacted by the genocide (e.g., protests and vigils for Palestine).
- Community events where people celebrate Palestinian culture—whether through dance (dabke!), music, art, or other expressions—while it is being actively erased by the colonizer.
- Loved ones who are able to hold space for my most intense feelings about the genocide. (So much love to my TO Grief Cafe friends for our deep container.)
- Loved ones who I can be present with for simple pleasures, touch, laughter, sharing food and so on (at this point, these are only people who I don’t have to compartmentalize the dark shit with, because how do you open yourself to genuine intimacy with those you can’t be fully real with?).
- Other supports that can hold a container “bigger” than us for processing our collective/intergenerational grief and rage (e.g., nature, our ancestors).
- I don’t have a pet, but animal therapy is most definitely a thing!
- Therapy with a therapist who practices from a decolonial lens and understands/supports the Palestinian cause.
- Wisdom from resources like The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller that remind me of the life-affirming importance of grieving.
- Someone messaged me recently to share that my podcast episode with Gloria Eid (and her poetry), “Dancing with Grief: In Personal Loss and Collective Suffering,” was supportive, so I want to share that too.
One of many messages I've sent to my TO Grief Cafe friends (my lifeline) over the past 10 months.
While it’s certainly helpful to build capacity to process our own feelings, we just aren’t meant to carry all of it alone.
If you continuously feel the heavy weight of grief in your heart and you don’t have others to help take on that load, what then happens to your heart?
If you feel the hot fire of rage arise again and again in your body and you don’t have a solid container to release that rage into, what then happens to your body?
Whatever your specific supports look like, my invitation is to find and include community within that. I promise that your people are out there and looking for you too.
Caveats to processing our emotions
The Last Farewell, maram ali
I want to be very clear that the idea of digesting these emotions in a neat step-by-step process is complete bullshit.
My view is that being able to process one’s emotions in this way can (sadly) be a privilege.
First, it can take time, energy, space and in some cases (like with therapy) money to access enough support to move into a state of processing, not to mention have the opportunity for rest and care afterward if needed.
Cycling through intense emotions can bring about calm and expansion, and it can also drain our energy for some time (Although it’s not always this intense, after two straight days of crying last weekend, my body felt like it had been hit by a truck.)
Second, for those of us in the West, we generally lack collective practices for releasing grief. As Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, most traditional cultures treat grief as “a regular guest in the community” and as something to be held communally. But in the West particularly, we are conditioned to accept the idea of private pain and isolating ourselves in our grief. There is much unlearning, learning and building of supports to be done.
Third, as I alluded to earlier, one of the hardest things about being with what we feel witnessing or experiencing this kind of collective suffering is that the infliction of that suffering is continuous.
As I was writing this paragraph a few days ago, my body feeling depleted from having moved huge waves of grief, I saw a news update that the Israeli occupation forces had started razing Palestinian lands and properties in northeast Ramallah to construct a wall that would cut off access for some people from the rest of Occupied West Bank. And my heart broke again.
The harm caused by colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and the rest of it is relentless.
Some days, it feels there is no room for real recovery.
And this is how I’m impacted as an ally.
What does this do to those whose people are the ones being genocided?
And for Palestinians in Gaza who are directly under fire every day, how are they afforded the space to process their feelings when staying alive is the sole priority and under constant threat?
(It goes even beyond having the space and time, as trey @whatsonemorepothos talks about here.)
All of this should remind us that digesting our experiences of trauma is after the fact.
I believe we must build stronger supports to hold our people’s grief and rage as we are undoubtedly confronted with more collective suffering while empire grasps onto its last attempts at life and climate chaos dives into a tailspin.
But more importantly, if we are to ever shift from our society’s approach to slapping bandages on the hemorrhaging, then we must also do our part in transforming the conditions that cause the bleeding in the first place.
Where do we go from here?
The other day, a friend reached out concerned about my state of tiredness he had observed lately.
He offered that a slowdown or pause may be needed.
“We finished year 1” he said. “Many to come.”
As he also said, “Resilience requires pausing, resting, rejuvenating, recovering, renewing, refueling, regrouping, replanning then restarting.”
I am grateful for his reminder that I'm no good to the cause burnt out. I pass on the reminder to you.
So, where do we go from here? At least with this blog post series...
Digesting is also about mentally chewing on the information and ideas we’ve absorbed. In this process, we reflect, analyze and strategize.
In this way, digestion can break down our internalized experiences of pain into “a life force or regenerative energy that can be used when we shift into Resisting.” I talk more about this kind of digesting in Part 6.
But before that, in Part 3, I dive into the resisting aspect of Gabes Torres’ oscillation framework—the “taking action” part of activism work. Stay tuned!
