Beyond the Singular Heart

In early 2023, I noticed that leftists online¹ had a tendency to describe or even prescribe organizing² as an antidote for despair, though maybe this practice had been common for much longer and only seemed pronounced to me because my unhappiness was so acute. The inclination to foreground despair struck me as a riff, conscious or not, on Mariame Kaba’s “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair,” a phrase she shared back in 2017³ . It’s a profound, beautiful benediction well worth holding in your heart, but the same cannot be said for all variations on the theme. For instance, to me, “Feeling despair? Wrong. Be radicalized,” is less helpful.

I’ve not been able to activism my hopelessness away, and I have some potential explanations as to why. One: the causes I’ve participated in are not sufficiently significant, either in absolute terms or in terms of whatever most fuels my pain, though, in actuality, many raging failures—climate collapse, policing, criminalization of reproductive health and sex work, factory farming—consume me simultaneously and to fluctuating degrees, and each day’s headlines bring new horrors to compete with and exacerbate the pre-existing ones.

Two: I don’t give enough or do enough, but that goes without saying, doesn’t it? (Does anyone feel they’ve done enough, and would you trust someone who did?) I know I have a capacity if not an appetite for extremity and I imagine that going all in, Weather Underground-style,⁴ might bring a modicum of inner peace, the assurance that, at the very least, I’m at my maximum level of devotion. Yet how long would it last? How laced with despair, still, would the single-mindedness be? New doubts would open up in pursuit of the goal, new losses and impossibilities. I suspect crossing the threshold of no return is more satisfying than anything that comes after.

My experiences in political collaboration have been invigorating and enlightening. I’m regularly humbled, grateful, and moved. On occasion, I’ve felt minor relief of the tremendous pressure to be of value in the world. I want to keep doing things; I want to be more involved. But I’ve also been demoralized and burnt out. I don’t come home, log off, or go to sleep feeling assured of a bright future. One complicating factor is routine human conflict, not just disagreement on points of conduct or mission, but incompatibility between personalities, inscrutable divisions, factions formed for reasons I’ve forgotten or never knew. Allies and other groups you lean on can disappoint you. When you’re providing some service to others, you can encounter people who are combative and abusive.⁵

Worse, much worse, has been greater knowledge of the deep evil laced through every aspect of life in the United States. Getting up close to the machinery of empire might encourage you, inflame you, but it is also terrifying. To see the smug, arrogant faces of the celebrities and CNN anchors and absolute nobodies walking to the White House Correspondents Dinner. To watch cops beat unarmed civilians. To be smeared by college professors and other establishment “experts” as mentally ill, an incest victim, a tool of pimps, a threat to real women.⁶ To navigate the layers of abandonment and obstruction erected against healthcare access even before or without criminalization. To attempt to acquire or spend money cleanly, so that it never comes from or goes to the enemy; to mourn the futility of that desire. To recognize the selfishness of leaving the country, going off the grid, retreating into isolation. To periodically yearn for it anyway.

Wynn Bruce was an activist. Aaron Bushnell volunteered. Willem van Spronson “was a fixture at demonstrations.” Did these efforts keep them from despair? I don’t want to depict their deaths as such desperate expressions of pain that I erase their rationality and intentionality. But these are the sort of cris de coeur that cannot be stifled by community. Community may make these expressions feel necessary, unavoidable.

This is not an argument against organizing, or an argument against anything. It’s just context, and one woman’s opinion. Doing something feels better than doing nothing, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to feel the way you or I want it to feel. And maybe the belief that we can or should lessen despair is a mistake.

Last year I began to feel there was a question inside my despair that could not be silenced by or answered with political activity alone. The question was, what does it mean to live and abide in a world like this? Does it have meaning at all? After October 7th, increasingly, I found that the only language that made sense to me was religious, because what can you say in the face of this “moral cataclysm" except “I pray”? I wish with the whole of my being, I hope past hope with every atom of me that is capable of love and care, I beg the universe for this mercy, I petition the force of life to intervene on behalf of life. I call on something outside and beyond me, because no matter how intensely I want this to end, I cannot end it on my own. And I began to look to religion for something I had not found anywhere else.

“Beyond the singular heart” is from the acknowledgements of Cassandra Troyan’s Against Capture.

In the next MFY: wading into the religion kiddie pool with floaties and goggles on.

1  This phrasing is not a dig. I am simply saying that I saw and still see this sentiment communicated online, through social media posts and newsletters. Presumably it’s not something that comes up much in person because when you’re in a leftist space IRL you’re probably already doing it.

2  As Kelly Hayes noted in 2018, “activism” has sort of fallen out of favor and “organizing” has taken its place. (Thanks, Obama?) I use different terms here (activism, organizing, volunteering) to acknowledge the way they blend and overlap, and because my own participation has fallen into different categories at different times—though at no point have I ever felt comfortable identifying as an activist or an organizer.

3  My source, as per some hasty internet searching, is this

4  She said, jokingly, in a law-abiding tone

5  It’s not the end of the world or a reason to quit. But it extracts, and demands, something from you.

6  “Smear” is arguably the wrong word since a person has not committed a wrong by being mentally ill or sexually abused, but that was the spirit in which those labels were used against sex workers agitating for rights back in the day. And it worked! Historically, it is in fact a fullproof strategy to say, pay this bitch no mind, she should be in an institution and also she’s a demon. But I think this tack is less popular among radfems/SWERFs now than it was in the 2000s and even 2010s. A win? Lol.