#compassion fatigue.

[fairymint]

I think later today, I’ll try to focus on emptying all of my drafts— that includes a few ask memes, including some shippy ones. The number is pretty low, so consider today and tomorrow ‘active days’. I’ll also try to do more Munday things tomorrow, too. tbh my priorities are drafts and sinday. i’ll worry about my inbox and other hobbies some other day.

for now, i’ll nap and see if i can sleep.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[saint-vagrant]

ceasefire isn't enough.

15000 lives snuffed out by israel, armed by america. 10000 in prison, several hundred of them children. millions displaced and homeless and starving. 50% of homes destroyed. 50+ journalists slaughtered, all hospitals destroyed, humanitarian organisations devastated, with information on those targets supplied directly by america for the sole purpose that they be obliterated in order to hide the extent of the carnage. the israeli hostages and even israeli civilians were rejected by israel and many gunned down. lies on lies on lies on lies from Israel because they'll need no excuse so will invent their own as many times as they want in order to eradicate Palestinians. it's not netanyahu. it's not biden. the whole thing is rotten all the way down, as it has always been. remember this follows 75 YEARS of the same treatment but at a scale never seen before, over the course of a single month.

CEASEFIRE! IS! NOT! ENOUGH!

[elumish]

In the wake of what's going on in the world, I see a lot of rhetoric that basically boils down to the idea that everyone has a responsibility to watch every bad thing that's going on in the world all the time. That awareness itself is a responsibility that everyone has always.

I'm not going to say that people do or don't have a responsibility to be aware of things, but I want to talk about how to take care of yourself and others while doing so.

For some context, I spent close to a year and a half reading about every terrorist attack in the world as part of my work on the Global Terrorism Database. It was 2015/2016, so this was the height of ISIS/Daesh, it was a major time for Boko Haram, and it was when there was a lot of political violence that we weren't sure how to classify in places like Yemen, Crimea, and Libya (stuff the GTD didn't know how to classify had all of is information recorded, and then it went into purgatory until someone above my paygrade decided what to do with it). What this means is that I was spending 10-20 hours a week reading about hundreds or thousands of attacks a month and, in my case, recording infomation about the type of attack and the type of weapon. Much of my life was reading terrible things.

Limit what you do in isolation. One of the worst changes for me during that time, mental health-wise (even though it was great for my commute) was when I went from working in-person to working remotely. With other people, there are ways to diffuse the pain. A burden shared is a burden halved and all that. That may mean talking about it, or joking about it, or finding some other way to engage with it that isn't just reading about the most horrible things in the world and then stewing in your own thoughts about them.

Find something to do that's totally unrelated. I highly recommend finding something to do with your hands, if you can (knitting, Lego, cooking, whatever), but regardless of what it is, you should have some time when you entirely switch away to something different. During a fair amount of my time with the GTD, I was also doing my undergrad thesis about terrorism on TV, so a huge amount of my life was about terrorism in some way. The only other thing I watched was Great British Bake Off, and I would just rewatch the episodes, over and over.

Be compassionate about how you share information and with whom. Use trigger warnings, and consider using consistent tagging on places like Tumblr so people can blacklist it if they need to. Also consider whether it's appropriate or necessary to share photos of bodies or other results of horrible violence. What is it accomplishing, to show that? Can that goal be accomplished other ways that don't require the equivalent of jumpscares of unexpected photos of dead or brutalized people? Are you just showing it because you think that everyone should have to see it? If you are showing it, are there ways to mitigate against harm it may do?

Do what you can to avoid an echo chamber. Sometimes, when everyone around you is upset or angry about the same thing, it just amplifies itself, and you all get angrier and more upset in perpetuity without accomplishing anything.

Work towards action. Watching terrible things happen for the sake of saying that you haven't looked away isn't as meaningful as taking action in some way. Write to your Congressperson. Donate. Do whatever is appropriate for the thing you want to stop. But penance via watching terrible things happen doesn't accomplish anything.

Recognize compassion fatigue and do what you can to mitigate it. If you spend long enough doing this, you start to lose context, and you start to become less able to have compassion about things. If you're reading about attacks with dozens or hundreds of deaths regularly, five can start to not seem like that many. If you're reading only about the worst suffering in the world, "lesser" suffering of those around you can start to seem unimportant and petty. Do what you can to mitigate that.

Be kind to yourself. You do nobody any good if you burn out. Look away, if you need to. Take a break. Do things so you can enjoy life, because otherwise you are just another person suffering in the world. Other people's pain isn't a hair shirt for you to wear.

[whereserpentswalk]

Activist burnout isn't a moral failing of a community, it's not people being selfish. It's a natural result of how human minds work, and you can't expect communities to out-moral human psychology.

When people are exposed to the same upsetting thing over and over again, either it fucks with their mental health and makes them more depressed and anxious, or alternatively it makes them apathetic and desensitized. Neither of those things are good for a movement, and those are the ways humans are going to react to constant upsetting messages. You cannot avoid this by telling people to just be better people, you cannot use higher reasoning to make an entire community's emotions work in a fundamentally different way to how human emotions normal work.

Every successful movement account for the fact that people can't be at 100% all the time. Movements that ask for a level of extreme and undying anger, burn bright and die fast, it's a useful way of organizing a very immediate response, but cannot be done for something larger scale. If you give people, the ultimatum of either being at 100% or 0% all the time, they will choose 0% because the alternative isn't possible for most people.

If you're constantly showing the same disturbing images over and over again, they will lose their effectiveness quickly. If I see a post detailing the horrors of the current genocide, I'm probably just going to scroll past it, because it's all things I already know, and I've seen it so many times there's no emotional reaction, and this is how a lot of people are with posts like this, because you can't ask people to have the same emotional reaction to the same information hundreds of times over.

You can't stop activist burnout by being a better person because burnout isn't a choice, it's a psychological response. If your activism doesn't account for the material reality of the community (in this case being humans with human minds), then that's on you for organizing badly.

Also, if you need to hear this: you are not a bad person for experiencing compassion fatigue, it's literally part of being a person. Don't hurt yourself.

[neuroticboyfriend]

hi disabled friends. here's list of minimal things you can do to increase your hygiene & comfort today, if possible ♡

put on at least 1 clean(er) article of clothing (ex: underwear)

brush your hair

rub your teeth with a towel

rinse your mouth with water

splash your face with water

grab a clean(er) blanket

flip your pillowcase to the side you haven't been using

change your posture, stretch

put on a gentle light, or draw the curtains

allow yourself at least a few minutes in a quiet environment

put on some soft background noise (ex: ambient sound, lofi)

try to pick out some pleasant sensory input (ex: birds chirping, how soft your clothes/blanket is)

and if you cant do any of these, dont guilt yourself. disability isnt a failing, and you're doing the best you can!

(yes, this post includes chronically ill and neurodivergent people! you're disabled too!)

[justalittlesolarpunk]

You have to take care of your own heart. You were not meant to carry the pain of the entire world. Do what you can for others, because you owe it to them, but be realistic with what you can achieve. If you’re already going to protests, donating money, working for liberation, holding power to account, taking care of the worst affected - then breathe. Take a step back and stop doomscrolling or endlessly refreshing your news app. Go for a walk in the woods. Eat your favourite chocolate. Watch a film with a loved one. Sleep. I promise you all the agony and cruelty and suffering will still be there when you get back. But maybe you’ll have a little more strength to fight them if you’ve remembered to keep tending the fires of joy inside you. You save no-one by letting them go out.

[spacedocmom]

Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom The only people who think that painful, debilitating health conditions "build character" are the ones who don't have to deal with those conditions on a daily basis. emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 3:41 PM · Apr 1, 2024

[serialunaliver]

seeing tumblr AITAs about pointless fandom drama, thinking "lmao people must think this is ridiculous to consider a relationship issue", open replies, it's a bunch of people taking it extremely seriously

[letterful]

to be perfectly honest, i find that semi-viral doing laundry / stopping genocide poem to be not only your run-of-the-mill Bad Poetry (tm), but also... really tone-deaf?

[zee-rambles]

—————

Tapping out.

@saspas-corner

First I Prev I Next

[akindplace]

this is your reminder that if you’re having a flare up, the pain won’t be always be just as bad. Please remember to rest, to eat and to take your medication. Im sorry you’re in pain, but it won’t be this bad forever, even if it seems to pass so slowly. Having a flare up and being exhausted doesn’t make you wrong for not being able to go out, work, or take care of yourself alone. It’s not immoral to rest when you’re exhausted even if you’ve been resting a lot lately. Please take your time to recover, don’t push yourself too hard, and don’t punish yourself for something that isn’t your fault. I’m hoping you feel less pain soon.

[thepeacefulgarden]

Self-care is great, but the truth is, it only goes so far.

[sshonuu]

Some people are just: "we're tolerant! we would never bully or laugh at anyone!"

And then they see a disabled person, and start to laugh at them, or say "you're just pretending!" shit

[diaryofanenchantedprincess]

Monarch butterflies will not attempt to fly in the rain because the raindrops will damage their wings. They will rest and wait it out. It’s self-preservation. It’s okay to rest during the storms in your life. Take all the time you need. You will fly again once the storm passes.

- Sharon March 🦋

[wiisagi-maiingan]

That post was not about shaming people for not volunteering at their local food banks or anything like that, it was about how the internet and the constant global news feed flood people with misery and guilt over every single tragedy in the world that we have no power over and we end up so overwhelmed with helplessness that we aren't able to see the point in doing "small" things because they feel so insignificant compared to massive tragedies happening on the other side of the world.

What does joining an urban gardening group mean in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Why volunteer to pick up litter when you're just going to get called an heartless psychopath by an anon on tumblr for not posting enough about the genocide of Uyghur people in China?

This isn't a new or sudden issue, it's been building steadily since people started having constant and immediate access to global news. We're scared and we're tired of being scared. There's so much going on all the time in every direction that it just feels so much easier to just curl up and cry than try to care about everything or come off as evil for not caring about everything.