Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion and how exhausting it can feel trying to care about the world in any meaningful way.
There is so much happening that we take on board as compassionate people. War. Genocide. Poverty. Racism. Anti-immigrant hatred. Queerphobia. Transphobia. Disabled people being abandoned by the Government (take your pick of the country!). Workers being crushed. Climate collapse. Animal suffering on an industrial scale. People struggling to afford food and rent while corporations make unimaginable profits.
Sometimes it can feel impossible to hold all of it in your head at once, so I wanted to take a few minutes to get some thoughts out my brain.
Read more below.
I think a lot of us who are vegan know this feeling especially well because choosing compassion for animals often opens your eyes to how many different systems of exploitation are connected. Once you start noticing suffering, exploitation, and injustice, it becomes very difficult to stop noticing it.
But I also think it is important to acknowledge that many of us are struggling ourselves even as we fight for justice for others.
A lot of compassionate people are working class. Many of us are immigrants, disabled, queer, trans, and/or chronically ill. We are financially stressed, burnt out, and exhausted from trying to survive systems that were never built with our comfort or survival in mind.
Capitalism wants us tired so we can’t fight the elite, while colonialism leaves deep scars across generations. Cruel governments doing the bidding of oligarchs encourage division because frightened people without power are easier to control.
And social media constantly demands we perform perfect activism every hour of the day while still somehow paying bills and functioning like normal human beings.
It’s a lot.
So this post is not me trying to make some profound statement about fixing the world. I do not have the answers and honestly, half the time I am just trying to keep myself emotionally upright while remembering to answer emails and drink water and not eat too much and blog every single day.
I suppose I just wanted to offer a bit of encouragement and solidarity.
If you are trying to move through the world with compassion, even imperfectly, that matters. If you are trying to care about animals while also caring about people and the planet, that matters.
If you are speaking up when you can, helping when you can, donating when you can, comforting people when you can, voting when you can, resisting cruelty when you can, that matters too.
None of us can carry every cause, fight every battle, or solve every injustice alone. But small acts of solidarity and compassion still count for something in this fucked up world.
This blog post is one of my small acts of solidarity this week. I hope it brings you even a flicker of feeling less alone. Even for a moment.
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