Do you ever feel burnout? I am sitting at my laptop tip tapping on the keyboard in my pyjamas feeling guilty, feeling overwhelmingly guilty and a failure. I just feel stuck to the chair, it is early afternoon and I am not dressed. This isn’t me. I don’t get up late nor do I lounge around the flat. I am usually up, around, organised and on the treadmill of activity, my worked out routine that keeps the depressive wolves away from my psyche. I should be going to this, to show solidarity to the Viva Palestina convoy but I feel unable to move from my seat to get dressed and get myself down to the embassy. The seconds are ticking by and feeling more guilty and a failure. Why can’t I just get dressed? And more to the point, why can’t I just give it a miss without feeling this overwhelming sense of guilt like I am letting the side down.
My partner says I remind him of being a Trot, part of the cadre, a foot soldier for the cause, rushing around, feeling guilty if you don’t, doing it for the movement, bursting with Leninist principle and pride, party discipline. You can take the woman out of the Trot grouping but can you take the Trot out of the woman. He is right (and he should know being an organised Trot for many years and still is but without the party affiliations). But he takes a totally different approach, less intense and more flexible. If he can’t make a protest/demo/meeting (delete whichever applicable) he doesn’t feel that guilt, just shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘next time’. He doesn’t let it overwhelm and take over his life. But like all of us he too has contradictions.
I have just been so focused on campaigning, rushing around, taking pictures, taking notes, feeling a part of something and forever struggling and fighting for a better world. And for the first time in a very long time I am sitting at the table, in the night clothes, unable to shift myself. Feeling oh so stupid, down, a bloody failure. FFS!! The other thing is that for the past year I have not had a holiday or proper rest, I have just been on auto-pilot activist. It keeps me sane. I have created a fixed routine. I enjoy being activist ‘cos I feel I am doing something useful and maybe being part of a social/political change, make a different on a personal and collective level. But sometimes the human body kinda tells you, ‘no’… I just can’t, need a rest… There will be other times to show solidarity, to take those pix and write those notes. Combined with feeling a fraud and not good enough cadre.
The other strange thing is that I have had this week off and I just don’t know what to do with it. Unwind? Relax? The only way I know how to is read lots of politico stuff and carry on campaigning. It is seriously hard trying to pull myself away from the world of politics as the lure and gravitational pull is always so strong. May sound a tad bizarre saying that but, at the moment, that’s what my life revolves around. And I think today was my way, unconsciously, saying, ‘nope, not today’… I suppose the scary thing is realising how empty your life can become, well not quite totally empty, just how certain things in your life can dominate the rest. Politics and activism, that’s seems to be my make-up. I was, I had hoped, being wise to all this, as it has happened before. But I think I just got so utterly focused, manifesting itself in increasingly feeling positive, happy and lack of depression.
Though the signs were there and I didn’t heed them. Though the biggest strangest part of this was the realisation that I didn’t know what to do on my days off. How bloody strange? I paced the flat thinking of what I should do mainly ‘cos I felt a cripplingly sense of emptiness, what do I do? How to get away from things without the need to constantly need for activism and campaigning? I just couldn’t get over how surreal it was… And sometimes, I know this to be true, is that I come alive when I am active, politicking and protesting but I am not very good at knowing what to do when I am not. Engaging with people can be overwhelming and sometimes I just want to hide away from the world. Like now.
I believe in what I do, I believe in the politics, campaigning and the activism ‘cos I am a Socialist and believe in a better equitable world but sometimes, with me, that’s all there is, I kinda lack form and shape. My way of engaging is through the politic. And sometimes I feel like a rounded individual with spirit and confidence and then I can feel so gutless and one-dimensional. I also believe that I have been doing this since I was 15, on and off, actually back then I was more dogmatic, determined and die-hard Trot so at least I have mellowed with age and not so revolutionary inclined. But yet….
So here I am in my pyjamas with my iPod stuck in my ears (I am a walking advertisement for Apple Mac) writing this, watching the seconds tick by, feeling less guilty though still having that voice in my head telling me I am a failure (where’s the Leninist spirit, comrade?!) but still feeling something is lacking.
Oh yeah, happy New Year… Lots of political activism, struggles and campaigning 2010!!
