Activism and Perfectionism

One of the reasons activism is hard is that you never feel like you’ve done enough. 

For those of us who have trauma associated with perfectionism and our worth intrinsically linked to how ‘good’ others perceive us to be, it’s triggering as fuck. If, as a child, your caregivers had a binary notion of good or bad, it’s terrifying to think that you might be bad. If you’ve grown up with no acknowledgement of the shades of grey in between, that if you are not good then you must be bad, that there is no room for mistakes, and that being good receives a small amount  praise (because that’s what you should be doing anyway) and being bad means punishment, it’s really hard to accept that in activism, you can’t be perfect. When you learn as a child that it’s dangerous to be less than perfect, and that the judgment of whether you are inherently good or bad hinges on your every new action, activism will bring up a whole lot of trauma. 

But it’s also an opportunity for a whole lot of healing and a new perspective. Any time there is a social justice movement that takes over our media, highlighting the worst of what humans are capable of, anyone who is trapped in the trauma of perfectionism is going to take any criticism of our society personally, especially if we identify as being part of a group with privilege. If you are also very empathetic, you will feel it in your bones, and your inner thoughts may look some thing like ‘Oh my god, people are suffering and dying and it’s my fault because I have privilege and I haven’t done enough about it and I’m a bad person but I’m also being selfish even thinking this because it’s not about my feelings so I’m doubly bad I have to redeem myself’. And then, most likely, spend a lot of time on the internet trying to find the perfect way to help. But the thing is, that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist now, and it didn’t exist then. So you end up with a barrage of different opinions telling you what you should be doing, often conflicting, and definitely much more than one person can do, with a lot of things you can’t do for your own reasons. So no matter what you do, someone will think you are bad, or not enough, or wrong. And that’s ok. 

The key to healing and helping in these situations is trusting yourself to absorb these different opinions and decide for yourself what you can reasonably do to help. It means accepting that you can’t make everyone happy. It means accepting you will make mistakes, and that is ok. It means allowing yourself to grow and change, without being dragged down by guilt because you didn’t know before, what you do know now. 

Mostly it’s about learning to accept and hold seemingly incompatible truths in your mind at the same time. Like that your best is good enough for you as an individual and that’s it’s still not enough for the people suffering as a whole. That we must do things as individuals to create change and our systems and institutions need to be completely rebuilt to really reach equality. That we need to actively learn about and challenge our privilege and we need to give ourselves a break to do self care. 

This is when establishing and maintaining our own personal boundaries is most crucial and most difficult. More is being asked of us, but we may not have more to give. We need to accept that we need to work on our own trauma as much as we need to help others, so that we can all do sustainable and ongoing work to make our society equal. And we need to remember that we are fighting for a world where we are all inherently valuable simply because we are human.