Sister! Movements Are a Marathon, Not a Sprint, So Please Slow Down

Reflections on Community Organizing Against Male Supremacism-Parasitism

Slide I created years ago for Workplace Sexual Harassment Awareness Trainings

Reflections on Community Organizing Against Male Supremacism-Parasitism is a new series I’ve been working on. I hope to impart some of my learnings from 15+ of community organizing, teaching, and analysis.

We want every woman and girl to join the fight to dismantle Male Violence Against Women and Girls (MWAWAG), and we want each of us to be given compassion, care, and honesty on the journey ahead.

“Life’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Everyone loves a good, simple quote, one we can memorize and call upon when we need it. We all collect quotes that work like the Hindu’s mantras. They soothe us and center us. They return us to our breath. Community organizers are no different. We need our mantras desperately, like everyone else. Some decades ago, community organizers took the popular quote above and put our own spin on it:

“Movements are a marathon, not a sprint.”

It comes out of the mouths of seasoned organizers as a warning cry to reduce the inevitable burnout that follows the ignition of passion about injustice. Those of us who’s organizing intersects with trauma-informed care put a lot of attention on slowing down and taking things step-by-step when we want to fight oppression. You do this work long enough, you start to see the patterns of the macro and the micro. When something bad happens, we want to stand up and fight back. That’s the nuts and bolts of organizing. After we stand up, the next step becomes figuring out how best to fight back. In those beginning years of being passionate about a problem, we run on pure adrenaline as we find our footing in the fight. If we have been directly victimized by the problem, or if a victim is a loved one, then that adrenaline can run for what seems like decades. But one way or another, we will crash and burn if we keep running at full speed and not slowing down to rest and recalibrate. We want the bad thing to stop and that is what fuels us with energy. But the truth is, the bad thing is not going to stop quickly, and plenty of sisters have come before you, screaming for change while everyone looks away. Bad things can take centuries to stop, because they took centuries to implement in the first place. To add to the problem, we live in a man-made world that pushes indifference. The bitter learnings of all organizers, educators, care workers, women who give their lives in service of fixing a problem is just how little others actually care. These truths send me into periods of defeatism, nihilism, fear of inevitability…knowing how ignorant and callous men (and women) can be. It also balances me and reminds me to put timelines into perspective. To remember that all women have their maladaptive coping mechanisms. Centuries ago, men waged this war against women and girls. Which means that to unravel this bad thing, it might possibly take just as long. That renews my hope, because even if it’s far away, I wholly believe in an endpoint. I know nothing is “inevitable”, because there was a before; there wasn’t always MVAWAG. This fortifies my belief in, “movements are a marathon, not a sprint” even more so. The next time you meditate, pull yourself thousands of miles above the earth, into outer space, and remember how vast the timelines are, and how everyone before you also had to learn to stop sprinting. Remember that no woman is ever meant to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders or solve all its problems.

“Put Your Oxygen Mask On First.”

When we commit to organizing around a problem, a bad thing, we stay dedicated by setting a sustainable pace. Dedication includes taking care of ourselves first. It’s the corny saying of, “put your oxygen mask on first.” Another favorite mantra in organizer/educator/care worker/trauma-informed care spaces. But it’s actually not corny, it’s scientific logic. Quite literally, if you die in the process of putting someone else’s oxygen mask on first, then you can no longer help them, anyone else, and most of all, yourself. “Put your oxygen mask on first” is the poetic version of “you can’t help anyone if you’re dead.” The only problem in the organizer community is that we love to parrot shit, but never practice it. We all live on our soapboxes, but we don’t hold the mirror up to ourselves. Sacrificing ourselves as the martyr is the organizer’s way. That spits in the face of the message that movements are marathons, to put your mask on first, to give a shit about your pace. Why do we forget that if we’re dead we can’t help anyone else?...If we’re sick we can’t help anyone else…If we ignore the need to prioritize ourselves, we can’t help anyone else? Being a martyr isn’t the greatest thing you can do for a cause; living is. The reason we ignore this fact is usually because we’re running from something within ourselves. For me, it’s usually because I’m trying so hard to run from feeling my own suffering. Like every other woman, I was taught to stuff my feelings and channel them into action. Girls are taught over and over again, “toughen up”, and that spirit lives in most women organizers. I know, because I’m her. I have to stay vigilant that I’m taking care of the little girl inside who was taught to silence her pain. My learned neuropathway is usually to let her suffer. I’m rebuilding it everyday.

I have personally lived through all the lessons I share, but the hard way. I share them in the hopes to stop women from repeating my mistakes. I was warned to slow down and I didn’t listen. Maybe you’ll be less stubborn than me. I, like everyone else with a savior complex, thought I was made of Teflon. Come to find out, Teflon causes cancer. But I wanted to believe it made me strong; I was “so tough,” I could take anything. Just like I didn’t listen, many reading my words might not either, because of the age-old problem that you can’t tell an organizer anything. Maybe not all women connect with that term “community organizer”, so another way to put it is that you can’t tell someone who really cares to solve a problem anything otherwise. They are fueled with a passion to make change. They will typically refuse to slow down. The fallout of this is so common, we have a name for it: burnout. Eventually our body runs out of all the hormones that propped us up during the unsustainable phase of sprinting. Sprinters have to learn how to run at the pace of a marathon, or their body will teach them by collapsing.

Every Woman Already Does a Second-Shift+

The woman organizer faces a very unique form of barriers, because women are automatically expected to be the organizers of the everyday world, outside of social justice. It’s easy to point out the community organizer who holds awareness events, goes to protests, works on grassroots campaigns, runs a nonprofit or a political office. But what about the invisible woman community organizer, who organizes the home and the family and the neighborhood along with her “special” cause?

This type of community organizing is the one that keeps civilization functioning through endless unpaid labor. It is the work of all daughters, mothers, aunties, grandmothers, and childfree women alike. The work that keeps the engine of social life humming, that we never see a single dime for. Women and girls are already running at a sprint without being a cause-specific community organizer. Women were first taught to run at a sprint “for the culture” when they were girls. We were never allowed to slow down. Most of us don’t even know what that means. I’ve seen some of the smartest women I know organize themselves into an early hospital bed (myself included). And that’s why we make great foot soldiers for any grassroots group or nonprofit organization. Unlike male foot soldiers who blow their bodies up in the name of “revolution,” women foot soldiers blow up the way they live their lives in the name of revolution. Women’s attempt to help everyone else usually doesn’t end well for themselves.

Adding on to women’s double, triple, quadruple burdens under male culture, is the NGO/non profit/grassroots sector. The NGO sector exploits workers, regardless of sex, just like the for-profit sector does. But how it looks and operates is different. On top of the general workplace exploitation in all labor, the NGO sector also demands much more visible and invisible labor by women. The nonprofit world typically starts with good intentions, but the male exploitation out in the world also exists within those walls. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex will suck you dry, use your demographics in whatever way works for them, utilize all your good brain power, while you never get paid anything but chump change, and are under the thumb of the “community”, funders, and board members. I was in the grassroots/nonprofit sector for most of my life and I simultaneously worked in the for-profit sector. My exploitation looked quite similar in both these spaces. The man-made culture is all about using women (and men) like cogs in a machine, much like the model of artificial intelligence. AI is the logical end product of man’s culture that says people are objects to be used as a means to an end. So there’s no surprise to me that the nonprofit sector would mimic what we see in the for-profit sector, and what we see in the nuclear family model, and what we see in religious institutions, and every other man-made space. It’s what we see across the board with male parasitism. Women and girls are labeled as things, objects to be used. And when necessary, the “precious” men and boys can also be bought and sold, at the right price. The human as object is a core tenet of males’ culture, his initial target is women, but he also targets his own sex. Inadvertently, he ends up targeting himself. Men always end up becoming the Ouroboros. Women in the care work sector need to decolonize male thinking, or they too will become the snake eating its own tail.

Sprinting Inhibits Access to Meaningful Choice

The message of “movements are a marathon, not a sprint” is a reminder to hold boundaries that protect your dignity, safety, and privacy. If you move fast in any work, you’re not able to make decisions that are well thought out. You become reactive, not proactive. This is where the concept of consent can be useful. Sadly it’s a concept that has been distorted and used in ways that work against women and girls sometimes. But it can also be a useful concept when we think about slowing down, when we think about boundaries. We can only give proper consent in movement work if we slow down. We have to take time to learn the people that we are meeting. We have to take the time to get to know the women we are working alongside for a cause. We have to build safety and trust first. We have to know if this is a space where we can express our boundaries and dissent without repercussions. We should not be rushed and told that we’re running out of time. I know some women organizers would diverge with me on this point, because the idea of urgency has its place. But time has shown me that it just leads to an unsustainable pace for both the leaders and the collective. “We’re running out of time” is a distortion, and anyone who tells you that you must act now or everything will fall apart is in their own state of reactivity. Step back and say you need time to think about things. Well-meaning women will push our boundaries sometimes, possibly responding from a place of first-hand or secondary trauma. Sometimes these women have been in a movement for so long and are growing tired that no one will listen to what they’ve been screaming for years. They’re so desperate to find women to step up and be a representative, so they might push that woman instead of slowing down themselves and questioning if they are being reactive, if they’re being fair to their sister, if they’re pushing her too quickly. Trauma-informed care means centering women who’ve gone through negative experiences and meeting them where they’re at. Women who have been victimized by male violence need to be treated with care and cognizance about the fact that they are reeling in grief and typically not able to make calm and proactive choices. Two seconds after someone goes through a bad thing is NOT the time to push them into the limelight. Nor is it the time to run at a sprint for either the new or seasoned community organizer. Moving quickly and reactively actually inhibits access to meaningful choice; a core tenant in consent culture and fighting rape culture. If you do not have meaningful choices, if you’re not in the best headspace to make choices, then you have to find a way to pull yourself back. And for seasoned organizers in movement work, WE need to remember to slow down and take other women’s consent seriously. Just because we are self-sacrificing doesn’t mean we should put that maladaptive coping mechanism on other women and girls. Try to pull back and question your motives. You might even realize that you’re steeped in a place of grief and desperation and that you too need to slow down.

No More Martyrs

The narratives of the self-sacrificial victim leads to women sprinting in the midst of their trauma response, jumping into causes without getting grounded in the work first, and unraveling in real time without understanding the consequences. This is how a woman reeling in trauma can mistakenly appear to be a willing participant as martyr. Her passion is powerful, so the consequences aren’t questioned. If anyone questions things, they get accused of infantilization or envy. Movement leaders aren’t gods, and questioning their decisions is the test if they are strong leaders. We can so easily become a martyr, token, pawn in movements and believe we are making an informed choice. We don’t know what we don’t know. But the seasoned organizer does; the leader does. And if that seasoned organizer doesn’t lay out all the facts, then victims who want to stand up and fight back are being betrayed once again. This is why trauma-informed care and movement work consistently bump heads. There is hypocrisy within the messengers of “marathons versus sprints.” This hypocrisy is not malicious, it’s desperate for anyone to listen. For the most part, women fighting for liberation are on the same side; we want men and boys to stop violating women and girls. It really is that simple. We don’t want to live under this fucked up male culture of entitlement and violence. But we will never be a fair, sustainable, nourishing movement if we don’t warn women off the bat of the long hard journey ahead. If we are not holding a sister’s hands looking her in the eye and explaining to her and asking her, “are you truly ready for this?”, then we care more about a campaign than we do about a person. And at that point we have lost the very essence of what community organizing is. We’ve lost the essence of why we ourselves as women got involved in this work in the first place. We never wanted to sacrifice, tokenize, or exploit a sister in the middle of her grief. Maybe this was even done to us, and we’ve buried the feelings deep inside. Maybe it’s time for all of us to take a break, to model what it means to slow down. To tell other women, “it’s okay, don’t rush into anything.” I return to the idea of consent culture. Ultimately we’re trying to teach women and girls that they need meaningful choice when they consent to things in their life. We say that consent is freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific.

All of these boundaries are predicated on slowness. Consent can never be formed quickly. And there’s no place more essential to uphold this tenet of consent culture, than in community organizing work. We teach women and girls how to hold their boundaries by modeling it ourselves, including in our community work. So let’s hold onto this lesson as we work towards female liberation. We’ve made all the disclosures, shared all the traumas, and it’s never enough. We need to make this clear to women who want to take a stand, because publicly sharing your traumas and organizing around triggering issues can have major health detriments. The more complex the trauma history of the organizer, the more high-risk this work becomes.

Sister, do not sacrifice thyself. You don’t have to be a martyr to the cause. I want you healthy, safe, rested, and moving at the pace of meaningful choice. I want you to move at the pace you would expect of a loved one. Was the need for slowness and self-preservation obvious when you applied it to someone you love? Was it “selfish” when you applied it to yourself? Don’t push these feelings of discomfort away. Sit with them, and let what comes up, come up. If you say you can’t, if you feel agitation at being challenged, if you feel like we’re running out of time, then maybe you’re still not moving slow enough.