Member-only story
I’m Done Trying to Save the World
From now on, my life — and my activism — will be small
I’ve been an activist since before I was old enough to vote. It started when I was still a little kid, passionate about animals and the earth, pushing my relatives to conserve water, lecturing anyone who didn’t wear a seat belt or smoked. I’ve forever been the tiny person annoying people, cajoling them into doing something I believed was right. It was an impotent effort, most of the time. It remains a mostly impotent effort.
I was always someone who cared about things — big abstract things, hard-to-change things, symbolic and ideological things. And I was never big enough, energetic enough, outspoken enough, superhuman enough to actually fix any of the things I cared about. I’ve always been filled with fury and frustration in equal amounts.
My activism has to be small. As small as I am. I’m working on accepting that.
My life has been a cycle of passion followed by despair, intensity and then apathy, over and over again. An unending wheel of shooting too high and crashing to the ground when I realize, yet again, that I can’t make everyone agree with me or share my priorities.
