Hey, what you’re feeling is valid. Shit sucks, and you’re right to think that shit sucks. It’s hard to feel like doing like anything right now.

Our advice would be “Do it anyway.”

Do it anyway

If it is all one big fight, and if everything is interconnected in this system of oppression, the good news is that anywhere you are (we are) is a front line in the fight. Every thing you do (we do) matters in fighting this fell, crushing beast, especially if you found yourself born into its belly.

Meet your neighbors. Talk to folk at the bus stop. Connect with others at hobbies and be invested in their lives. Get phone numbers so you can call them instead of calling the cops. Cook with larger portions to spare someone else cooking a meal. Let them help you navigate paperwork. Or vice versa.

Thinking about the whole awful thing is demoralizing, but that’s exactly what your enemy wants of you: for you to be paralyzed with worry and anxiety that achieves nothing but your stress and exhaustion.

The Revolution™ is not some eschatological event up ahead. It is now. It is right now.

If you are an anarchist, you believe in a unity of means and ends. What you do now is critical to what comes later.
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One thing you might try to tell yourself to recenter your feelings each day is, “How can I be a good ancestor?“

You may not live to see it, but there will be future generations, and they will have given anything to fight these bastards here and now like you have the opportunity to. You have so much that you can do. You have so much time still to be a good ancestor. That’s a blessing.

Get involved in prisoner-writing, or reading former and still-incarcerated people who had incredibly limited agency and still had to figure out how to go on. Apply that to your own situations, learning from conversations with people who have a huge body of knowledge and experience to pass along.

If you’re not already, get in community with disabled activists and those with degenerative or terminal illnesses. They also have a lot of expertise, and have opportunities to provide and learn about mutual aid or actions beyond, “Let’s overthrow the government!” Harm reduction is not a liberal euphemism to get you to vote (for Democrats); harm reduction is a philosophical orientation that it’s critical we all learn about because it is the only antidote to doomerism worth anything. Even when your degenerative disease will kill you, you have agency over medication, diet, and exercise that determine how many days you have and how they can be experienced. So what can you can do? Will you do it anyway?

You are feeling all of the right things. You are right to feel them.

But feeling isn’t enough, and it can come at the expense of doing things, which is what matters.