A Letter from an Organizer on How to Fight While Feeling Broken

An excerpt from Read This When Things Fall Apart.

Read This When Things Fall Apart is a forthcoming book edited by Kelly Hayes that compiles over 20 letters from activists and movement leaders, each providing guidance on how to take care of yourself and keep fighting during these demoralizing times. Hayes was kind enough to let me excerpt a chapter here. The below chapter is called Read This if You Are Struggling with Your Mental Health. It’s a letter from organizer Aaron Goggans.

Dear Beloved,

(For that is what you are, even though we have never met. You are loved.)

This letter is for anyone struggling with their mental health in the movement. Maybe worrying if struggling with mental health in the movement makes them crazy.

In my experience as a neurodivergent organizer with a history of anxiety, mood swings, and nonnormative information processing, the line between mental illness and what Martin Luther King Jr. called being “creatively maladjusted” to society has never seemed clear to me. For King, we must never be well adjusted to injustice. It was a call to push back against the pathologizing of people who resisted their oppression. Our mental health, like our personalities and worldviews, are a result of some mix of nature, nurture, and social environment.

I think the same neurodivergence that can make us anxious in social situations, or hyper-fixate on details, or swing from grandiose thoughts to deep over-focus on flaws can often be part of what makes us good organizers. It’s also the flip side of sensitivity that allows us to read situations well, plan ahead, or connect deeply with the world. I’m not suggesting that “mental illness is a super power” but that the same way of sensing, perceiving, and experiencing the world that makes our day-to-day lives challenging also helps us imagine and live into other worlds.

Those of us with diagnosable mental illness or neuro­divergence (even if we don’t have the means to be formally diagnosed) have had to live in the margins long enough to learn a thing or two about surviving while being creatively maladjusted. So, as someone who identifies as crazy, I’m going to be speaking to all of us who have become creatively maladjusted because I think the advice is equally relevant for those of us for whom mental illness is more temporary and situational and those of us for whom it is a lifelong reality.

With the rise of fascism, we are going to experience those in power using everything within their power to warp consensus reality. From news media to nonsensical laws or theatrical shows of force, they will try to twist everyone’s worldview into one in which their actions are justified. This is frightening and literally produces anxiety and depression. In the coming years, lessons in how to thrive, learned by those of us who are born with a strong tendency to step outside consensus reality, might be lifesaving to more neurotypical organizers.

Being an organizer means you have enough wisdom and experience to know that your community or nation (or the world) has some serious problems that no existing formation can fix but you think you might be able to convince enough other people to make the change. It also means that you push past the consensus reality, the eternal messaging that says, “Everything is fine,” or “Okay, things are messed up, but you gotta leave these sorts of things to men in power.”

Can you imagine a better definition of being creatively maladjusted than living outside the consensus reality? Add to that having the audacity not only to envision another world but to act, day in and day out, as if that world is as real as the world other people live in. To organize well is to live on an alternative timeline in which we get free, and to start acting as if you already are.

So again, if you find yourself wondering, after weeks or perhaps months of constant stress, maybe some panic attacks or lashing out at your comrades, or perhaps even waking up in the middle of the night terrified of jackboots at your door, if you are going crazy, I’d offer that maybe that’s the wrong question. The better question is, how can we take care of our mental health while either refusing—or being just plain unable—to adjust ourselves to injustice?

So, now that we have set aside fears of being crazy, at least for a second, where do we go from here?

First: Tend to your body. Sleep, eat something hearty, get a hug, and touch earth. It may seem trite, especially if your mental health challenges arise—at least in part—from the stress of your movement work. These four things are a great place to start. We are basically big children. Or maybe more accurately, children are just small people who don’t have coping mechanisms yet. Yet the reason that most kids’ problems can be solved with a nap, food, a hug, or playing outside is not because their lives are simple but because those are the basic things all humans need to regulate our emotions.

Not to be too on the nose, but to be creatively maladjusted is a mercurial gift. Many of us have seen stress and trauma turn the shared reality of a tight-knit group of people into something toxic. I have distinct memories of supporting Black-led organizing collectives during the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd uprisings that have burned this realization into my soul.

I spent about three months in Louisville, Kentucky, during the height of the 2020 uprisings. By the time I arrived, the local activist community was already a hundred days into consecutive actions. That meant at least one action—though often more—every day for a hundred days. Many of these actions were banner drops or marches, but some included shutting down bridges or camping out on the front lawn of an elected official.

Activists and organizers were beaten, tear-gassed, and snatched off the street. They were woken up and questioned in the middle of the night. Still, they got up every morning, planned more actions, and ran a mutual aid network that fed hundreds (sometimes thousands) of residents a day. One hundred days turned a group of college students and young adults into committed revolutionaries—committed revolutionaries who were so paranoid that they wouldn’t give their local activist group their social security number so that they could become an employee, because they didn’t want the feds (who already knew who they were) to have that information.

They organized without pay for eighty hours a week. They ran a food-delivery service because the only grocery store on the Black side of the city had been closed after a Black man was killed on the property by the National Guard. They ran a housing program because developers were hiring police to evict Black residents from certain neighborhoods. They knew that without food, without housing, members of their community would die.

It took hours of conversations, constant reminders that they need to eat vegetables, and sometimes my refusal to meet with them until they slept for them to hear that if they did not stop, they might die. As my collective supported them in slowing down, we heard more and more about what the uprising had taken from them. How their affiliation with the protests had lost them jobs, or how something they tweeted got reposted by one of Trump’s children, leading to someone finding out where they lived and kicking the door down.

They had formed what you might call trauma bonds with their idea of what movement was. A trauma bond is where someone feels deeply connected to their abuser because after the harm, the abuser lavishes love and praise on them to “make it okay” and promises never to do it again. The negative feelings of the abuse become closely connected to positive feelings that come from the lavishing of care, attention, and support that comes after. Eventually, our bodies can’t distinguish well between the two, even if our minds can. Praise reminds us of the abuse and the abuse gets interpreted as love.

In the same way, cultures of self-sacrifice and disposability can creep into our movements. Many of us develop the misbelief that you must put your body and spirit on the line, often with no plan for how to care for yourself after. Then there is a picture of you at the protest that goes viral and people comment on how brave we are or talk about how this is a new civil rights movement and we are following in the footsteps of giants. At the debrief, the action organizers might even provide food, and that might be the only way you can afford to eat now that you’ve lost your job.

In many (though by no means all) movement spaces, destructive ideas about the nature of healing and restoration remain pervasive: that healing is the responsibility of individual organizers; that burnout is neither avoidable nor the organization or community’s responsibility; that mental illness is a sign of inherent weakness. These false beliefs can keep you pushing through unnecessary pain, blaming yourself for your inability to get over it.

At the same time, there is no feeling better than a movement high. Even as I was supporting younger activists in Louisville, trying to encourage them to slow down, I was exhilarated by their energy. I felt compelled to push myself harder to support them, meeting them at any time of the day they needed me. I felt so seen and valuable when they would open up about how helpful our collective was. Even as I was tired, even as I was devastated by sitting with the family of a man killed by police as they read the letter from city hall blaming their child for their own death, I felt more alive than I have ever felt.

This cycle can create a weird world, a new reality, that only your equally creatively maladjusted activist friends understand. You can form such intense—if dysfunctional—bonds with your comrades that you seek to be with them all the time. Yet, in some cases, the only thing you do together is more traumatic actions. Eventually, activists find themselves passing harm back and forth, asking more and more of each other because they live in a world where the stakes are impossibly high. The next action has to be bigger to justify all that we have sacrificed. You can’t put your own needs for sleep or rest ahead of the movement, because if the movement is not worth our lives, then why did we give up everything for it?

Unfortunately, there is also no low like a movement low. The depths of my usual depressive episodes cannot compare to the existential languishing that a movement conflict or setback can trigger in me. It’s one thing to think your life is hopeless, but a badly executed action or a mass arrest can make it seem like the world will never improve. No matter how much your body hurts, no matter how hard it is to get out of bed, a movement depression will gaslight you into jumping back into the fire before you are ready.

A sleep-deprived, hungry brain can’t see that the more you resource yourself, the more you will have to give; that an hour of work that comes after eight hours of sleep, a healthy interpersonal interaction, and equally healthy meal is going to be a hundred times more productive than an hour of work that comes after three weeks of little sleep and a Hot Cheetos–based diet.

An overwhelmed person who has been doing actions to avoid having the time to sit with their emotions is not going to see how much pain they cause when they lash out and chastise those who are not willing to sacrifice as much as them. They are unable to see that if they really paused and took stock of the cost, they wouldn’t want to sacrifice any more either.

Like so many of us, I had to learn the hard way that every challenge we face is harder to deal with when we are tired, hungry, lonely, or have been stuck inside for long periods of time. It was only through losing myself to the movement, getting sick and never being quite the same again, that I realized self-care is crucial. I’ve come to think of these things as mental health hygiene—things you have to do every day to maintain as much of your health as you can. They won’t fix anything on their own, but they at least they will slow the pace of things getting worse. These actions all increase our nervous system’s ability to regulate itself.

“Dysregulation” is probably the best term I know to describe the deterioration of mental health. When you are dysregulated, your body can have unskillful or self-defeating reactions to stimuli. This could mean being irritable over small things or reading all social interaction for potential threats (i.e., experiencing paranoia). Yet it can also mean the opposite: a lack of response. It can mean not caring about the risks of a situation, feeling little empathy for others’ pain, or having little interest in the things you used to love.

If you’re an organizer, you have probably spent years being somewhat dysregulated. Unfortunately, many movement spaces have normalized dysregulation. So many overwork because if they stop, they can’t help but notice all the uncomfortable feelings they have been bottling up inside. Our people might be open to risky actions because they can’t really feel anything else and the chaos of risky actions are the only times they feel alive. Our people might only be able to see what is wrong with the situation, or why some choice is problematic. We can often write this off as “the curse of knowledge,” but it can often be a narrowing of vision and rigidity that comes from unprocessed emotion.

For many of us, our dysregulation is complicated by trauma. “Trauma” is a word that gets tossed around a lot. It has gotten to the point where it seems like every social behavior is based in trauma. Personally, I believe that this is because, while not everything is trauma, trauma is everywhere. We live in a deeply traumatic society and at a particularly traumatic point in the history the planet’s climate. I think of trauma as a time-traveling somatic (or embodied) experience. It is experienced when our bodies react to stimuli based on a story of previous harm in order to avoid or prevent future harm.

Trauma occurs when your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is triggered yet, for some reason, your body cannot release all the energy of that activation. Often this is an experience for which you have no context, something that is so extreme, foreign, or novel that you can’t situate it in your story of self or story of the world. This is also why childhood trauma is so impactful: it occurs at the time where you have the least amount of personal context.

The danger might pass, but your body files away a somatic connection to whatever triggered the response so that the next time you experience the trigger, you respond in the way your body has learned to respond. In this sense, trauma is deeply tied to an overwhelming of one’s capacity for self-regulation. Trauma can occur when you experience more activation than your system can effectively dissipate, or when the kind of activation you experience is something your body doesn’t know how to handle.

As Resmaa Menakem writes in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, “Contrary to what many people believe, trauma is not primarily an emotional response. Trauma always happens in the body. It is a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.” A trauma response can be triggered by anything the body perceives as threat, rightly or wrongly. It is important to note that the brain experiences threat to social status the same way it deals with threats to the body. Somatically, the experiences are almost identical. This is why we say things like “I almost died of shame.” Ego death—the destruction of things to which we cling in order to build a sense of self—is experienced somatically as a threat to life.

This means that if you have been dysregulated for months, you can be traumatized by things that wouldn’t have affected you much if you were healthy. To me, this is a big reason movement conflicts are so volatile and frequent. It’s a bunch of tired people whose long-standing unmet needs for sleep, food, connection, and validation are exacerbated by interactions with the police and with the strategies of reactions that are designed to increase stress. When conflict happens, it is primed to set off other pains, other time-traveling emotions, that are not connected to the conflict in question and thus cannot be fully resolved by resolving the disagreement that started the conflict in the first place.

Back in 2016, I was an organizer with Black Lives Matter DMV. The police put these bright flashing lights outside my and my sister’s bedrooms. It was so bright that it was hard to sleep. It was a reactionary strategy developed by the Israeli military for use in Palestine. It brings to “community policing” a familiar interrogation (or what might more reasonably be called torture) technique: preventing detained people from sleeping. This lack of sleep wreaked havoc on my and my sister’s relationships as we were just constantly cranky. It was not until we were able to make the connection to the lights that we could stop engaging in petty arguments and redirect our ire toward the cops. But that was easier said than done, given how much trauma we were accumulating together.

Now, it is crucial to state here that not all trauma is the same. Like most things, it exists on a spectrum. In the same way that some people will respond to a precipitating event with brief, mild depression and others might experience chronic episodes of crippling depression with no discernible trigger, trauma can be simple and worked through with deep breathing and thought stopping, or it can be complex and take years of therapy to recognize and even more years to lessen levels of activation (that may never completely go away).

Likewise, what traumatizes one person may barely affect another. While there are some events, like witnessing serious violence, that tend to be traumatic for most people, nearly anything that activates a sense of flight or fright can be traumatic.

If any of what I’ve said resonates with a conflict you are dealing with right now, then please eat a good meal, rest, get a hug from a safe person, and go outside. As organizers, it’s so easy to fall into the cult of “maximal effort.” We can rush into restorative or transformative processes, principled struggle, or even a defense posture because we think it’s the ethical thing to do. Especially when we have caused harm, we can be worried that taking time to rest is selfish or avoiding accountability.

But hear me when I say: no one is served by your entering into or facilitating a process when you don’t have the capacity to self-regulate. To do so is to run the risk of making things worse with unskillful action, or of opening up more pain than you have the capacity to process, leading to even more trauma. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen so-called restorative spaces cause more harm than they were attempting to heal.

I once felt so responsible for a space I had helped organize that I tried to facilitate through a conflict on little sleep and with a facilitation team that was so triggered that they had checked out. In hindsight, everyone would have been better served by me just walking away. Instead, my maximal effort fed the conflict and led to me being asked to leave a space I had helped organize. It caused a rift in an organizing community that, half a decade later, hasn’t fully healed.

That leads me to my last point. Whether a conflict is keeping you up at night, memories of an arrest cause you to lose time, or you experience anxiety at the thought of going to a meeting, you are not alone. I can assure you that another organizer has experienced something similar. Likewise, another organizer has been where you are and got the help they needed to make it through to the other side. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and you don’t get any bonus points for struggling alone.

Reach out, ask for help, and accept the help that is offered—especially when you think you are unworthy. Giving comrades opportunities to show up for us is an exercise in solidarity. Take all the naps. Eat all the food that makes you feel good. Find the people who make you feel safe and connected and ask them to help you regulate. Touch the earth.

It seems so small, but it’s so crucial. About two weeks into supporting activists in Louisville, we realized that all our years of training in crisis intervention were sometimes less immediately helpful than just inviting people to drink some tea, cleaning their homes for them, and giving them a hug. We realized that telling people to rest is not enough. We had to make rest easy. We held meetings outside, letting people soak in the sun, feeding them solid meals, and then scheduling a two-hour break in rooms full of fluffy couches.

We realized, too, that many people didn’t actually know how to self-regulate and weren’t around anyone stable enough to coregulate with. So we incorporated groundings into every meeting. We started off with active grounding in music or pose making to help people release some of the energy that had been accumulating, before it could become trauma. As people’s nervous systems calmed, we would introduce breathing exercises and guided meditation into the mix. To offer another way for people to regulate themselves, one elder began running Qigong lessons in the morning and evening.

We worked with leadership to ensure that there were no other meetings happening during grounding times. That way, all those traumatized activists who were afraid to be alone could gather around an activity that actually resourced them, rather than asking them to sacrifice more. Eventually, we were able to have more one-on-one relationships where we could ask each organizer what they used to do for fun, or what activities had brought them joy. We encouraged them to bring activities like coloring or singing by incorporating them into meeting agendas.

Once they connected with joy and saw how much more energy it brought them, we introduced something even more radical. What if we allowed ourselves joy just because joy connects us to what it means to be human? What if your joy or rest didn’t have to make us more productive? For many, this idea was too radical. The idea of doing anything other than pushing harder was literally unthinkable.

Unfortunately, not all of us survived the uprising with our lives or with our spirits intact. Too many of our ancestors and peers gave everything to movements that refused to facilitate their rest or reconnection to joy. To borrow from Allen Ginsberg, we have seen some of the best minds of our generation destroyed by an under-resourced madness—a creative maladjustment that was not allowed to be human and to be resourced by joy, love, and connection and so turned in on itself.

The reality is that joy, laughter, and rest are not only the best medicine; they are also the best measurements of our mental health. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, if we are not laughing, dancing, or singing, there might be something wrong with our revolution. If there is one piece of advice I can give you in these perilous times, it’s that sometimes your very maladaptiveness will be what keeps you from despair or, worse, accommodating fascism.

I think King was right to say that the fate of the world is in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. We cannot afford to adjust ourselves to the cruelty of fascism, the disposability of late-stage capitalism, or apathy of indifference to the plight of fellow humans. With the future in our hands, we must nurture our ability to see and live into new worlds by caring for each other and normalizing rest and joy.

In and love and solidarity,

Aaron

Aaron Goggans is an organizer, writer, and movement infrastructure builder, born and raised in Colorado. His politics were shaped by interfaith organizing in the Great Plains, labor and housing organizing on the South Side of Chicago, Black Liberation organizing in Washington, DC, and international delegations to Korea, Hong Kong, and South Africa. He is currently the Steward of the Pattern at the WildSeed Society, a Black-led, BIPOC-focused organization that supports movement stewards building a better world.