Hello,
This is a hard one to write because I feel… guilty that I am not a sparkling ray of sunshine at the moment.
The book is out and has had so much positive reaction, both from my friends and complete strangers. Isn’t this everything I wanted? Shouldn’t I be overjoyed?
The truth is, I am struggling. All the momentum that carried me through the emotional turbulence of the past year has evaporated, and instead I am left to face it all without an impending deadline to focus on.
Avid readers of this newsletter will know that a lot has been happening in my little brain this year. For much of the past eighteen months, my care was in constant turmoil, leaving me unmoored and anxious. Writing the book forced me to confront the legacy of bullying and dating-related pain in a way I was perhaps not entirely prepared for, and then I had to wrap my head around how I feel about one day being a disabled mother - the latter in particular was hard beyond words. At the same time, coming out and the associated realisations about myself has been both wonderful and very scary, opening up cans of worms I didn’t even know existed.
This is not to say that any of this is necessarily bad. In fact, there is so much good here. I have probably made more progress towards a life I want in the past year than I did in the half decade before that. I am more confident, more comfortable, more myself than I have ever been, and that feels really special. To have come away from this frankly wild year with a book and a body of work I am so proud of feels like the best, most important achievement to date, and I finally feel like I am doing good in the world.
But this work is hard. Being a lived-experience activist is hard. There is no line between my job and my life. I love what I do, I would not do anything else for anything else, but it is relentlessly difficult, relentlessly personal, relentlessly never enough. You give so much of yourself - in the case of the book, all of myself - and then you open Twitter to see the latest instance of egregious ableism and wonder whether anything you do can ever make enough of a difference, if you’re ever doing more than shouting into the void.
When I feel like this, I try to remember that activism is a hike up Everest, not an ascent of a gym climbing wall. That all progress is incremental, and almost never linear. That when we are tired, there’s an army of people ready to take some of the strain. That success is not, can never be, the absence of ableism, but lies in the individual lives made better, in the hands outstretched in solidarity. I try to remember all of this, and yet it is so easy to forget.
I am happy. I am sad. I am scared, hopeful, and scared of being hopeful. I am figuring out a new version of myself, and trying to work for a new version of the society we all live in. It is a lot. I am so, so tired.
Time for a proper rest, I think. See you on the other side, when we do what we always do - and go again.
Much love,
Lucy
That’s right! My debut book is NOW.
It’s a memoir about life as a disabled woman, how ableism and sexism interact in complicated and multifaceted ways, and how we often have to fight to be seen as women at all. Find out more here.
I put my heart and soul into this book and I’d love it to reach as many people as possible. Please do grab a copy or share the link with anyone who’d be interested.
I can't remember the term, but someone coined one for the experience of completing a big project and the strange fatigue and malaise come down that happens when we expected to be riding some euphoric wave.
Anyway, REST! Rest is radical. Rest IS activism under Capitalism.