Welcome to this week’s edition of Stacks & Spoons, a weekly substack for bookish girls, gays and theys, written by author Jen Wilde. If you enjoy it, make sure to subscribe here.
Setting boundaries is hard.
I set healthy boundaries for myself, only to break them hours later. My weekly screen time results prove how far I blow past my self-imposed social media limits. I say yes to things I don’t have the spoons for (or just don’t want to do), to avoid disappointing people. When put on the spot, I will go along with just about anything, not wanting to cause a fuss. I’ve pushed myself so far beyond my limits that I’ve made myself physically ill, all because I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.
Listen, I go to therapy. I follow all the Instagram trauma-informed / astrology / collective healing accounts. I can tell you all my neurosis and diagnoses and attachment styles and sun-moon-rising signs. None of that changes the fact that this shit is hard.
As a disabled person, my energy is limited and precious. On average, I get two or three good days a week. And by good, I mean low pain and enough energy to write, shower, do the dishes, reply to emails, read, and maybe go for a walk. On bad days, I’m on the couch in pain or medicated, sleepy, with only enough energy to watch TV.
So why, oh why, do I spend such a ridiculous amount of that limited energy being angry at strangers on the internet?
This is something I’ve been grappling with a ton lately, as I’ve been tearing my hair out in grief over what’s happening in Gaza. More specifically, I’ve been trying to unwrap the mess of feelings that come with trying to convince other people to care about a genocide, only to be met with silence or whataboutisms.
Sometimes I truly don’t know what hurts more, seeing the horrors of the world or the way people can look away so easily. My natural response is to try to show people why they should care, and when I can’t do that, I feel like a failure. (If you’re screaming at the screen that this is not a healthy way to cope with the world, my therapist has already gently explained this to me.)
Lately, however, I’ve started to notice the discrepancy in time spent on trying to convince others to care vs time spent actually being useful to the cause I believe in. I’m embarrassed to think how many hours I’ve wasted scrolling on my phone, fuming at strangers online who I’ve decided aren’t ‘doing enough.’ (Again, my screen time graph is proof of this). All my grief at watching a genocide unfold turned into misdirected outrage. It is not sustainable to be in outrage mode all the time. There needs to be room for rest, for joy, for hope.
It's been two months of Netanyahu’s violence against Gaza and the West Bank. 17,000+ Palestinians murdered. 7,000+ of them children. 46,000 injured. 10,000 air strikes. Countless families displaced, with nowhere safe to go. At this point, if someone learns those numbers and responds with an attempt to justify them, I will not waste my limited energy trying to convince them to care.
If someone watches one of the hundreds of videos of Palestinian men running toward a bombed-out home, plumes of dust and smoke still rising, digging with their bare hands to pull children out from under rubble, and responds with ‘what about ____’, I will not waste my limited energy trying to convince them to care.
We have all had more than enough time to ‘do our research.’ Our favourite wellness influencers have had plenty of opportunities to share more than a generic love and light post. Our Spotify Top 5s, Hollywood crushes, and autobuy authors have all heard the pleas for them to speak out in support of Palestine. So have our family, friends, and followers.
If someone hasn’t been moved to care by now, after everything we’ve seen and learned in the past two months (and 75 years) of horror, that failure is not ours.
Many of us are burned out. I know I am. I’m grieving personal loss and global loss. I haven’t finished any writing projects all year. Even these once-a-week substack posts take days to complete and leave me exhausted (this was supposed to go out yesterday). I don’t have the bandwidth to write Instagram captions anymore. So the precious energy I do have, the few spoons in my possession, will be devoted to action that serves good. More than ever, I need to set boundaries for myself and respect them the way I respect the boundaries of others.
This looks different for everyone. I’m still figuring out what boundaries and burnout recovery looks like for me. Maybe it will mean taking a big break from my phone during January. One thing I’m certain of: I refuse to spend more of my limited time and energy trying to drag people out of their willful apathy.
Instead, my attention is going toward the people who do care. Some organizations and activists have already been doing this work, and they need my support a lot more than some celebrity with millions of followers needs my criticism. Instead of fighting the people against me, I want to support the people who are with me.
This isn’t to say I’m giving up on trying to make people care. I’m still a pisces, after all. This also doesn’t mean I’m not going to call out unforgivably gross behaviour (looking at you, Julianna Margulies.) And because I’m human, I’m sure I’ll slip up and do some mindless rage-scrolling. It’s hard to beat an algorithm that runs on outrage.
But my energy needs to go into direct action: contacting reps, sharing Palestinian voices, boycotts, protests. Getting into arguments with strangers online is not direct action, it is a distraction.
Especially when there are so many people who do care. I’ve stood by them at rallies, shouting ‘free, free, Palestine.’ I walk past the Palestinian flags in the windows of local shops. They are my neighbours, who have been organizing rallies and petitions and demanding a town hall with our Congressman (a town hall that is now happening, thanks to their efforts).
They are my friends who protest with me, support local Palestinian businesses with me, share resources with me. They are people I know online, some who have been in this movement for years and some who are new like me, boosting Palestinian voices as much as we can.
They are Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestinian Youth Movement, IfNotNow, Within Our Lifetime, Books For Palestine, and other groups working tirelessly for justice and liberation.
They are the people jamming the phone lines and flooding the inboxes of our politicians, demanding a permanent ceasefire and end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
I can’t even list all the people and organizations who care, there are too many to count. At the risk of sounding like Mr. Rogers, I’m looking for the helpers, so that I can be one too.
How to be a helper:
Contact your reps to demand a ceasefire:
Find a protest to attend wherever you are in the world.
And remember to keep sharing and amplifying Palestinian voices. Don’t stop talking about Gaza.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
ICYMI…
Previously, on Stacks & Spoons:
Spotify Wrapped Called Me Mentally Ill
Books Are Inherently Political.