We are not on the same page

I’ve been fortunate to have been in therapy with the same practitioner for the last seven years. They’ve known at least four or five versions of me (I joke that I can throw any new development at them mid-session and they do not miss a beat - “oh that’s interesting that you’re discovering polyamory, in my experience here is how people cope when they make that transition”). In the last two years, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they’ve known the war-adjacent me; and the topic that the war-adjacent me brought to our sessions the most hasn’t beeen the actual vicarious trauma of watching my native country suffer assaults (that processing is yet to be done as I’ve carefully layered it under piles of dissociation), but the heartbreak of compartmentalizing my Ukrainian / queer / leftist / neurodivergent selves into separate beings, because my full self is rarely fully welcomed in any single space. 

I exited many spaces that were obviously belligerent to my increasingly soft armour - my days of believing “but this tech company culture might be kinder to an autistic queer” are over. On the other hand, I expected better of people and communities that focus on anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, and a critical study of history and politics. But the truth is that the Western progressive community has been disappointing as it’s become obvious how splintered we are in the direction of our activism. I don’t mean we disagree on the approaches to our liberation struggles; I mean we literally cannot agree on a global vision of what we are fighting for. We specialize in individual struggles, and we don’t have enough generalists, weaving the webs of oppression together for us to see them clearly. 

From my vantage point this looks like many things

It is having brilliant Ukrainian educators in my network who use saneist and ableist language; pro-Palestine activists who minimize or outright deny russian imperialism and colonialism, prominently as it relates to Ukraine and Syria; it looks like refugee support workers who unfollow and block me for opposing Zionist narratives; trans rights supporters (who are cis themselves) getting friendly and diplomatic with conservative MPs; pro-Ukrainian folks sending me Azerbaijani propaganda in real time as Armenians in Artsakh are forced out of their land. It looks like being personally bewildered at seeing a russian queer activist and artist I supported (and built community around) having nothing to say about the russian responsibility to end an unfolding genocide that russia is staging, and unfollowing me on socials as I get more vocal in my Ukrainian liberation commentary (and my former community finding their lack of activism in this particular area vaguely acceptable). It looks like one single day earlier this week, when I had an in depth and emotional conversation about Palestinian liberation with a close Ukrainian person steeped deeply in Zionist propaganda, and then hours later informed yet another pro-Palestine acquaintance that they unknowingly shared a post that atrociously minimized deaths of Ukrainian children over the last two years.

I can keep going.

The thing with these reactive incongruencies is that they are rooted in deep traumas that leave us under-resourced and desperate to make a difference at any cost. The Ukrainians using deeply ableist language are trying to drive home a point about just how genocidal our imperialist neighbouring nation is, and the abhorrent comparisons of dead children happen because we run out of words when we try to describe how much humanity we lost when we allowed the destruction of Gaza to happen. We don’t have all the overlapping identities within us, and so we feel only one hurt at a time, and as our pain gets translated onto the page or into the ether of the internet, we lose the ability to see widely, and be widely empathetic. 

“Yes, and” - I understand it / It makes no sense to me

Though I am but one single human, with all my imperfections and biases, and my highly specific identities, I still feel overwhelmingly that these disconnects in leftist spaces make absolutely no coherent sense. Don’t we agree that being progressive means honouring lived experiences of those under oppression, centering their narratives, stepping outside of the Western-centric ways of thinking? (The US isn’t the only colonial power.) Doesn’t it mean learning new information, sitting with discomfort, and being willing to change our views? Prioritizing community and the collective instead of our own egos and the neo-liberal urge to individualize our struggle? Doesn’t being progressive mean abolition, doing away with transactional allyship, and knowing that all of us exist in the future that we are building? 

Yes, even our oppressors exist in the future we are building. But here’s a more palatable truth that we’ve yet to understand - people unlike us, who have been oppressed in ways that are different from the ways we have been oppressed, also exist in the future. We are peers. We suffer differently, and in some cases to different extents, but we are in the same cohort. I look around and I see people ignore these values, sometimes because our awareness doesn’t yet extend to every struggle around us, but sometimes - if I’m being honest - out of resentment and purposeful ignorance. I’ve been left on read, unfollowed, and ignored too many times to be too optimistic about our willingness to organize cross-struggle.

I think of that recent US military spending package passed by Senate. Aid to Ukraine, arms to Israel, funds for Taiwan. My social media feeds had me dizzy: half the people I follow encouraging a resolute yes (Ukrainians will die if this bill does not get passed), the other half of the people I follow encouraging a resolute no (Palestinians will die if this bill gets passed). I was chronically online during this period, my covid recovery had me stuck to my feed - and in that mass of content I consumed, I saw only one lone person encourage us to tell our elected officials that aid to Ukraine is critical and arms for Israel are abhorrent. 

How progressive are we really, if most of us are willing to simplify our worlds enough to advocate for just one people’s survival while dragging “other” victims to their deaths?

This friction has real world implications

These disconnects are indicative of how we all behave in community: how we protest, where we invest and divest, what support we offer to others, whose stories we listen to. When we are bristly and unintentionally unwelcoming to each other, when we get hurt by these micro-omissions of empathy over and over, we may choose to put up walls amongst ourselves. 

I’ve seen these shades of hesitancy in myself. Last year I took an art and writing course on the theme of creating visionary futures, an absolute gift of a four-week program that helped me reset my artistic practice and experiment with letting my trauma and hope coexist on one proverbial page. The reason I decided it was safe to pursue this course and bring all my Ukrainian rage to it was because I saw that the instructor was Armenian and from the SWANA region. (They held the space beautifully, with nuance and care.) I don’t know that I would have felt comfortable risking sharing my full self with a more thoroughly Western-lensed facilitator, one more likely to ignore russian imperialism and the multiplicity of global oppression.

I am always on the brink of disengaging in healing, storytelling, organizing, and pushing for a more just world. From my conversations with others, those like me and those unlike me, I think many of us are, too. In a time when we need to be diving deep into the myriad of roles available to us as activists, it is no small tragedy that we have to spend so much time testing the temperature of the water before each jump. 

None of us are the perfect activist

I think a lot about times when I made things feel unsafe for others, too. Last year I was gently reminded that Cossack history is complicated - we like to remember them as keepers of the independence of the Ukrainian state, but we do not like to remember them for their episodes of violent antisemitism. The year prior as I was vocally calling out parts of the Western left for effectively abandoning Ukraine in their efforts, I missed the important note that this was nothing new for Syrians, who have been similarly abandoned by the same folks since 2011. I can think of many more embarrassing missteps I’ve had.

The same person who reminded me about the Cossacks reflected to me, on a separate occasion, that in our most supportive circles we have different backgrounds and “bring each other along” in our mutual understanding of the diversity of struggle. I’ve been brought along by so many generous people. My therapist phrased this sentiment as “it’s always going to be someone’s first day.” And I wonder: as I’ve been coming along the path of understanding, from my first day onwards, and maybe been less-than-gracious to some folks, how do I expect them to relate to me? What understanding do they owe me?

As I get on this soap box of an essay, and advocate for inter-liberation-struggle grace and empathy, what grace and empathy can I really expect back from those I’ve hurt? 

I don’t have the answer, but I know we need to always remember that this dynamic exists

The closest thing to a concluding thought that I can muster up is the idea that anyone advocating for change, liberation, and progress has a wounded animal inside their soft temporary earthly body. Theirs may be different from ours. And on the other side of any one movement, on the other side of all the movements - we all exist. Together, concurrently, imperfectly, with struggle and conflict, as humans always have. We need to carry each other through to that destination, recognizing that we are headed towards the same point. And, honestly, I don’t think that we will realistically achieve this vision of a communal journey. I think we must acknowledge that, and we must try anyways. 

Appendix: Recommended Reading

“On Ukraine-Syria solidarity and the ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’: How many Leftists are failing those caught in the crossfire of oppressive regimes”