the best view comes after the longest climb

happy international women's day

Happy international women’s day. Thank you for being with me today, and every other day. I almost didn’t write to you, because I don’t feel in a particularly celebratory mood this morning. From Walgreens refusing to carry abortion pills (even in states where it’s legal) to CPAC calling on the elimination of transgender people, I’m left frustrated by the slow rate of change. The UN predicting that the gender equality gap won’t even close for another 300 years, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

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A post shared by Liz Plank (@feministabulous)

But it’s in moments like these, that I remind myself of an important lesson: you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome. I find that the happiest I’ve been in my life, is when I’m focussed on the process, not the end result. When I’m thinking about the next step I need to take, rather than the mountain I need to climb, I instantly relax a bit more into my life. I believe this mantra applies to work, relationships, but I also think it applies to activism. As the late disability rights activist Judy Heumann, whose funeral I’m watching as I write to you, has often said, just because it’s slow, it doesn’t mean it’s not working. “Change never happens at the pace we think it should,” she says. “It happens over years of people joining together, strategizing, sharing, and pulling all the levers they possibly can. Gradually, excruciatingly slowly, things start to happen, and then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, something will tip.”

Activist burnout is real and I’ve written about it to you before, and I often come back to the advice that mental health practitioner Ross Szabo gave us, which is to allocate our attention to what we can control. “One of the largest causes of bad stress or anxiety in our lives is when things are out of our control,“ he said. “There are a lot of laws and other issues impacting us today that are completely out of our control. In those moments it’s helpful to focus on things you can control.” For me, this looks like making my activism smaller, not bigger. It may seem counter-productive, but I find that the more local I go, the more impactful I can be. The pro-social reward of activism is crucial, and we can become disconnected from it, if we are always trying to go big or go home.

So if you’re feeling defeated that another international women’s day has gone by and that equality has still not been reached, think of one woman’s whose life you can impact right now. It can be as simple as sending her a text to let her know how loved she is. If you’re a man, if could be asking a woman in your life how you can make her feel more safe, or amplifying the work of a female coworker whose efforts often go unacknowledged. It can look like donating to a women’s rights organization like Girl Up or Mayday Health, which I’m lucky to serve on the board of since they do spectacular work. It can also look like supporting your local feminist journalist and subscribing to this newsletter or getting it for a friend! I’m offering a special women’s day discount just for today, so if you find our community soothing and helpful, please consider supporting it.

I feel honored to get to do this work with you.

Liz-