Quiet Activism

Learning how to quietly get shit done...

Last Samhain, I was invited to be a speaker on a panel at the marvellous House of Hackney in London. The topic for the discussion was "witchcraft and activism". It’s long been a concern of mine, that, while my young urban witches class was filled with people who were out on picket lines, at rallies, and engaged with all sorts of political activism like Extinction Rebellion, my own path has often led me to a quieter place. I am an introvert* - I hate crowds, and I hate noise, so you’re unlikely to find me at the front of a protest march or standing outside Downing Street with a placard.

One of the questions put to me on the House of Hackney panel, was "where is your activism?". It took me a while to think this one through. When we think of political activism, it’s the protest that comes first in our consciousness. However, having spent a lifetime of working in social care, I would propose that there are different ways of maintaining activism.

As some of you know, I’ve spent the last 25 years working for a voluntary sector organisation that works with people who are suffering from alcohol and drug dependency. I don’t work frontline - I am too affected by other people's emotions to be effective in a frontline role - so instead I work behind the scenes supporting the frontline workers. This means I’m one step removed from the visual and emotional experience experiences of working at the sharp end of the wedge, but I stilll encounter it - in incident reports and death investigations.

My mother was a frontline worker, as is my sister, and when people used to ask me, "are you going to follow their footsteps?", I was always adamant that my role was in the arts, and a creative life was the one that I was meant to be living.

However, in our late-stage capitalist western society, the arts aren’t funded, so if you want to live the creative life, you have to find ways of supporting yourself. The reality is, without that day-job, I would really struggle. Despite the verbal protests that I was not going to be a social worker, I was going to be an actor, my own life path was to land in a very small charity twenty-five years ago, and I have been there ever since. That charity has since grown, and I’ve grown up with it. My role has changed over the years, and while some periods have been traumatic and difficult because I was so resentful of doing the work I do, when I started to come to terms with the idea that a life in witchcraft is in fact a life in service to my gods and my community, things started to become clearer. I realised that work is an important part of my life's path, my activism, and my work as a priestess. Sometimes our gods call us to different areas of supporting the community. Life as a priest of the Wicca means a life in the community, and not one that’s lived behind cloister walls.

In my teaching classes, and in my life generally, I also have an abhorence of any form of competitiveness, particularly when working with women, as marginal groups of all kinds are often pitted against each other and taught that you have to be competitive in order to succeed, and that success can only be achieved by trampling over your 'competition'. That you have to be better than the person next to you. Bollocks to that. This is something I’ve never been able to get my head around. Surely, rather than being competitive and measuring yourself against the people next to you, we should be supporting each other and lifting each other up, not trampling each other in the stampede.

So when that question was put to me at the house of Hackney - i.e. where is your activism, my answer surprised me. My response was to say my activism is a quiet activism. I enjoy creating subversive spaces where the edge of competitiveness is not present. I serve my community in doing the work that I do quietly, with getting on with getting shit done, and often doing the tasks that no one else really wants to take on. And those of us that work in that way, often don't feel the need for trumpet fanfares, or shouting. Its part of the challenge of living the life of an introvert in a society that's designed for extroverts.

While that might seem far less exciting than standing at the front of a protest march, or waving a banner, I know for me it’s more effective. The world is filled with people who are willing to shout the loudest, and push themselves forward. What the world is very often short of is people who are willing to get shit done, and quietly get on and do the work that nobody else wants to do.

My research studies also showed me that I’m not the first to feel this sense of inner conflict or challenge. Mary Webb - the topic of my PhD research - was frequently filled with self-doubt. She lived through the First World War, and had three brothers in the trenches, one of whom who came back greviously wounded, his life shortened by that experience. Webb's novels tend not to talk about the war, although it’s there, tucked away in the symbolism, if you know where to look, and it is very much present in her (out of print) short stories. But she often wondered if she should have been more overtly political in her writing, and more overly critical of war mongering in order to take her place in the roll-call of writers who were activists. Ultimately her novels tend to follow the same philosophical arguments that mine do - that we all need to return to nature, to find common ground, healing, and a sense of peacefulness in order to be effective in our daily service.

So I’ll stick with my quiet activism, and know that I am serving my community in teaching ideas that aren’t necessarily overtly radical, but they are ones that aren’t often shared. And I’ll keep writing my books where I champion the idea that return to nature is what most of us need to give ourselves and more even keel.

*(By the way, if you want to read more about the idea of how introverts are wired differently than extroverts, I would really recommend reading Susan Cain's excellent book, 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking'.)