Imperfect Activism

I've been a blogger in some capacity for the past five years. I never had any grand aspirations of becoming an online celebrity a la Dooce -- to be honest, I started that first blog to hone my very basic web design skills -- but I have been paid actual money for my writing, which made me feel validated and like I was getting something right on those days when I swore I was only "mailing it in." I've evolved from a navel-gazing diarist to something approaching enlightenment. I was too political as a personal blogger, and not enough as a social justice blogger. (And, frankly, getting to old to be just a pop culture pundit.) Finding a happy medium isn't easy, but I'll settle for "evolving," if imperfect.

After one of her articles received a hefty dose of fallout, Amy Richards from Bitch magazine wrote:" The greatest lesson I've learned as a writer is that you can't control how others interpret your words." I try to remember this whenever I'm writing something "big" and "important," but I think it puts unnecessary onus on the reader. A writer should strive for clarity, but remember than each reader brings her own history to what she's reading. (This is also important to remember as a reader. Actually, the greatest lesson I've learned is to back off when things get to heated. Its far too easy to reply to say something you'll regret later.)

There's a downside to this, though: the excessive picking apart of your own writing. This, by far, is one of my greatest obstacles, particularly in the SJ blogging community (and a large part of why I don't participate that often.) A while back, Sarah from Feminist wrote about having the "right to fuck up ." I don't think this means absolving yourself of the responsibility when you fuck up, but allowing yourself not to be frozen by your mistakes. Almost every person I respect has fucked up somewhere (just ask me about second and third wave feminists). Does that nullify the good they've done? It shouldn't, but the fuckery shouldn't be ignored either:

Part of being concerned about social justice is understanding that humans fuck up. That we are, to use a cliche, all more than the worst thing we have ever done. That Helen Thomas can say something that feels like a personal slap across my face and still be a journalist that I look up to. That someone can commit a crime and still deserve more than being locked up and having the key thrown away.

This comment encapsulates, I think, the stress of being a perfect online activist:

There is a lot of pressure to boycott indefinitely, or to write off certain people, authors, blogs, and other entities because of a very real clusterfuck. I feel like we should be able to talk about fuck ups, but I have a really hard time casting people and ideas out altogether just because they hurt me once (or even twice, or whatever).

Full disclosure: a lot of this hits disturbingly close to home because I've never considered myself to be a fluid writer. I make mistakes. Lots of them. Most of the time, I don't comment on blogs because either I don't know the vocabulary (a word like "cis" I learned exclusively from SJ blogs), or I know what I want to say but don't think I can express it clearly enough, and I don't want to be caught in the middle of an online clusterfuck.

How this translates to concrete, real world activism, I'm not sure yet. There's been a lot of talk about online activism being less than "real," but I maintain it's very real, especially for those of us who don't have an outlet for real world activism. I know it's a lot easier to make a mistake when it's not archived online. Maybe that's the heart of the problem here: not the lack of accountability -- though there's enough of that online -- but the ability to revisit our mistakes. (And still not learn from them.)