Week Three Reflection: Staying Outraged
Out of the various articles and pieces of writing that I read over the last week, my reaction to one in particular surprised me. It was called “How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind” and it talked about how to keep yourself from creating a ‘new normal’ in this political climate where so much is threatening so many people’s lives and freedom. It talked about how to momentarily distance yourself from news so it doesn’t become ingrained as what is happening, about how to start participating and doing little things to resist and protest and start participating. I spoke in last week’s reflection about trying to find where I should be in terms of activism and social justice work, and while I don’t want to revisit any of that, my reaction to this article felt particularly important. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I read through the points it made. It made me feel hopeful that I could help create change, scared for that will happen before it gets better, frustrated that I don’t feel the strength I think I should, and it broke the feeling of numbness I hadn’t noticed permeating my mood. I think there is something really important in anything that can break through that numbness, so that we can really be aware and be able to engage and participate in the crap we are about to go through.
As a report of what I have done this week, a lot of my time was taken up in writing a piece I have been thinking about for quite some time. Back in November I came across a contest with the prompt “Are Digital Technologies Making Politics Impossible?” Since then I’ve been thinking about it, writing notes, trying to write drafts, and battling a good deal of self doubt on whether I should feel like I have any authority or credibility in writing a response to that question. Over the last week I made a last ditch effort at taming that self doubt and writing a reasonably decent response. And I am proud of what I managed to create. It feels important, and it feels thought out. I’ve been thinking about which things were important to talk about within the word limit, and about how those topics should be strung together. How it could be built upon for a further, more in depth work. In the last week I finished writing an absolute crap draft, and I turned it into something that I am proud of and happy with. I’m not going to share this piece of writing on this blog because I don’t want it to be available to the public, but if anyone is interested in my conclusions, I am willing to share a hard copy.
My internship has been slow to get started, but I have begun collecting articles with interesting looking abstracts to read, and I am working on finding an organizational method that works for me to keep track of how I find and work with the articles I’m going to be using. I expect there will be more to report on this by next week.