Back when I started this blog I was about to graduate, and was ready to reinvent myself. I said that I was ready to leave behind my identity as a philosophy student, that I wanted to be a person instead. After graduating I went to Iceland for three weeks where, in addition to finding myself in arm-tubes lying on the ground in the middle of a road blockade, I fell in love with consensus decision making. I fell in love with communal living. I fell in love with direct action, with anarchism, with activism. I felt empowered and alive. I wanted to spend the rest of my life living like that. So I walked through my Las Vegas Wedding Chapel of Personal Identity and committed myself to activism, embracing my new identity as an “Environmental Activist”. This wasn't something completely new, I had been an activist all throughout university. In fact, I'd been an activist all my life. At age 7 I spent my recess time at school cleaning up litter in the playground. At 9 I decided to be a vegetarian. At 14 I staged my first sit-in and blockaded myself into the bathroom in protest of a family trip to Utah. I have always had a passion for making the world a better place. Activism has always been in my blood. But that summer after graduation, I made activism my primary occupation, I made it the defining feature of my life. In rejecting my identity as a philosophy student I had created a void, a raw gaping hole that begged to be filled. What I should have done was to let the hole heal. To allow the void to evolve, to encourage something real and genuine to grow into that space. To become a real person. But voids are scary. Growing is scary. Even healing can be scary. And I was scared. So I stuffed activism into the hole and forgot about the whole issue.
But since labelling myself as an activist, I haven't really accomplished much. I've been flailing around trying to figure out what to do. I've been thinking myself into circles about what kind of activist I want to be, what form of activism I want to use, which form would be most effective, whether tactics can be justified by their effectiveness, with whom do I want to work, with whom would I be willing to work... And with all this thinking and flailing, there hasn't been much doing.
In addition to using my new activist identity as a way to avoid dealing with the post-graduation void, I also used it as a way to justify coming back to Edmonton. Because, hey, if I'm an “Environmental Activist”, and arguably the most environmentally disastrous development project on Earth (aka the Alberta Oils Sands) is happening where I grew up, how can I possibly justify being anywhere else, right? The move couldn't possibly have had anything to do with feeling lost and not having anywhere else to call home. It's not that I didn't have anywhere better to go. I obviously came here out of a sense of duty. That's what I told myself at least.
The ironic thing is that for all my flailing and thinking and self-righteous dedication to the cause, I find it really difficult to fight for Alberta, because deep down, I don't even like Alberta. I didn't come back here out of a passionate love for the place. I don't lie awake at night lamenting the destruction of my beloved homeland. It's difficult to be passionate about fighting for something you're not passionate about. And I'm tired of fighting anyway.
Shortly after taking on the label of activist I also took on the label of anarchist. In the basic sense of the word, I am an anarchist. I believe in non-hierarchy, I'm anti-authoritarian, I'm anti-capitalist at least in the sense of being opposed to our current capitalist system. But the term anarchist also brings with it a whole lot of baggage that I'm not so sure I want to carry around with me anymore. I'm not interested in class war. I'm not interested in organizing the workers. I'm tired of struggling, and fighting, and waiting for the revolution.
I was a better anarchist before I took on the label, a better activist before I made it my identity. The problem is that I let the labels become prescriptive rather than descriptive. When you can look back at things you've done and retrospectively decide that a particular label is in fact appropriate, go with it. Descriptive labels act as verbal shorthand. They make communication easier. But when a label becomes prescriptive, it ceases to serve it's purpose. I let my identity as an activist define my actions. I started doing things because I was an activist, not because I actually wanted to do them. So I'm not going to be an activist anymore. I'm going to gather up these skills and ideas and experiences that I've been collecting over the past few years and store them on a special shelf in my heart next to my vegan ideals. And I won't hesitate to dust them off when a situation calls for them. But it's time for me to start choosing my fights rather than picking them.
And now that I've pulled activism out of that gaping hole in my identity I'm left with the void again. This time I'm not going to stuff it full of something just for the sake of filling it. I'm going to have to wear it on my sleeve and let it do it's thing.
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