findings from Dragon Fruit Project
A quote from the oral history project I volunteer with at API Equality Northern California, good things to keep in mind about life and work. Alex Lee is a trans Asian American activist and filmmaker. Emphasis mine.
M: In terms of circling back to activism or your political awakening as an activist, how or I suppose, what kind of advice would you give to people starting out as activists?
AL: I think my advice would be around the self-care part of it, because there are definitely several points in my career where I said, "that's it! I'm done! I'm so sick of this shit!" and it didn't need to get to that point, like I think pacing yourself, number 1, is important. I also-so my current job, I work at my old law school as a career counselor so I interact with younger people all the time and I see how much different their experiences are than mine. When I was at that law school, like it was fairly cheap to go there so people weren't as worried about their debt, and now it's quite expensive to go there and people are very worried about debt and that adds a layer of stress on top of every decision that wasn't there when I was there.
So I think a lot of it's just figuring out how to calm down. Figuring out how to not stress out and thinking of this as like, the beginning of a very very long journey and there's no reason to rush and there's no reason to think that every decision you make is the decision that will define the rest of your life.
So that means you can take your time to figure out where you fit in, who you're comfortable with, what issues you really care about, and then also you can change your mind. You can decide, "I want to do this other thing instead" or "I don't like this set of people so I'm going to find a new set of people to be around." and just giving yourself to flexibility and the patience to do that and then, you know, once you have that for yourself you can extend it to other people, the kind of people who kind of irritate you and the people who kind of may say or do things that you find disappointing or wrong, just outright wrong, hurtful, and feeling like, "you know, they're learning too, they're figuring things out too…maybe they get this wrong…I don't have to be the one that corrects them or even be around them, but I can also see them as a person and maybe we'll talk in five years. Maybe you'll figure out your stuff." So yeah, just giving everybody space, including yourself.
M: In terms of circling back to activism or your political awakening as an activist, how or I suppose, what kind of advice would you give to people starting out as activists?
AL: I think my advice would be around the self-care part of it, because there are definitely several points in my career where I said, "that's it! I'm done! I'm so sick of this shit!" and it didn't need to get to that point, like I think pacing yourself, number 1, is important. I also-so my current job, I work at my old law school as a career counselor so I interact with younger people all the time and I see how much different their experiences are than mine. When I was at that law school, like it was fairly cheap to go there so people weren't as worried about their debt, and now it's quite expensive to go there and people are very worried about debt and that adds a layer of stress on top of every decision that wasn't there when I was there.
So I think a lot of it's just figuring out how to calm down. Figuring out how to not stress out and thinking of this as like, the beginning of a very very long journey and there's no reason to rush and there's no reason to think that every decision you make is the decision that will define the rest of your life.
So that means you can take your time to figure out where you fit in, who you're comfortable with, what issues you really care about, and then also you can change your mind. You can decide, "I want to do this other thing instead" or "I don't like this set of people so I'm going to find a new set of people to be around." and just giving yourself to flexibility and the patience to do that and then, you know, once you have that for yourself you can extend it to other people, the kind of people who kind of irritate you and the people who kind of may say or do things that you find disappointing or wrong, just outright wrong, hurtful, and feeling like, "you know, they're learning too, they're figuring things out too…maybe they get this wrong…I don't have to be the one that corrects them or even be around them, but I can also see them as a person and maybe we'll talk in five years. Maybe you'll figure out your stuff." So yeah, just giving everybody space, including yourself.