In 1974, a psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger needed a word for what he was watching happen to himself and the other volunteers at a free clinic in New York: people who believed their work was too urgent to rest, wearing down until they were useless to the cause they cared about most. He called it burnout. Fifty years later the word is everywhere, mostly drained of its original edge.
This episode turns inward, away from movements and toward the bodies inside them. It follows Audre Lorde's argument that \"caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,\" written while she was living with the cancer that would kill her, and traces the same idea through adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism, Tricia Hersey's Rest as Reparations, and ACT UP's political funerals, where grief itself became protest. It looks at Ella Baker's group-centered leadership, built specifically so a movement wouldn't depend on any single person's stamina to survive, and at Standing Rock, where thousands of people learned the same lesson at the scale of an entire encampment.
It closes somewhere less tidy than a manifesto wants: rest gets sold back as a bath bomb, and the crises this show has spent two seasons naming are not on pause while anyone recovers. Both of those things are true at once.
Further reading: Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988; Ixia Press reissue, 2017) adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019) Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) Cher Weixia Chen and Paul C. Gorski, \"Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists,\" Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2015 John L. Hammond, \"Mística, meaning and popular education in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement,\" Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 6(1), 2014
Tags: burnout, activist burnout, grief, Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, rest as resistance, transformative justice, Ella Baker, SNCC, ACT UP, political funerals, MST, mística, Buen Vivir, healing justice, anarchism
Show notes: Burnout, Grief, and Staying in It A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 2
Burnout ends more organising careers than any raid or arrest ever has, and this episode argues that's not incidental, it's a test of a movement's actual politics: the difference between caring enough to act and knowing when to rest, and what infrastructure, not willpower, actually makes staying possible.
In this episode: