Stop Whistling, Start Listening

New year perspective

One of the benefits of the Christmas/New Year season is that I’m crazy busy and often living outside my usual routines. My yoga classes finished for almost a month (boo), I had a decent amount of time off work this year, I went to quite a few Christmas parties and I spent a lot of time with my family and my husband’s family. The upshot of this is that I also took a step back from my online life, since I had less time to browse the internet and engage in social media.

Returning to regular Twitter following in the new year I was struck by how pointless and grating a lot of our current twitter-outrage is, and wondered to what extent do I engage with it too and is it useful to me? 2011 saw me return to engaging in feminism in a big way again. I’ve identified as a feminist since I was a child but last year I attended FEM11 and Reclaim The Night, read more feminist books and began to dip my toe into an online community, mostly on Twitter. As a result, much of my news gathering and assessment is informed by feminists I follow on Twitter. Half of the time I’m outraged before I’ve even clicked on a link to read an article. I’m a voracious news junkie, but am now coming to articles through feminist activists, even on sites like The Guardian where it’s likely I would have come across the article myself organically but have now been directed to it.

So what does this mean? It sometimes means I’ve judged a news story before I’ve even heard it. Either I’m predisposed to enjoy it (linked to positively on Facebook), or poised to be outraged by it (multiple links on Twitter). I think it’s important that I step back to a place where I approach the news on my own terms again. An interesting example of this late last year was the outcry over the lack of women nominated for BBC Sports Personality Of The Year. My Twitter feed was over-run with annoyance and outrage at this, and I clicked on each link and retweeted some with enthusiasm. It was only later that night, in a real-life conversation, where I was challenged about how much of that outrage was justified. I have very little interest in sport and the little bit I do watch is men’s. I don’t watch or support women’s sport and neither do most women but here we were bemoaning the lack of support for women’s sport. Instead of adding to the noise online (not the most mindful approach), perhaps I could’ve wondered more about why I don’t take more practical steps to raise the profile of women’s sport. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it was poor that no women were on the shortlist and that magazines like Nuts and Zoo are on the nominating panel, and I heard some brilliant analysis of the issue from women who are involved in sports commentary. I just think that when it came to it, the problem wasn’t the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist. The real issues are much deeper.

It’s so easy to get wound up and stressed over these issues when reading about them online - especially if you engage in sites with comments - and I suspect I’m not the only one to be wondering if this is good for me. I had been mentally composing this blogpost when I saw someone I follow on Twitter (@absinthetweets) ask

Question of the day inspired by @zenscara: do you find being an activist is good or bad for your mental health, overall?

My honest response was that I ‘can find self overwhelmed & angered by world sometimes, because of feminist view’ but also that ‘Activism can also be a force of community, strength and empowerment though’. Some of the other responses I saw seemed to echo my first. Engaging in feminism can leave you so angry, frustrated, annoyed and overwhelmed. I don’t think this is always a bad thing in itself, but it’s important that it’s channeled constructively rather than just existing to add to your already stressed life!

So, when engaging in feminism or activism this year, I’ve resolved to myself to make it more meaningful. This may involve spending energy on fundraising and raising awareness (if you haven’t heard about our Sky High event on 27th January then please check it out). I’m going to try not to sweat the little things so much but to dig deeper, and maybe write more about the issues under a story, rather than the story itself.  I can’t promise I’ll succeed but I’m hoping it’ll be better for my stress levels.