Persistence, Patience, & Perspective: The essential ingredients for resiliency in human rights and social justice work
I remember picking up the phone to call my mother as I sat in the small town of Kasese in Western Uganda. She answered the phone and I immediately started crying at the sound of her voice.
It was one of those days. Those days that so many of us have working in the field of human rights — the days where the weight of the world feels too much. The days where the problems feel too entrenched. The days where the task of navigating the little stuff feels too hard. This was one of those days.
The field of human rights is wrought with having to confront injustice daily — of absorbing, witnessing, and at times experiencing it. Our daily lives are marked by consistent, and at time heartbreaking, encounters with visceral inequity. Our work requires intimacy with pain and suffering of people and communities we serve.
Our exposure to injustices make us feel compelled and responsible for solving them. We believe, and commit, to our ethical imperative to act in the face of injustice. And yet we are overwhelmed with the prospect of how to address these seemingly infinite injustices. It feels like failure often. If only we worked a few more hours, if only we could do a little more, if only we had done something differently.
At the heart of social justice work is the inevitable tension between remaining empathetic to the suffering and inequity in our world, while not being broken by it.
My resiliency has fluctuated, and at times plummeted, in the last decade I’ve spent in the field of human rights. In thinking about what has enabled me at my most resilient times — and what I’ve witnessed from the social justice warriors whose paths I’ve been privileged to cross — I can’t help but think of three things; persistence, patience, and perspective.
The problems we are solving are deep, entrenched, and not easily solved. If it was simple, the thousands of brilliant minds before us would have solved it. But they didn’t — not because it’s unsolvable but because it requires a tenacity, grit, and persistence that so many failed to commit.
We must work side-by-side with those we serve to ask why, to be curious, to practice wonder. We must try different approaches, be nimble, realize no solution will be linear — it will be circuitous, and messy, and often not fit into the boxes we so dearly wish it would. We must be creative, practice ingenuity and both apply ideas use elsewhere and be willing to develop new ones.
But most of all, we must be persistent. We must not give up when the problems seem intractable — because they are not. History has proven that time and time again. We must have grit, an unending commitment to get up and try again. And we must expect that — we must expect to fail the first, second, third time, so that we anchor ourselves from the start around our commitment to persist. It is only when we know that the persistence itself is a part of the journey that we will be forgiving enough of ourselves to remain resilient to continue this work.
Dismantling injustice takes time, it takes accompanying those we serve and building trust, relationships, and partnerships. Time horizons of two, three, even five years are unrealistic and impossible to expect radical change to occur. We fuel our desire to overgive, overwork when we think we only have one year to end poverty. We work late nights, we skip dinner with friends, we tell ourselves it must be done now.
We fail to realize that if we extended our time horizon to ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, the impossible urgency of everything would become more tenable. We create anxiety by placing our own mortality on a project at the center of it’s success. We reduce the timeframe we give ourselves to meaningfully bend the arc towards justice to but a few years, when injustice has been built over centuries. Resiliency comes only when we realize not everything is urgent.
Resiliency comes when we feel like the opportunity cost of living — of meals with those you love, adventures in the beautiful corners of nature, and reading Sunday-morning articles — does not come at the cost of living out our moral imperative to address injustice.
We must realize living is, in fact, a pre-requisite to lasting in the field, to building relationships, partnerships, and a community that are essential in the fight for social justice.
As human rights practitioners, we define success by achieving human rights. By enabling social justice. By ensuring access to healthcare, food, justice. Because we confront injustice daily, we see ourselves succeeding when we correct that injustice, when we no longer witness the suffering of those around us.
It is important to remain oriented towards justice, but it is not productive to expect it as the only outcome of our work. Too often we work towards the outcome without appreciating the importance of the process. We advocate for dignity without valuing the way in which we practice that dignity in our daily interactions. We preach empowerment without celebrating those we empower in our weekly work.
When we flip our perspective to see our value as not only the outcome, but the process of enabling equity, of breaking down structures of injustice — it allows us to see our wins. Our resiliency is worn down by not having the perspective to step back and both appreciate the progress — to see what’s working instead of the places we’re failing — and to celebrate the small moments of triumph. If we can simply reframe what success looks like, and force ourselves to examine it more often, we can be more inspired human rights defenders.
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But most of all, we must practice what we do with love — love for self, for others, and for the causes we so fearlessly believe in. While it is our duty to address suffering — it is also our responsibility to do so with persistence, patience, and an affirming perspective.
Persistence, Patience, & Perspective: The essential ingredients for resiliency in human rights and social justice work
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