Balancing Acts: Building Accountable Communities of Care

Maryse writes about radical mental health, healing justice, Icarus history, OWS organizing, peer support, and holding each other and our movements accountable with love.
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There is a reckoning period, I think, early on in the political life of most organizers. It's a moment when we realize the enormity of the harm done, the systems that work to continue this harm, and the endless struggle required to uproot this cycle of oppression and violence. That realization hits us hard and heavy. For me, for years, I walked around with a weight, a hopelessness where my only defense was to keep fighting back. Where the way me and my friends dealt with George W. Bush, Abu Ghraib, the police state surrounding us during the 2004 Republican National Convention was to just keep moving, to bottle up all the pain and anger and let that drive us into more organizing, more meetings, more workshops. We worked from a place of deep suspicion of any system or institution, seeking to create our own alternatives rather than work within them.

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Source: The Icarus Project - Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness - October 3, 2012 Category: Mental Illness Authors: silverelf Tags: 10thanniversary Source Type: blogs