Vulnerability, writing, change

Vulnerability is a word on many people’s lips these days. I was already hearing lots of talk of it among feminist activists and writers before the pandemic. But Covid-19 seems to have heightened our sense of the vulnerability of human life, even as the ever-present threat of climate change makes humans acutely aware of the vulnerability of other creatures and the natural world of which we are a part.

Vulnerability means different things to different people. To some it connotes a dangerous weakness to be overcome; for others it holds the promise of openness and intimacy. When writers talk about vulnerability, they often seem to have in mind an ideal of tapping into emotional honesty as a way of making the author more empathetic to the experiences of others, as a strategy for connecting more closely to readers.

What does it mean for activist writing to be vulnerable?

When I asked this question recently in a writers’ group, one woman responded that activism and writing both involve expressing strongly held ideas and commitments; this in turn can make people vulnerable to risks of criticism and rejection. Activism can make us feel exposed not only because it involves close attachments to other people; we can also become fiercely attached to our values, our ideas of how the world works and our places in it, including our convictions about how to make change. Activist identities are often tightly tied to political commitments. To be challenged on these can fill us with self-doubt, make us question our very sense of self.

Yet the process of reconsidering our ideas, of being open to changing our minds, is vital if political change is to be anything but superficial or authoritarian.

I’m not suggesting that there are no objective truths, or that our impressions of the world are merely subjective, subject to change at a whim. Activism is not a hobby; commitment to radical political change often comes from direct experiences of very real injustice. Nor do I underestimate the all-too-common problems of perverse power dynamics in political movements, activism’s underbelly: calls for “open debate” that mask refusals of self-critique; power politics in supposedly progressive spaces that reinforce historical patterns of oppression; ego trips that eat away at community building.

Yet these problems can be symptoms of a refusal to recognise the complexities of change: the fact that it doesn’t always go the way we have idealised, or that it’s not just other people who will have to change if the world is to be a more equal place for all.

When I started doing veganism almost 10 years ago, I had feelings of elation and excitement, but also vulnerability. I was in my late 40s and I wondered – and some other people asked me – what had had taken me so long. There were (self) accusations of hypocrisy. I had ignored the abuses of animal agriculture for decades, even as I was immersed in sexual politics and anarchist movements. The process of giving up animal products threw into doubt some of my long-held sureties both about myself and the other political projects I was committed too. I felt alienated from movements that ignored or even ridiculed animal rights activism. I wasn’t oppressed by or excluded from those movements. It was more a shift in my ethical position that I felt keenly in my body and that I experienced as a kind of political displacement. At the same time, I was surprised that giving up some animal products was so hard. Things I thought I could live without easily enough turned out to have stubborn links to activities and identities – sex, queerness, family, friendship, community – I had held dear for decades.

Writing about the contradictory feelings I had around doing veganism helped me to be more empathetic not only towards the self that had actively exploited animals for most of my life, but also towards other people for whom giving up animal products is difficult, for any number of reasons. Being truthful about the ambivalence I sometimes felt about veganism brought fears of being a bad vegan. But this writing also sparked interesting conversations with readers.

Progressive political movements are all about change – changing the world, changing other people’s ideas, changing other people. Yet often to hear political activists speak about their ideals, you’d think they’d come into the world with fully formed knowledge of how it works and how it should work – like so many Athenas born from the head of Zeus in all their maturity and wisdom. You’d never know from such talk that we all have to learn the ideas we hold most dearly, that we owe debts to other people who taught us, that we too are conditioned by the dominant ideologies of the world we live in, that we’ve made lots of mistakes along the way.

Stories about changing our minds in the face of new information or experiences are not the kind of heroic tales preferred by political movements. They don’t necessarily make activists look great. They’re not the only kind of vulnerable activist writing. But if I keep coming back to the challenges of change it’s because it’s a process that sits at the juncture of the personal and the political. Because of course structural and systemic transformation are fundamental for meaningful political and social change. But these cannot be neatly disconnected from the processes that happen at a smaller more personal level.

Change is hard because it involves giving things up. And giving things up can make us feel empty and exposed.

Vulnerable activist writing is writing that gets into the messiness of change, not for the sake of satisfying the reader’s voyeurism or telling universal truths, but as a way of sharing things that are profoundly personal and possibly painful, while being about so much more than ourselves.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.