Musings on life and how I choose to interpret it…

I just finished listening to a documentary about activist burnout, which aired on CBC radio’s “the Sunday Edition” program, last Sunday, Sept. 12. The reporter and producer of that episode was Frank Faulk, and he interviewed me among a bunch of other activists.

The title of the episode: Burning Bright. (It’s on the second hour.)

I hesitated telling people about this documentary, partly because I felt like it would be some self-flagellating way to talk about myself, and another because a lot of things happened after the interview that reflected and, in some cases, went against what I had talked about during my conversations with Frank.

And now after I listened to it — on CD because Frank so generously sent a copy to me — I still hesitate to talk about it because I sound like I’m talking with my nose pinched so out of touch … so presumptuous and naive.

Allow me to put some context to where I was at the time and where I was coming from:

At the time that Frank was interviewing me, it was in the heat of the Olympic build-up. It was the spring of 2008, which now seems so distant but was actually just a few months ago. Tibetans had just recently risen up openly against the Chinese occupation. News of monks being killed and protests happening all over the world were fresh in every morning news reports. Toronto was abuzz: we had just a couple of weeks ago staged massive protests not only in Toronto, the largest Tibetan settlement outside of Asia, but also in places like Vancouver and Ottawa. I was in the thick of organizing dozens of school buses packed to the doors with Tibetans from Toronto heading to Ottawa to protest on the Parliament Hill. It was unprecedented.

There was a lot of excitement, moments of despair and panic, relief and anger, uncertainty and hope. It was a time when a committee of five fairly disparate organizations came together under one committee in a show of solidarity to collectively meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the summer olympic spectacle.

And it was during these intense periods of organizing and strategizing that punctuated the stress that I was dealing with and which eventually led to a burnout; which was gradual, but which took a while for me to register. For the most part, when you’re in the middle of a storm, you don’t really have the time to take stock of what’s being tossed around.

But that’s not to say that everything was a constant moment of discombobulation or some burgeoning heap of responsibility that was put on me in an unfair or unsustainable manner. I mean, parts of it do bear some truth in retrospect, but there were also times when I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. There is a sense of camaraderie in a dizzyingly uncontrollable situation that makes you come alive. We weren’t quite in the trenches like I’m making it sound, but we did have daily meetings with a healthy dose of shoutings and fist-banging and briefings all thrown in the mix while the rest of the community pricked their ears on every action we were planning.

For me, it was unprecedented and a tad crazy.

And this would all have been fine — in a youthful, activist frame of mind. Every person who feels passionate about something must be willing to step into the heat of it. But then there are those details: those intimate, boring, annoying details of life that invariably seep into your existence and stick out not because they’re there but because they have to.

Like the fact that you have a full-time job. Like the fact that you work in an office and having the phone ring every few minutes because a reporter would like to speak with you is not a fair use of the office phone or space.

And how asking to temporarily put your work on hold while you deal with more pressing matters (and expecting your co-workers to understand) isn’t realistic nor okay.

Like the fact that you’re sleeping only a couple of hours every night for almost weeks on end and how caffeine isn’t the solution to a mild narcoleptic like me.

Like the fact that you have family matters to deal with, documents to apply and mail, and a whole stack of “to-dos” that just piles and piles.

Or like the fact that you may have your own personal inhibitions and doubts and insecurities and manifold other feelings that you feel must be swept aside for the good of the whole. And how it eats you from the inside to have these “feelings”, and you don’t know who to share them with, and you feel like your shoulder’s been burdened beyond what it can hold.

Because, of course, everything around me will have to revolve around MY perspective. And regardless of how you admonish yourself to think more selflessly, it just won’t do and you’re stuck in a swirl of existential and moral dugouts that don’t appear to have any opening in those moments.

And it’s just my long way of coming to my point: no matter how entrenched you may be in a movement, or how passionate you feel about something, there are those things that need to be addressed to, in addition to this big explosion of actions, that will sometimes throw a wench into your plans and mess it all up.

There are obviously a plethora of great people who have managed to succeed by sacrificing some aspect of their personal lives or mindset, but to a lesser moral like me, that was just one detail too many.

That was something which was so sad and humanizing about Frank’s documentary. It’s the stories of individuals who plunge into these waves of events and actions and attempt to shape the chaos around them into something less burdening and more beautiful for others. And sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they fight on in spite of what the outcomes are, and sometimes we just crash and fold.

Or sometimes we just tell ourselves that we need a break and then repeat the cycle again.

But that’s the other thing: this all makes it sound like I was some weather-beaten, grizzled activist subsisting on caffeine and living in a community all by itself. Which isn’t the case at all, and which again bears a point about how I was initially unsure about even talking to Frank and later, talking to people about it.

There are people I know personally who have sacrificed far more, on a much deeper level, and they seem to be carrying on just fine. No one, of course, knows what goes on inside. But that’s not the point. The point is that there are way active people in the Tibetan community and beyond who’ve accomplished a whole lot more, and here you have this seemingly solemn, young kid waxing poignant about how tough he had it and how he’s contemplating about taking a reprieve and all of that shit.

You see where I’m coming from, right? If you’ve stuck with this posting so far, you’ll get a sense of how I’m always in the frame of catching myself. It’s a perpetual series of me trying to snap a picture of myself as I trip myself on a rock.

There are a lot of points that should ideally be addressed in a more meaningful and forthright way. But I suppose today is not the time and maybe I’m not the right person.

It’s a fascinating thing, this to do with self-consciousness and awareness. You weave this orb of thoughts and conceptions that at one point totally grew beyond your control, and now you are, for better or worse, feeding it while futilely attempting to make sense of it all.

It just grows on, and keeps on full steam. And sometimes when the orb’s brightest, you just burn out.

And you put yourself on hold, because issues always come up, personality clashes occur, and at some point you realize that not everything you do will be under your control. Or have anything to do with what you think is right. It hits you in the nose like you just walked into a glass door.

We have questions many, but consolations few.

N.B. Frank did a wonderful job with the conversations and the subject he dealt with. The stories are told in a heartrendingly personal way that sheds an illuminating light on activism and the lives of activists and the people they affect. I believe part of that reflects the warm way in which Frank conducted his interviews. It was personal without being overly sentimental. And it was brutally straightforward and honest. Something I aspire to capture if and when I plan to trudge behind storytelling such as his.

P.S. Not that it matters in any meaningful way, but at the time of the interview, it was outdoors and quite brisk. I was cold, had a cold, and midway through the interview, I was really holding my bladder. Again — not that it matters … mjussayin yknow.