Several years ago, I learned about Carl Augustus Hansberry, a political activist in Chicago who, after years of racialized violence and failed policy efforts, made plans to move his family to Mexico in search of a different life. A life not defined by survival.
Just as he was preparing to begin again, he died of a brain hemorrhage at 51.
I remember asking myself:
Is this what happens when Black people and people of color finally slow down and seek rest?
Do our bodies give out?
As I continued learning, I began to see a pattern.
Lorraine Hansberry was 34 when she died of pancreatic cancer. Martin Luther King Jr. was 39, with the heart of a 60-year-old man when he was assassinated. Fannie Lou Hamer died at 59 from cancer and heart disease.
Audre Lorde battled cancer repeatedly before her death at 58. James Baldwin died at 63 from stomach cancer.
These are not just deaths. They are stories held in the body of movement work.
At the time of this awakening, I was recovering from my own cycles of burnout.
I was juggling full-time graduate school and full-time social change work while navigating toxic institutional cultures and supporting a sibling moving in and out of incarceration and substance dependency. I would go on to burn out again and again — until the one in 2021 that changed everything.
It was the morning of my sabbatical when I realized what I was experiencing was deeper than burnout.
I had given so much of myself to the movement, to my family, to systems that could not hold me, that I had pushed myself to the margins of my own life.
I had self-abandoned.
I remember asking: Where do I exist in my own life?
I was utterly depleted — spiritually, physically, energetically.
My nervous system had collapsed into a state of deep freeze.
Even rest felt unreachable.
I had become a stranger in my own life.
And I was the one who needed to come home.
What I would come to understand is this:
Burnout is not an individual failure. It is a cultural inheritance.
Within social change spaces, there is an unspoken belief:
If you are not willing to give all of yourself to the cause of liberation, then you are not revolutionary enough.
And yet — many of us are also longing to live the very lives of flourishing we are working to create.
This contradiction is not accidental. It is patterned.
Research reflects this reality. Activists experience high rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout — especially when organizing around issues that directly impact their own lives. The emotional weight, combined with structural oppression, backlash, and in-movement harm, creates conditions that are unsustainable.
But beyond the data, there is something deeper at play.
As scholars Rea Leiner and Jasmine Syedullah write, many of us have internalized the very systems we are trying to dismantle — glorifying overwork, competing in exhaustion, and abandoning care for ourselves and one another.
We have made a home inside survival.
And we call it commitment.
As Mariam Kaba reminds us, when we set out to transform society, we must also transform ourselves. The systems we are fighting live within us. Without intentional practice, we risk reproducing the very harm we seek to end.
This is where I began to see burnout differently.
Not as a personal breaking point —
but as a signal.
A symptom of a deeper cultural and embodied misalignment.
In All About Love, bell hooks defines love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
If this is true, then self-love is not optional.
It is foundational.
So the question becomes:
How do we love others well if we have not learned how to love ourselves?
What happens when self-love, self-compassion, and self-awareness are not the ways we have been taught to relate to ourselves?
What happens when we have become strangers to ourselves?
In my studies of grief tending with Francis Weller, I learned about the Five Gates of Grief — the ways grief meets us beyond bereavement.
One of these gates is the parts of us that have not known love.
These are the exiled parts. The hidden parts.
The parts shaped by survival.
In alchemical traditions, this is known as the shadow.
The shadow holds the wounds we have learned to hide — the shame, the disconnection, the places where we abandoned ourselves in order to belong, to survive, to continue.
The invitation is not to fix these parts.
It is to befriend them.
To grieve what was lost.
To sit with what has been exiled.
To slowly, gently, return home.
As a somatic practitioner, I have come to understand that the kind of transformation that sustains us over time does not begin in ideology.
It begins in the body.
It begins with learning how systems of oppression have shaped our nervous systems, our patterns, our ways of relating.
It begins with noticing.
With slowing down.
With practicing new ways of being.
Not just for ourselves — but for our communities.
For our neighbors.
For the strangers we encounter, in human and more-than-human form.
Perhaps the question is not whether our bodies give out when we finally rest.
Perhaps the real question is:
What might become possible if we learned to live and thrive — not just survive — in the worlds we are fighting to create?
What would it mean to be revolutionary in a way that does not require our self-abandonment?
What would it mean to build movements rooted not only in resistance — but in care, in love, in embodiment?
This April, I am hosting a somatic practice group for those who are ready to slow down long enough to befriend the stranger within.
To return home to themselves.
To practice a different way of being.
Learn more and register here.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
Love relationships? We promise to have a good one with your inbox.
Subcribe to get 3x weekly dating and relationship advice.
Did you know? We have 8 publications on Medium. Join us there!
***
–
Photo credit: Teemu Paananen on Upslash
