It’s cold here in Cape Town. We’re technically headed into spring, but it feels like winter just keeps hanging on, its driving rain and winds buffeting the apartment. I’m huddled next to our unquestionably hazardous and beloved gas space heater as I type this, 21st century Bob Cratchit-style, with fingerless gloves. My hands are still numb.

There is a thread here (albeit a thin one): numbness.

Or numbing, really, as a self-preservation technique. I’ve used it for years as an emotional coping mechanism to offset the horrifying stories of human cruelty that are part of a day job in human rights advocacy. Sometimes it takes the form of gallows humor. Others, it’s a slow shake of the head and long exhale as I pour a glass of wine at the end the day. In DR Congo, it was R&R trips where I’d try to disengage, but would inevitably come down with a cold as the effect of months of frantic work caught up with me all at once.

But I digress…

In my twenties and early thirties, I exhausted myself with long hours working and even longer ones beating myself up for not having enough of an impact, not creating enough meaningful change. Time, experience and humility have helped me take a step back, see myself as a very small part of a very big picture, and separate my Self from my Work. I only started to acknowledge the importance of that space when respected human rights defender groups began to talk about it as acceptable. This idea of well-being and “self-care not as selfishness, but as a subversive and political act of self-preservation,” felt taboo, and took a while to sink in. But sink in it did. And over the past few years I’ve curated a kind of balance when it comes to work, slowly and carefully detangling knots until I can even set an out of office message without a full-on existential crisis.

Ok - yes, this is also bound up in other fun personality traits of mine like perfectionism and trouble delegating, but there was, beneath it all, a deep undercurrent of guilt surrounding time off, time away from the suffering of others, when I, comparatively, suffer not at all.

But then comes the worry: has this little experiment been too successful? Am I now too numb? Have I protected myself too much?

It often feels like it’s all there - the rage, the sadness, the confusion and pure disgust at inhumane acts, systems, people, orange muppets. It’s just bubbling under my skin - ever-present, but controlled, repressed. Polite Anger…until it spikes, erupting at the surface, ignited by the latest headline or anecdote or comment. It just happened the other day: I was out for a run, when Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name (an all-time fave) rotated through my playlist. Suddenly I was sprinting past people walking their dogs, mentally cursing what I perceived as their blithe ignorance.

Cliché, I know, but sometimes it literally takes my breath away - that reminder of how furious I truly am.

But how do I make it constructive? How do we, in this field, maintain our humanity and empathy without letting it consume us? How do we channel our rage and direct it, with laser-focus and precision, at the perpetrators of these acts, and then go home to our families and sleep at night? Especially when so many front line human rights defenders are doing the hard work, taking the real risks, and can’t go home to their families and their beds?

Is it possible for activism to not be all-consuming? Is that even real activism?

I don’t know. I’m just asking.