JOYFUL RESISTANCE
On a cloudy Saturday morning sometime in spring, a group of mentally ill people gathered in a dingy Central London room to talk about a new group that we hoped to set up. The meeting had all the hallmarks of a classic organising session: an agenda to work through, tasks to be assigned, ideas to be debated, reshaped and recast. But one thing on the to-do list was less quantifiable, less allocatable: joy.
It’s something often missing from activism. For all the victories clawed back from the uncaring face of the world and all the pleasure that can bring, the reality can sometimes be less than joyful. Interpersonal struggles, concerns that we’re not doing enough, burnout and stress – these all hamper a collective ability to make change. This was the question our group gathered to ponder: can activism be structured in a way to incorporate fun? And if so, how?
We wanted successes, of course – the pleasure of running an event or direct action, the knowledge that we’d reached people or made progress with a project. But we also wanted to navigate the rest of it with the same vigour.
“Activism doesn’t have to
