#joining a discord broadly focussed on trans rights would be hell for me and i would be useless there

[sashasienna]

🐜

You're absolutely right - I don't engage in as much collective action as I should or as I'd like to these days. I've found it surprisingly hard to fit into my life since becoming self-employed and moving to a new city, but I can feel a gap in my soul where "doing something good" used to be. It's probably not helped by the fact my day job was in the charity sector (definitely, tangibly helping people) and now I write nerd shit and make niche role-playing games (creating luxury products in an oversatutated market).

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I'm looking for ways to get more involved, but it's hard to find something I can actually commit to. I don't engage with activism online anymore because it was really bad for me and more of a distraction than anything effective, so maybe a local group I can volunteer with? I'm thinking I need to pick one cause, and then choose one very specific issue within that cause to focus on, y'know? Like, it's so easy to get overwhelmed about climate change because polar bears are dying and I'm very powerless to do anything about that. But maybe there's some local species of butterfly that's less charismatic than polar bears, but equally endangered and maybe I can do something about that. Those butterflies deserve to be saved just as much as the polar bears do, and I've come to believe that little, local wins add up to bigger global wins much more effectively than tweeting and call-out posts do. So I guess, right now, I'm looking around for my local endangered butterfly.