Activism Is a Drug

It's exciting, but it'll consume you if you aren't careful.

There are many quotes from the science fiction series Babylon 5 that seems to continue to swirl around in my brain, but recently there’s one in particular I think about a lot.

I mean, being a freedom fighter, a…a force for good, it's…it's a wonderful thing. You get to make your own hours, looks good on a resume, but the pay…sucks.

While Alfred Bester was referring to Lyta Alexander no longer being able to afford living expenses, this quip can also refer to one’s own health and well-being. What can be a good, noble, and fulfilling pursuit can also be all-consuming in a very bad way.

Another word for freedom fighter is activist. I’ve been in ‘activist mode’ for much of my adult life. If I had to put a finger on it, it began with the advent of the Internet, which I was fully exposed to in the 90’s. If you spent much of your childhood without it, it was a wondrous thing. Imagine being able to talk to people (text-only, but still) you had never met, sometimes from around the world. What many refer to as the free and open internet was something so special I don’t think any singular word or phrase can accurately describe it.

This special thing soon became a target for many who viewed the freedom it provided as unacceptable and dangerous, and continual battles which rage to this day began. Something else began alongside these conflicts: A sense of obligation to protect what had been created. Some refer to it as ‘Internet Nationalism’, and it treated this wonderful thing as its own nation in many respects. It was mainly due to all of these phenomena that I became an activist for freedom of speech, expression, and keeping things weird.

This nation was eventually colonized by the rest of the world, of course. It began with commerce, but during this period the weird kids of the internet still held sway in many ways. It wasn’t really until the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of what was called ‘social media’ that normies began to flood in. This isn’t to say that any group had particular entitlements, but slowly the original culture began to erode.

Today, discourse about this erosion occurs in certain small corners, usually among locked Twitter accounts. Posting about how things used to be and our mutual disdain for ‘bluecheck’ culture, we hold onto our corner out of spite more than anything else. As the free and open Internet gradually becomes less so, we reminisce about the good old times and find a way to make some new ones.

The fight for and against freedom of expression also came to social media. The phenomenon known as ‘Gamergate’ led to the creation of Twitter’s ‘Trust and Safety Council’, and this term and apparatus became normalized as a method of platform governance. Various other events, most recently the capitol hill insurrection, have led to increasing calls for government intervention. This will undoubtedly lead to some form of regulation, and alternative platforms and technologies are already springing up (and have been for a while) in response.

As this bit of activism waned, I found my way into plant medicine. First in legalized cannabis, and later psychedelics, I eventually became lucky enough to make my primary living working in this burgeoning industry. Before I was a cannabis professional, however, I was a cannabis activist. Utilizing social media, I followed the evolution of legalized cannabis, both medical and recreational, around the world. I did what I could from my position of being Very Online, and had some significant contributions. I became known for livetweeting conferences, commenting on policy, and independent journalism. One of my crowning achievements was contributing to a report presented before the Canadian senate during legalization hearings.

For a time, I returned to my activism for freedom of expression on the platform that popularized what many now call audio social, Clubhouse. Having found my way to the platform during a stage when it was still forming its policies and norms, I advocated for freedom of expression in the face of increasing calls for content moderation.

Briefly I felt that same kinds of things I did about the early internet, but this experience was far different as the culture war became layered on the formation of a new kind of social platform. With hate speech having found firm footing on Clubhouse, I often wonder if perhaps this advocacy was misplaced, but hindsight is always 20/20.

Coming out as transgender last year also thrust a new kind of activism on me, one which until very recently I’ve felt obligated to shoulder. When your very identity is up for debate in the public square, it’s hard to not be in activist mode all the time. It’s become so exhausting that I’ve really found it hard to ever flip the switch to off, to the extent that I wonder if that switch really even works anymore.

There’s a thrill to being an activist. The feelings of righteousness when speaking truth to power are undeniable. Hard to describe, yet most similar to what I would characterize as excitement when I still had testosterone flowing through me. I’ve never really been a stimulants kind of girl, but I can only assume it’s also similar to many substances in that category, both legal and not. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of good that comes from these feelings, but it can definitely be something that you get addicted to.

What this leads to, however, is a sort of hyper-sensitivity. Even when I am definitely in ‘friend circles’, and not activist environments, I feel a constant need to activize. The immediate feeling that I get when someone is Wrong Online have begun to carry over into friend circles. It’s become increasingly hard to not view every contrary opinion as a prompt to activize. There’s no doubt my approach to the pandemic, hermiting in a 1-bedroom apartment for almost a full year now, has exacerbated the problem. The seeds of this problem were planted long ago, however.

It can be hard to be transgender without being an activist, however. Swaths of Twitter regard transwomen as no more than male sexual deviants. Trans celebrities such as Buck Angel opine that we’re just a bit too sensitive to the continual onslaught.

Clubhouse was once a pretty nice place for LGBTQ+ people, trans in particular to exist. Now it’s become much like Twitter, and it’s a 50/50 chance that discussions will be disrupted at best, and threats (including death threats) be levied at trans people at worst. With all of these things being the case, it becomes hard to not cut the wires to that switch and just resign to never having a moment to yourself.

For many it isn’t sustainable, which eventually leads burnout and sometimes very public meltdowns. I think this is a kind of overdosing on activism, when it consumes most of your life, negative consequences are all but inevitable. It’s hard to stop, you think that As A Person With A Platform, you have a greater obligation and you just keep going even when it’s clearly not healthy.

Social media has undoubtedly made a problem that probably existed before the first early internet chat rooms far worse. The instant gratification and rush of dopamine, the pile ons, and the posturing incentivizes people to become a certain breed of activist. I think a lot of this is just screaming into the void rather than accomplishing anything tangible.

On a personal level, I’ve decided that it’s time to flip that switch to off and smash the circuitry behind it. I don’t think my efforts result in anything besides transforming into someone I don’t like all that much, and remaining as that person for longer and longer periods of time. I think I’ve done a lot of good in the past, and as one of only a handful of visible transwomen in cannabis and psychedelics, just living my life is a form of activism.

Activism is also now a distraction from properly and fully completing the transformation into a person I do actually like a great deal when she manages to fully emerge. I’d like to conclude this treatise on activism by saying that I’d like to communicate anything, it’s that it’s okay to want to live your own life and not be in activist mode every minute of every day. It doesn’t make you a bad cannabis user, or a bad transgender person, or a bad whatever else. Anyone placing those obligations on you might just be Bad, Actually.