golbatgender:

Avoid framing your activism as destruction. There is already plenty of destruction. Someone else will always already be doing more than enough of it.

Try nurturing. Healing. Caring. Listening. Giving. Feeding. Loving. These are not defanged platitudes but ways of transforming the world for the better, if you commit to acting within them. They are far less easy than they seem, and often there is so little you will be able to do, but it is not nothing.

And often you can build yourself up along with the world. Destruction is breaking yourself again and again in hopes that what you’re throwing yourself against will crack, or manipulating others into doing the same (and possibly standing back and letting them take all the damage without doing anything to offset the situation, in which case go to hell). And then who heals the broken? No one, usually, because that is considered feminine and therefore unworthy, because sexism runs deep in the core of our language, below the level at which most of us think. Heal yourself, heal others; heal the world. There are enough people breaking themselves against the walls of the oppressors, there will always be more than enough; and growing tree roots can bring down a wall as easily as a battering ram.

Know this: if the only thought and only respected way is fighting, as soon as you break down a wall, you will believe it is necessary to build it up again. You will build barriers of pain and fear because that is considered more noble than healing or accepting, because building weapons and repairing the infrastructure of war is the only kind of creation and healing that is respected or considered acceptable. It is much more difficult, conceptually, to stop fighting and plant crops and feed refugees, or to try not to escalate situations, but generally a better idea. It is easy to fight. It is easy to want to fight. It is much harder, in a society already full of constant violence, to realize that there should be more, and commit to doing anything to that end. But it needs to be done. You can’t exist just to fight.