Building on my last post, I’m reminded of Maia over at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty (both sentiments, by the way, with which I wholeheartedly agree), and her recent post Many Stones Can Build an Arch; Singly None.

What is important in feminism? In political activism? I am a person who lives mostly inside my own head. I work off of ideas. They feed me, they fuel me, and thoughts and ideas are really my chief area of concern. This is simply the way I am. This is not to say that I’m not willing to do things, to act when I think an issue is important, but it’s not really my area of expertise. I need other people to do the groundwork, to help me be effective.

This is not to say that I’m totally out of touch with the world around me. I think I’m fairly well-grounded. I both derive my ideas from and connect them back to the world I see and experience all the time. I try to make my musings useful or applicable to everyday life. Maybe they aren’t useful to everyone, perhaps these aren’t ideas which really make their presence known from day to day in the worlds of other people, but in my life, the issues that I write about manifest every day, and honestly are important to me in a very real way.

But I often find myself wondering, “am I helping anyone? changing anything? doing anything useful at all?” I’m not out there organizing and drumming up support. I’m not an extrovert and I don’t enjoy being in charge of groups of people, even groups that support the causes I care about. I don’t like belonging to and regularly attending large groups, even if I’m not in a position of leadership or responsibility, because crowds shut me down. It’s too much input all at once; it exhausts me.

I think, that while the points raised both in Maia’s post and the article she quotes are valuable, that not everyone is really able to contribute to the causes that they care about in the same way. I don’t think I’d be useful to anyone if I tried to head a group, organize a campaign, reach out to the masses. Thankfully, there are other people who are more talented in these sorts of areas, and, hopefully, they are the ones who will try to make these contributions.

What I do best is write. Writing is what I spend my time doing, provided I have no other obligations, responsibilities, distractions. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction…it doesn’t really matter to me what it is, one way or another. Every other thing I do is merely an unfortunate, necessary condition of my being able to write and continue writing: eating, cleaning, sleeping, working. If I can manage to live my life in such a way that I can spend as much time as possible writing, not needing to waste valuable hours in order to make the money I need to survive, I’ll be in heaven.

And so I think, even in isolation, this is really the best contribution I can possibly make. Some of us are theorists. Some of us are thinkers. I’m not saying that other people don’t think…but that thinking isn’t really their motivation, not the means and the end all in itself. Some of us are only useful if we’re theorizing. I can try to go out and “do” things, but I won’t be half as effective, talented, or useful as I will be writing. Isn’t writing doing? Isn’t writing a verb, an action? Isn’t writing a way of organizing? Isn’t it a form of protest?

We all have our own talents and areas of interest. We are all good at different things. I think the best contribution any feminist can make is to do whatever it is ze is best at, and do it with complete, unwavering dedication. Do what we do best, and always strive to do our best at it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Feminist Movement, Theory.