Right now, the headlines feel relentless. Day after day, we are confronted with news of communities under threat, rights under attack, and histories being erased. Whether you are Black, brown, disabled, queer, neurodiverse, a religious minority, a woman, or some beautiful, complicated combination of all of the above, chances are you have felt it lately. That exhaustion of being outraged, informed, activated, and resilient, all at once, indefinitely.
And here is what most media narrative does not tell you: these experiences are not separate. They are overlapping, interlocking, and deeply connected. The same systems that marginalise one group tend to marginalise many. When we understand that, we stop competing for recognition.
April and March are packed with awareness dates. Autism Awareness Month. Ramadan. Passover. Easter. Eid. Trans Visibility Day. Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Each of these observances exists for a reason, because the communities they represent have historically been overlooked, pathologised, persecuted, or simply not seen.
But the problem is, when these observances are covered in the media at all, they tend to be siloed. One community's story sits next to another's without any acknowledgement of the ways those communities share experiences, or share members. And sometimes the framing goes further, pitting marginalised groups against each other as if solidarity is a finite resource, and someone else getting more of it means you get less.
It is not true. And we need to say that clearly.
Solidarity is not a pie. It does not run out. The more we extend it, the more we have.
The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the way that overlapping identities, particularly race and gender, create distinct and compounded forms of discrimination. Since then, it has been taken up broadly across social justice movements, sometimes helpfully, sometimes as a buzzword stripped of its analytical power.
What it means in practice is this: a disabled Muslim woman does not experience ableism separately from Islamophobia separately from misogyny. She experiences them all at once, through a single life, in a single body. Any analysis or any support that addresses only one of those axes will miss something important.
And this matters for all of us doing this work. When we look around at who is in the room, when we design training, when we build campaigns and communities, we have to resist the urge to default to single-issue thinking. Because the people we are trying to support rarely have the luxury of being only one thing.
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with being politically aware and personally affected. It is called a lot of things: activist burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, moral injury. Whatever the label, you probably recognise it: the scrolling that never ends. The sense that caring about everything means being overwhelmed by everything. The creeping question of whether any of it makes a difference.
This is not weakness. This is a completely reasonable response to living in a world where, on any given day, you might read about a genocide, a vote to strip trans rights, a racist incident in a workplace, and a study confirming that disabled people are still being failed by services designed to support them. The weight is real. The grief is appropriate. Pretending otherwise does not help anyone.
What does help is naming it and making space for it, individually and collectively.
There is a phrase that gets used in activist and advocacy spaces that I want to interrogate slightly: 'you can't pour from an empty cup.' It is true, but it sometimes gets used in a way that individualises the problem, implying that if you are burned out, you simply need to do more self-care, as if that is entirely within your control.
Let us be honest. For many marginalised people, self-care is not easily accessible. It requires time, money, energy, safety, and support networks, all of which systemic inequalities make harder to come by. The burden of managing your own wellbeing in an unjust world while also fighting that injustice is not evenly distributed.
So when we talk about filling your cup, we need to talk about it collectively as well as individually. It is not just about yoga and journalling (though if that helps, go for it). It is about communities creating genuine conditions for rest and recovery. It is about movements making space for grief and fun and ordinary life alongside the urgent work. It is about recognising that sustaining ourselves is itself a political act.
There are things that are in our individual control: the media we consume and how we consume it, the conversations we choose to have, the boundaries we set, the communities we invest in. Choosing to follow accounts that offer analysis rather than outrage, or that centre joy alongside struggle, is curation. Your nervous system needs it.
There are things that are within our collective control: the cultures we build in our organisations and communities, the alliances we form across difference, the support structures we create for each other. This is where inter-community solidarity becomes tangible. Showing up for causes that are not 'yours'. Amplifying voices that are not yours. Holding space in your organisations for people whose overlapping identities mean they carry more than one burden.
And then there are things that feel beyond our control right now, like geopolitical events, legislative attacks, the persistence of structural inequity. For these, it is worth recognising: helplessness is not the same as powerlessness. You may not be able to stop a war. You may be able to organise your local community in solidarity with those affected. Both things can be true simultaneously.
You are allowed to be devastated and still show up. You are allowed to rest and still care. You are allowed to be a full human being in the middle of all of this.
We are writing this in a spring marked by immense pain. Ramadan, Passover, Easter, and Eid all fall within weeks of each other this year, holy seasons for billions of people across the world, many of whom are watching their communities suffer catastrophically. It feels almost surreal to speak of awareness months and observances in the same breath.
But that is precisely why we must. These dates, these practices, these communities, they are not separate. And the work of building a more just world is not separate from the work of holding each other up while we do it.
Take care of each other. Take care of yourselves. And remember: the shared struggle is, ultimately, a shared hope.