Feeling Unheard

After the trial last December I ended up becoming really depressed. The trial felt like an example in miniature of the issues that ran through the rest of my life. I felt like I had been punished for trying to protect myself. I felt like I’d been accused of horrible things and never given a chance to tell my side of the story. I felt like I’d tried to do the right thing and ended up being dismissed, not listened to, not believed. And if the trial were my only concern I guess I could have gotten past that more quickly, but I felt these same themes kept cropping up elsewhere.

Around this same time I’d been engaged in the seemingly endless and largely pointless debate over the viewpoint dubbed “animal welfare” and the one we call “abolition.” If you read this blog, then you kind of know how I am. I make mistakes, I sometimes say stuff that I realize later was stupid, but most of the time I just bleed emotions all over the page and I’m more or less the same way when I say something to someone face to face. I strive toward honesty, both in terms of factual honesty and honesty about how I’m feeling and why.

And just to note: while some find the overly emotional approach a little self-indulgent, it’s not something I do without thought. I feel like I’d rather say to someone “I’m upset and this, this and this are why I’m upset” instead of pretending that I’m totally emotionless and impartial, all the while still having those same emotions color my understanding of events and arguments. A lot of the time I’m admitting to myself how I feel so I can do that little sanity check “Am I angry over the situation itself or how it’s being handled?” “Am I over-reacting because this reminds me of past situations where I was angry?” “Am I letting other stuff in my life come too much into this situation?” Because I don’t think pretending to be impartial works, but I do sometimes think that those who believe themselves impartial can cut themselves off from understanding their own viewpoint, and so are also cut off from understanding the viewpoint of others.

So, to sum up, I bleed emotions all over the page…

When someone accuses me of something I have to take a step back and consider: 1) what is the other person really saying? And 2) is this possibly true? So it messed with me a tad to be accused at various times during this debate of being “anti-animal,” of being a “dogmatic extremist” and so on. Emotions are high and I know to take these comments with a grain of salt. But still, it all felt a little unfair for me to be accused of such terrible motives or such defects of character, when from my viewpoint I was pouring my heart out trying to explain why I find myself taking this stance. And I do—I’ve poured my heart out on this blog, on message boards, in private email exchanges, and on list serves. I try very hard not to ever say “you’re wrong….” Or “you’re not thinking…” or “you’re being dogmatic….” Or whatever. I try to say “when I was up to my elbows in blood and pus, trying to save these animals, it struck me that I’d be doing triage like this the rest of my life, and others will do it after I’m gone, unless we could start trying to change the basic relationship we have with animals, and the more I read about this, the more convinced I became that concentrating on teaching veganism, as a philosophy, as a way of life, should be our primary focus.”

I’m over simplifying, but that’s more or less it. I’ve tried a lot of different types of activism, and I’m totally willing to admit that a lot of those efforts were dismal failures on my part. I don’t want to insult anyone else or take away from the very good work they put in for animals, but I also think that I’m saying what I’m saying out of some hard-fought experience and lessons learned from mistakes. But I found that most of the responses I got accused me of being some animal-industry plant, of secretly hating animals and wanting them to suffer, of not being intelligent enough to form my own thoughts, of not having even one valid point.

I think this is when I started not wanting to blog anymore. When I saw so plainly how other people might twist my words around, when I saw that for many it didn’t matter what I said because they were already determined not to read or listen, from their foregone conclusion I could have nothing worth saying… Well, then why bother?

So I trapped and rescued cats. The winter was spent on sick family members, various emergencies, and cats. And that has some good news. Sean and I managed to trap most of the cats in our neighborhood and rescue some more of the tame ones, and we’re starting to feel, for the first time in years, like there is actually some hope for this really terrible cat situation. But I didn’t blog and I didn’t talk to other activists, because I felt on some level that if nobody was going to even listen, then why I should put the effort in?

Listening, by the way, doesn’t automatically mean agreeing. And agreeing doesn’t automatically mean agreeing on all points. But as general rule, if I can’t paraphrase what the other person said, and have the speaker more or less agree “yeah, that’s what I said,” if I can’t do that, I haven’t really listened. The email and online debates convinced me that most people weren’t listening, maybe didn’t even want to listen. When it kept deteriorating to me saying “that’s not at all what I said” and the other person more or less repeating “did too” then there’s no communication of any kind going on there.

That, on top of living day in and out with the real possibility of the death of someone close hanging over us. Thinking about death while needing to give a peaceful death to a sick animal. Thinking about death while force-feeding an animal so starved that she wouldn’t eat on her own. That was the kind of winter I had. I know these are common experiences. I know we all confront death and living in our own lives in our own ways. I know everyone eventually faces those questions of when is it time to give up and welcome death and when is it right to fight with all we have toward life. I know we all fall down and then get back up and lick our wounds and move on. But even knowing the universal nature of these issues, I still felt powerless to speak of them.

I skipped the United Poultry Concerns Conference that was supposed to help us sort out once and for all the Welfare Vs. Abolition debate. I kind of figured that I had heard most of the same arguments before, and I was still haunted by that idea that nobody was listening. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe some people do listen. But I just had this feeling that no matter what people were saying, in private they said and thought that the other side had nothing valid to say at all. I know that’s unfair, each person speaking there is an individual and I am not a mind reader so I have no idea what they thought privately. It’s just that discouragement in me speaking up, urging me to assume that nobody is willing to consider any point of view but their own.

Anyway, I’m trying to stay a little more positive than I’ve been lately. I’ve had a number of activists tell me that my actual problem isn’t that nobody listens, but that DC is a mean town. They’ll tell me how much better they feel not living in city that encourages lies, interpersonal politics, and character assassination as a way of life. Well, I’m not moving any time soon. I’m still looking for my own ways to feel effective. A few people had asked why I haven’t been posting, so this is sort of where I’ve been for some time now.