One of the things I have been strug­gling with late­ly is fight­ing. Not actu­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly fight­ing, but fight­ing to make the world bet­ter. I’ve been work­ing with res­cued ani­mals for so long, tak­ing care of the dogs, or the wolves and still see­ing so much abuse despite the changes for the bet­ter that I’ve also seen. I’ve been won­der­ing late­ly if tak­ing a break, buy­ing a boat and sail­ing off is quit­ting. If it counts as rolling over in defeat? I hate the idea of los­ing. Which is a lit­tle sil­ly. I mean being con­cerned about some­thing so stu­pid. But still, stu­pid or not, it is some­thing I’ve been bat­tling with quite frequently.

So is step­ping back from a life that is no longer work­ing for you quit­ting? Is is tak­ing care of your­self? Is it both? Or nei­ther? I don’t know. I do know that when you talk to peo­ple who have been doing this for a long time they preach about the impor­tance of self care and that is not some­thing that has been a huge pri­or­i­ty for me. It’s hard to get away when there are three dozen ani­mals that you are help­ing to take care of, plus the sev­er­al res­cued ani­mals liv­ing in your home. Even though I had fam­i­ly that would watch them for me and oth­ers who could care for the ani­mals at the res­cue that is a huge thing to ask of somebody.Working with ani­mals means being on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week add that to 8 years of no vaca­tions and that is my life.
So I keep telling myself that it makes sense that I need a break, but I still can’t break away from the feel­ing of sur­ren­der­ing the fight. The fear that I am some­how let­ting the apa­thy win. If every­body gives up then how will any­thing change? But then again if every­body fights for change for a while imag­ine how much of a dif­fer­ence that would make to the world. So often when you do any kind of activist work, you know that you won’t live to see every­thing get bet­ter. You may see some improve­ments, but the world will still suck when you die.

But I’ve decid­ed that it doesn’t mat­ter if you make a dif­fer­ence or not. You don’t fight to change the world. You fight for your­self. Because at the end of the day you have to decide what you can live with. I can live with chang­ing my life, because at the end of the day I’ll still make deci­sions that I can live with. I will still make deci­sions that, hope­ful­ly, will make some dif­fer­ence. And I can help show oth­ers why they should do the same. I’ve decid­ed the best way for me to work right now is the Don­na Noble method of chang­ing the world. Just shout at it until it gives in.

For years I hat­ed that peo­ple would share images about abused ani­mals. I saw so much of it in my dai­ly life that I did not want to get on face­book and see more, see ani­mals that I couldn’t help. So because of that I have shared the pic­tures of cute cows and pigs, but not the hor­ri­ble ones at the dairy farms. I’ve shared the images of plas­tic filled beach­es, but not dead plas­tic filled birds. Even though it was that bird pic­ture that caused me to dras­ti­cal­ly reduce my plas­tic use. So here is my ques­tion, how do you feel about graph­ic images on social media? Has that ever made a dif­fer­ence for you? Has that ever been what tripped you up and made you change?