Advocacy Is...

Hi y'all!

At this point, you're all aware that Congress has decided to strip all provisions for insulin from the prescription drug pricing bill.  You've seen my anger on social media, so I won't rehash it here, but let's just say the past few days have been consumed by our collective effort to fight back.

In the midst of all of this, I've been doing a lot of thinking about advocacy. (I mean, not exactly a surprise, seeing as basically every waking moment since the news dropped has been spent on exactly that.)  So, what is advocacy?  For me, a whole lot of things.  Here are a few.

Advocacy is putting your own mental health spiral on hold when you get a text breaking the news - "they screwed us over again" - and suddenly nothing else matters.  It's an emergency Zoom meeting link sent in an email with the subject line "what the fuck."  It's all hands on deck, all lives on pause, all in until we figure out what to do.  It's the exhilarating feeling of jumping into water without knowing how deep it goes - how long the battle will last.

Advocacy is an hour-long meeting that takes you from "it's good to see you again, Senator" to "with all due respect, sir, that's not good enough."  It's the realization that you're no longer scared of authority figures, and the pride that comes with that.  It's the sting of disappointment when your favorite Congressman tells you, as gently as he can, that you might have to wait for the next election cycle, and it's the sting of your split knuckles when he ends the meeting and you punch a wall in anger.

Advocacy is an endless string of voicemail boxes, dial tones, and heated conversations across the country.  It's the feeling of your voice going raw from hours of repeating the same call to action.  It's typing up emails to Senators while you sit on hold with their offices.  It's hanging up the phone and screaming into a pillow, playing a Green Day song just so you have an excuse to yell a few curse words, and then taking a breath and dialing the next number.

Advocacy is camaraderie with people you've never met.  It's a lunch break FaceTime with exhausted faces and coffee cups on screen and blood sugar monitors beeping in the background.  It's organizing for a rally you won't be able to attend, lamenting the price of plane tickets and the existence of work schedules, brainstorming ideas for protest signs and cheering as they're written.  It's pooling your Capitol Hill contact lists to schedule as many meetings as you possibly can and texting the group chat whenever you get a particularly clueless staffer or a particularly powerful connection.

Advocacy is anger, bitterness, exhaustion.  It's Zoom fatigue so profound you feel like a high school senior again.  It's an overpowering rage at the broken system and the people who uphold it.  It's long rants to your partner and long emails that will never get a response.  It's sharing your story - your trauma - countless times and seeing how little it matters.  It's the painful moments when that voice in your head begins to wonder if your work means anything at all in the face of such steep odds.

Advocacy is, at times, despite it all, the only purpose I can find.  It's the only thing worth doing when the world says there's nothing left.  It's the thing that gets me out of bed on my worst days and the spark that turns defeated anger into dry, brittle, flammable rage.  Advocacy is, above all, the art of creating hope where none exists.  And for that reason, it is everything.

I don't know whether our efforts for this bill will pay off, but there's always another fight around the corner.  Stay strong and stay safe.  Love you all.