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Advocacy can take a lot of energy. It’s often something energizing that gets you involved in the first place. That energy can be either or both positive and negative. No matter which one or both is relevant to you, it can take a lot out of you.
Advocacy is filled with ups and downs, and often spiking in either direction. It’s something I hadn’t known when I first started.
I thought that when I would present cogent arguments to why something should be changed, that others would see my view and things would happen. It turned out not to be the case. The world is filled with a plethora of opinions and viewpoints, ranging from those that match yours to those that are completely against yours and sometimes actively against yours. There could be those out there advocating for something completely opposite of what you are working towards. Believe me that we are in a world that is not nearly as driven by facts and reason as we think.
This can cause some extreme swings in emotion, and therefore energy, as you work on your advocacy.
There are times when you present and the whole room seems to be against whatever you are saying. You may find that district personnel often care little or not at all about what you are working on. Some may actively oppose what you propose. I have been in many situations where this was true. It drains you. It eats you up inside. It can bring up feelings of why the heck am I doing this when no one cares? It takes a unique individual to be energized to the fight; I have seen many who just get more worked up to do battle in these cases. But when you are in fight or flight mode for so long, it will surely eat you away on the inside (more on recovering in another post).
Then there are times when the opposite appears. Parents will show up and thank you for your work. They tell you they agree and to keep going. You find that district personnel do agree with you and maybe are working on your advocacy already. Perhaps some strategy that you came up with actually starts working. It just happened to me last week on one project. I thought that district personnel were ignoring me and not supportive. I was ready to call it quits. But then I learned that it was a technical problem and also new updated information showed up where they re-integrated some of my requests. Wow – what a pick me up!
So I whiplashed from negative to positive in days, ready to quit to ready to go again.
I’m still not so prepared for these severe extremes of ups and downs. However, again, this is a topic for another post, but self care and preparation to keep one healthy in the face of these massive emotional swings is key in maintaining energy in advocacy.