An organization needs to account for this within its structure. Having recruitment goals and a clear onboarding and political education program allows you to choose strategies that support scaling up. There needs to be an even distribution of reproductive labor within the organization to prevent certain members bearing the brunt of the labor in unsustainable ways, and also new people coming in and being delegated tasks to free up more senior organizers to have a more manageable workload.

The reality is that until you are collecting dues and or fundraising to pay a couple of people to be full time professional organizers, it is really challenging to navigate and avoid burn out. The only way to mitigate it is a balance of choosing projects that are not beyond your organizing capacity while prioritizing recruitment and onboarding and political education.

You need to be able to take breaks from it. Even quit for as long as necessary. I’ve worked on a long union campaign before, so I feel your pain.

Every single time I get the rare chance to witness someone trying to organize more than ten people to do anything vaguely political, like talk about taking concrete steps to stop our government from unaliving children in other countries, it is plain how incredibly difficult the resulting onslaught of naysayers and argumentative donothings is.

I wish I knew what to say. I wish I could do what you are doing. But I have some truly insane circumstances that make fulfilling my responsibilities to my family feel truly overwhelming. So I can’t even begin to consider working on an organizational project.

Thank you for your service! I hope you can rely on comrades to take some pressure off and maybe take a brake. There’s a whole book that’s been written about this: "Burnout - the emotional experience of political defeat" (Verso) by Hannah Proctor. It helps to read the concrete experiences and strategies of comrades who have gone through this. As long as the revolution hasn’t been victorious all over the world, political success always comes in waves and after every wave, reaction will roll back some of the wins. Accepting this from the get go should help. The revolutionary moment will only not pass once. Until then, we have to anticipate reaction and only commit what we can sustain long-term.

We do what we can, comrade. It may not be the be all end all of everything, but every little bit helps.

I’m just starting my organizing journey via tenant organizing and grassroots union radicalization, and I feel you, I really do.

We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and I think finding your own niche helps ward off the drag.

You got about a year on me, so I’m sure you’ve heard this all before - all I can do is express both commiseration and solidarity. Do what you can, don’t burn out, and keep up the revolutionary optimism.

Are you working within an organization so you have appropriate support and can build morale within the group?

Maybe if you would elaborate on what “organizing” means to you, we could offer you some specific advise?