I'm finding it harder and harder to be optimistic and hopeful lately. I guess this is a combination vent post and request for support and advice.

When I first started learning about feminism and racism and capitalism and intersectionality and systems of oppression and the history of oppression and everything else related, I thought that the main reason things hadn't changed was because people simply didn't know. I thought that because those benefiting from the status quo didn't want it to change, they sold the narrative that it was the only way. I believed that once people started to understand what was going on, they'd want to participate in change. With time I've begun to feel like I was wrong.

My dearest friends and the people I respect the most feel the way I do; they suffer and struggle and sacrifice for change, they accept their limitations and their hypocrisies, they are willing to learn and change. But I've found that most people don't spend too much time or energy thinking about abstract issues. I thought this was a function of privilege, that those who suffered as victims of oppression often did not have the bandwidth to work at radical change... but I realize that privilege is so much more insidious and entrenched than I could have imagined.

I'm so tired of talking to people about the simplest of radical ideas. I'm tired of the whataboutism and the "both sides" and the bleating of moderates. I'm so frustrated with complacency and indifference. I'm constantly enraged at the denial of white and male supremacy and rape culture.

Every day I want to give up. Every day I ask myself who'd do what I did if I were to give up. And then I get up and I do and I speak and I fight.

I just feel so lonely and hopeless, you guys. I feel like those of us who care are so few, and those who have less power are constantly being shut up, sometimes permanently. I'm so terrified that I will never succeed in changing minds and hearts, and that the rich and powerful and heartless will win, that the imbalance of power that we live in is permanent.

I want to know I'm wrong. I want to believe that people are changing, that white people will stop talking about Chicago, that caste Brahmins will stop using purity as a weapon, that people will recognize and denounce toxic gender roles, that everyone will fucking understand what the shit bloody rape culture is and stop ignoring and enabling and perpetuating it.

I just want some hope and I don't know where to find it.

P.S. Shoutout to my boyfriend who will probably read this at some point: you keep me holding on and I love you.

Edit: I just wanted to thank everyone who's replied. I'm going to respond to each post individually tomorrow. I guess this is the place to find hope. :)