Queer activism needs hope. We need you to bring it.

It was a completely normal day. I was lying on my bed scrolling through Instagram reels when a video about trans bans in the US appeared on my screen. I watched it, then another one, then a news article, then a thread, and hours passed without me moving or fully processing what I was reading. I was just consuming, paralysed, caught in a cycle I couldn't break and feeling something drain out of me that I didn’t yet know how to name.

I know what to call it now. It was hope leaving the building.

What happened to me that afternoon happens to queer people every single day, and I don't think it's an accident. Exhaustion is not a side effect of the fight for liberation; for a lot of people in power, it's their goal. When we're too tired to organise, too overwhelmed to show up and too burned out to believe that anything we do matters, the status quo wins without having to lift a finger. The news cycle feeds this, the algorithm feeds this and the sheer relentlessness feeds it too. We are not imagining it. We are being worn down on purpose.

I say this not to add to the weight, but because naming it is the first step to refusing it.

Here's the thing about that afternoon on my sofa – nothing changed in the world while I was scrolling. The news was still there when I put my phone down, the bans were still real and the threat was still real, but I had lost hours and something harder to get back; the feeling that any of it was survivable. That's consumption, not activism and there is a real difference between the two.

Queer activism has always been powered by something more than anger. Go back far enough and you find people who were fighting impossible odds and still finding room for joy; for drag, for chosen family, for dancing, for celebrating each other in the middle of everything. That wasn't naivety. It was a strategy. Joy and hope are not the opposite of taking things seriously, they are what make it possible to keep going. Somewhere along the way, we started to forget that.

We have lost some of that. I feel it, and I think a lot of us do.

So, this is what I want to say, to two different groups of people.

To those of you who are burned out, and I know you're reading this because you're the ones clicking on articles like this at 11 pm when you can't sleep, you are allowed to rest. You are allowed to put the phone down and you are allowed to stop consuming the news for a day, a week, or however long you need, without it meaning you've given up or stopped caring. Your exhaustion is not a moral failing. It is the entirely rational response to being asked to carry too much for too long. By resting, you are not retreating or failing the movement.

To those of you who haven't engaged in activism before, who are maybe reading this wondering if there's even a place for you in all of this, please come in. Bring your hope with you and don't learn exhaustion first. Because the movement needs people who haven't had it trained out of them yet. We need people who still believe instinctively that things can be different, and that belief is not something to be embarrassed about.

What we all need, the burned out and the brand new, is to get better at celebrating each other, and not just the big wins. Someone came out to a friend for the first time, someone wore something they'd never dared wear outside the house, someone asked for their pronouns to be respected at work, and it worked, someone just got through a hard week and showed up anyway. These things are our movement, not baby steps, but the thing itself. Every time we lift one of those moments up, every time we say, "that matters, you matter, look what you did," we are doing something the algorithm cannot do for us. We are reminding each other that we are still here, still building, and still worth fighting for.

Hope is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It's a practice. It is something we make for each other deliberately, in the gaps between the bad news, and we need you to help make it.