When the Well Runs Dry: Activism Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and the Quiet That Hurts

Aug 22
6 min read

"And still, I rise.” — Maya Angelou

Crosswalk colored by chalk in rainbow colors — Crosswalk for Pulse Nightclub

There’s a special kind of exhaustion you get when your life is one long emergency alert. You know the sound: new bill drops, another executive order, a “just asking questions” op-ed, a “both sides” panel, a fresh erasure in the dead of night. Your body starts bracing before your brain even catches up. That’s activism burnout. And when your empathy keeps sprinting after people you love while policy machines mow down everything in the way, that’s compassion fatigue. We’re living both, on fucking loop!

This isn’t theoretical or “culture war” cosplay. It’s policy. It’s removal. It’s rewriting. And it’s the complicit silence that lets all of it calcify.

Burnout in the Age of the Memory-Hole

Burnout happens faster when reality gaslights you. A rainbow crosswalk in Orlando, installed to honor the 49 stolen at Pulse, was painted over like grief is graffiti. Locals literally chalked the colors back, TWICE, because the state turned mourning into a code enforcement issue. And they’ll keep doing it. If you ever needed a case study in erasure breeding burnout, this is it. (The Guardian, Aug 22, 2025; them., Aug 2025; Florida Phoenix, Aug 21, 2025.)

And it’s not just streets. The White House and federal agencies removed LGBTQIA+ references and resources from public sites after January orders rescinding gender equity directives and dismantling DEI across the government; courts have already had to step in on parts of it. When your literal existence disappears from official pages, you start to wonder if you dreamed your own rights. (White House EOs, Jan 2025; GLAAD, Jan 21, 2025; KFF, Aug 2025; Williams Institute, Feb 1, 2025.)

Museums and public history spaces, places meant to hold our collective memory, are now contested ground. We’re seeing exhibits delayed, “re-balanced,” or briefly yanked; simultaneous pressure campaigns from the executive branch telegraph which narratives are “acceptable.” When institutions wobble, communities carry the weight AND the fatigue. (Axios, Aug 21–22, 2025; Washington Post, May 6, 2025; Oaklandside, Feb 5, 2025.)

Compassion Fatigue Isn’t a Moral Failure

Compassion fatigue is not you “caring wrong.” It’s a natural response to prolonged crisis with too little off-ramp. The administration’s policy program is engineered for attrition: flood the zone, keep opponents in reaction mode, and let the silence of “allies” do the rest. It has us questioning whether they were ever really allies to begin with because we have only ever understood silence as complicity.

Consider Project 2025, the Heritage blueprint that spells out how to erase LGBTQIA+ people from federal protections, health care access, and data collection while supercharging anti-trans governance. This isn’t subtext; it’s text. (Fenway Health brief, Jul 30, 2024; ACLU explainer; Axios, Nov 7, 2024; them., 2024.)

Layered on top is Project Esther, marketed as an antisemitism strategy, criticized as a crackdown blueprint on campus dissent and protest of the genocide in Gaza. It’s not “about LGBTQIA+ issues” on paper, but the playbook is familiar: redefine terms, conflate identity and ideology, and police speech. In practice, those tools migrate, QUICKLY, into suppressing queer and trans visibility, organizing, and scholarship. (Heritage, Oct 7, 2024; PBS NewsHour, Jul 28, 2025; JVP/Contending Modernities, Mar 13, 2025; Snopes, Jul 28, 2025; Vox, Apr 12, 2025.)

The Obergefell What-If: Anxiety by Design

Is marriage equality at immediate risk? Media says yes; court watchers say: likely not today, but the door is cracked. Petitions are in; the Court asked for responses in a Kim Davis–adjacent case, rare, but not determinative. After Dobbs, precedent has trust issues. Anxious vigilance is rational; engineered panic is the point. (Reason, Aug 21, 2025; NY Mag/Intelligencer, Aug 2025; Newsweek, Aug 11, 2025.)

The Quiet That Cuts, Inside and Out

Let’s name the ache: the silence of “allies,” and the strategic quiet inside our own community. The people who once rainbow-framed their avatars now “don’t do politics.” The orgs that should be loud are writing grants to survive the audit du jour. Some of our own are tired of being “too much,” or they’re hedging bets with respectability politics while crosswalks are scrubbed and archives get “revised” overnight. Silence isn’t neutral; it’s policy’s favorite accomplice.

But there’s a quieter wound: tone policing within our own ranks.It goes like this: a Black trans woman raises her voice, names the violence plainly, and someone in the room says, “Can’t you be more strategic?” A disabled queer activist posts about burnout, and the comments fill with “you’re being divisive.” Anger is recast as unprofessional; grief is recast as irrational; insistence on intersectionality is repackaged as a distraction.

Tone policing isn’t new; it was used against ACT UP in the ’80s and ’90s to frame life-saving rage as “bad optics.” Historians note the same strategy against Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson when they refused to let “respectable” gay leaders sideline trans and street-involved voices at early Pride events. And we haven’t moved that far up the field even today with the “normal” gays making political waves, attempting to distance themselves from the types of activism that gave them the freedom to speak their truth in the first place. And all voices need to be heard. (Duberman, Stonewall, 2019; Schulman, Let the Record Show, 2021.)

The twist today is that tone policing comes not only from the outside, but from within. In-group gatekeeping maps onto survival: some people cling to assimilation as a strategy, and any deviation feels like sabotage. But when the stakes are erasure and eradication, there’s no “right” tone that will save us. Politeness won’t unpaint the Pulse crosswalk. Calm won’t re-add our history to federal websites. Respectability won’t stop Project 2025 from explicitly “coding” us out of the law.

Tone policing drains us twice: first by muting the urgency of the crisis, and second by pitting us against each other when we most need coalition. That’s burnout layered on burnout.

How We Burn Bright Without Burning Out

Here’s the pivot: We don’t beat an attrition strategy with endurance alone. We beat it with design of care, of cadence, of coalition.

Shrink the theater, grow the outcomes. Pick one local lever (city council, school board policy, museum advisory board) and one federal lever (comment on rulemaking; support a plaintiff org) per quarter. Depth over discourse. Pair every “outrage share” with a 10-minute action. (Ex: public comment; records request; board meeting signup.)
Operationalize allyship. If you’re an ally, your silence costs us spoons. I’m sorry, but it fucking does. You could commit to a monthly standing action: email your rep on any Project 2025/Esther alignment you spot; donate to a legal defense; show up to the hearing (not the happy hour recap). If you’re in-community with capacity, pick one lane and own it. If you’re out of capacity, just say so and stand down on guilt and stand up a relay: hand the baton with your notes, contacts, and templates attached.
Guard the memory. When websites purge, we archive. Use crowdsourced archiving (screenshots with dates, Wayback submissions) to build a living ledger of removals in sectors of health, education, and culture. Push those ledgers to local journalists and watchdog groups. (See Williams Institute’s warning on data removal; KFF’s litigation tracker.)
Re-ritualize grief. Orlando shows us how public mourning gets policed. Make it harder to erase: pop-up memorials, rotating venues, movable art, chalk that returns as fast as it’s washed. Document everything. Grief is a record, keep making it. (Guardian/them./Florida Phoenix reporting.)
Build cross-issue firebreaks. The machine that censors queer history is the same one that narrows academic freedom and protest rights. That means shared infrastructure: copyleft toolkits, joint legal funds, mixed-coalition rapid response, so we don’t each reinvent the wheel, tired and alone. (See Smithsonian pressure reporting.)
Name the win conditions. In an attrition war, “We’re still here” is a fucking win. So is “we kept this clinic open,” “we preserved this exhibit as-is,” “this crosswalk got repainted,” “this dataset stayed public.” Etch those into your planning docs and celebrate them on purpose.

If you’re burned out, it’s not because you’re weak. It’s because the opposition’s strategy is working exactly as designed. Our response has to be designed, too. Not louder but smarter. Not constrained but composed. Not forever, just next quarter, then reassess. Keep the receipts. Keep the rituals. Keep each other.

References

Florida paints over Orlando Pulse memorial crosswalk; local response. The Guardian (Aug 22, 2025); them. (Aug 2025); Florida Phoenix (Aug 21, 2025).

White House and federal DEI rollbacks; website erasure. White House Presidential Actions (Jan 2025); GLAAD (Jan 21, 2025); KFF litigation tracker (Aug 2025); Williams Institute report (Feb 1, 2025).

Museums and public history censorship pressures. Axios (Aug 21–22, 2025); Washington Post (May 6, 2025); Oaklandside (Feb 5, 2025).

Project 2025 implications. Fenway Health (Jul 30, 2024); ACLU; Axios (Nov 7, 2024); them. (2024).

Project Esther critiques. Heritage (Oct 7, 2024); PBS (Jul 28, 2025); JVP/Contending Modernities (Mar 13, 2025); Snopes (Jul 28, 2025); Vox (Apr 12, 2025).

Obergefell context. Reason (Aug 21, 2025); NY Mag/Intelligencer (Aug 2025); Newsweek (Aug 11, 2025).

Historical tone policing of LGBTQ activism. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (Plume, 2019 edition); Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021).