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Munroe Bergdorf: “As an activist, people expect you to say something profound about everything” A lot of creatives can’t support themselves just doing what they love, so they overwork themselves. As an activist, people always expect you to say something profound about everything. I think it’s difficult to not take it to bed. In other industries it’s easier to remove yourself from your work and switch off. Stepping outside the office, as it were. But I don’t just do activism. It’s difficult to navigate my media career as well as my activism. There needs to be some form of balance; I need to use my platform from the modelling to get my activist message across. Having a transgender woman of colour on the cover of a magazine is a form of activism in itself.
Xosar: “The key is for artists to learn how to say no” Burnout has happened throughout many phases of my life. The most recent instance has been taking on too many shows, more than my body was capable of handling. This was mostly a physical burnout because I'm incredibly sensitive, and the act of going on an airplane and travelling was just tearing my energy apart and made it really hard for me to function. Being in that extreme situation taught me to consider what I needed to recover physically. I had to take eight months off. I had to sacrifice a lot of shows and "opportunities" but it was simply what I needed to not burn out completely. I got my yoga teaching license during that time and started trying to spread knowledge to other artists struggling in the community. I think a lot of artists, who normally make art for the sake of making art, but eventually turn it into a career, face a point where lines are blurred. There’s a need to uphold some degree of expectation in order to feel like their career is validated. They are now financially dependent on their art, so they have to drain their creative forces to sustain this.
I'm willing to feel the burn of whatever comes along with self-care. Whether that’s less followers or getting yelled at by my agency because I'm not getting enough booking requests. I'll take that over sacrificing my mental and physical health. I hope that more artists are honest and open about how they are suffering as soon as they feel their health is starting to be compromised. I believe general awareness is spreading in people's needs to honour their own limits, but many are still stuck in toxic cycles. The pressure of success is immense and overwhelming, but people should align with their own definition of success. You have the power to re-define the conditions of your life. The key is for artists to learn how to say no when enough is enough, for agents to not push artists past their boundaries, and to be compassionate in helping an artist define those boundaries, instead of exploiting them for what they're worth. Sounds typical, but keep trying and don't give up. Xosar is a Berlin-based DJ, producer and wellness instructor for artists in the electronic music community
Burn out is probably the hardest thing that I have to contend with. A lot of the time you don’t see it coming. I find it hard to recognise the signs, especially when you’re so close to your cause. With me, speaking about racism and transphobia, it opens up old wounds about how I’ve felt in my life. You can block out the noises from other people but burnout definitely forces you to look inside yourself and that can be a scary place when there’s trauma there. This hits creatives hard because a lot of us are doing what we love but sometimes the boundaries that we set for ourselves get pushed because we’re doing what we love. We think, ‘oh, I’ll just do this for a few hours’ and then that turns into more hours, days, weeks. We take on too much because we’re scared of losing out on opportunities that might not come so frequently. We overcommit or overpromise. We don’t think about the fact that we need to be there for ourselves rather than other people.
Figuring out what works for you will help stop you from burning out. I’ve realised out that there’s no one form of activism – some things work for me that don’t work for others, and vice versa. We’re all working together as a machine rather than individual parts. We’ve all got to play as a team. For example, I find protests extremely triggering. It’s about selecting what works for you. Know what your strengths are. My strengths are my writing, my platform, my reach. I use my platform to amplify the voices of other people. I think the key is to try to think about how you’re going to feel, not how you feel at the moment. Whenever I feel like I’m burning out, my go-to self-care regimen is: scent, sex and ice cream. It’s about finding your happiness and being aware of your surroundings. Munroe Bergdorf is a model and activist leading the fight for trans visibility