[image]
[title]Fascinatingly, it takes four generations of monarch butterflies to complete their annual migration. The brightly coloured insects spend entire lifetimes travelling thousands of kilometres, pollinating flowers along the way, on a mission to further the collective journey of their species.
Nevo Zisin approaches their advocacy work with the monarch butterfly’s ethos. They’ve accepted that it’s work that will last a lifetime.
“I think it's so amazing that these monarch butterflies start this migration knowing that they're never going to finish it, but they do it anyway because that's part of their journey,” Zisin says.
“That's how I've been treating this life… how can I get as far down the migratory pathway as possible so that my descendants can carry on the baton?”
Zisin is a social justice advocate who works as a public speaker, author and educator across a variety of spaces, including their own social media platform. As a transgender, non-binary person, they’ve dedicated much of their life to outspokenly raising awareness of issues that impact their community, as well as creating spaces to support and uplift trans and queer people.
Their identity is part of what inspires them to take on this butterfly approach to their work, as they know that the systemic changes that have propelled society this far have already spanned generations.
“There's no way I would have been able to make a life as a trans public speaker and author if it weren't for our many, many LGBTQIA+ community members who lost their lives or dedicated unsung generations to fighting.
“(I know) that I won't reap the fruit of my labour in my lifetime, but simultaneously, I'm constantly reaping the fruits of the labour of generations before me.”
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Zisin takes a holistic lens to their function in this multi-generational journey, and while they have an impressive multi-hyphenate career, they also dub themselves simply as a “community member”.
“I’m becoming more aware of what my place is in the ecosystem that we exist in – recognising the interconnectedness of all of us and what our responsibilities are to ourselves and each other,” Zisin says.
“Showing up for the people around me doesn't just mean people with a shared identity. That also means people with shared values, shared visions for the future, and also people who share nothing except our existence on this planet.”
The inherent belief that we all deserve to belong, and we all deserve to exist… that informs a lot of the ways that I move and work.
Recently, like many social justice advocates, Zisin has used their social media presence to advocate for the Palestinian people suffering and being killed in military attacks on the Gaza Strip by Israel. Zisin is of Jewish faith, and in reconciling their Zionist upbringing with their own values, they’ve faced a reckoning within their religious community.
“I do believe we are in a very significant point of history where we will look back on this maybe quite differently as to how we're looking at it (now).
“Recently standing up as a very public anti-Zionist… that has been a scary transition… (but) I don't want to speak about that as an act of bravery,” Zisin says.
“It feels like an insult to say that when we think about the sacrifices that Palestinians have been making for decades and generations, it feels like the very bare minimum that I can offer.
“My platform has always been dedicated towards social justice. That's how it started and that's how it will finish… it's kind of always been like this and it just feels like, in a sense, my role in the ecosystem.”
And the work they’ve done in this role has returned recognition – being invited to give a TEDx Talk, performing at Sydney World Pride and hosting in-conversation events with heralded queer figures like Alok Vaid-Menon and Jonathan Van Ness – to name a mere handful of their recent achievements.
While their career is on the rise, Zisin says they remain grounded by referring back to a phrase they heard by Jewish teacher Dori Midnight: “On one hand, I am incredibly important. And on another hand, I'm not important at all. And if I fall too far into either of those, chaos ensues.
“I do believe the reason why I get a lot of opportunities and the platform that I have is because of the privileges that I hold… so people validate my voice in a certain way.”
At a time when many people are feeling weighed down by a heaviness emanating from unrest across the world, Zisin says they believe it’s imperative to think with a collective, communal frame.
“My advice to people who are feeling hopeless is you don't have to do it alone. There are a lot of other people who are here as well,” they say.
“For people disengaging at the moment, it comes from a place of fear. It comes from a place of numbing… There is a zombification that is happening in our society and people are living in a numbed state.”
I don't know how many lives we get, but if it's just this one, then I really want to be able to live it to its fullest.
Zisin shares that one way to sustain hope for the future is by finding “micro-moments” of freedom in the present – aka tangible instances of feeling free in our everyday lives.
They say it could be simply going for a walk with your dog, feeling the sun on your face on a winter day, making yourself a really good coffee, or driving down a highway on a Friday afternoon knowing you have the whole weekend ahead to enjoy.
“If we can come from a place of knowing, then we can write (our) futures together, because we do actually know what it means to be free and we do actually know what we yearn for.”
Zisin says this practice is a way to combat feelings of hopelessness and fatigue, and to sustainably advocate for people facing injustices. It doesn’t need to be spurred on by guilt and feelings of scarcity – instead, motivation can come from feelings of abundance and joy.
“I don't do my activism because I feel guilty about the privileges I hold. I do my activism because the privileges I hold make me enjoy my life so deeply and I want for other people to be able to enjoy their life so deeply as well.”