Season 1; Episode 1: Two Medicated Girlies
Meet Darien, community developer, writer, activist, and founder of Zapta Magazine. For this premier episode, we talk about what it's like to love and hate a job simultaneously, burnout, how to find community, seasons of transition, mental health, and the birth of capitalism.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and RadioPublic
Darien is one of my best friends; we’ve worked together for two different non-profits; we’ve lived under two roofs together; and we’re both currently two unemployed, medicated girlies trying to drink every drop of dopamine to heal our burnt-out brains.
Darien and I met at university in 2019; we were both editors at UFV’s student newspaper, The Cascade, and were Global Development Studies majors. I was immediately drawn to Darien’s passion for fighting against injustice by joining local grassroots movements. One of the first times we hung out was to interview unhoused people to get their perspectives on the opioid crisis in the Fraser Valley. We’ve been specializing in shenanigans together ever since.
I’ve seen Darien go through many ups, downs, and shifts during our years of friendship. She’s worked in many positions: as a barista, budtender at a cannabis shop, community development worker, youth shelter worker, writer and editor, and in many different unpaid internships and research projects.
I wanted Darien to be my first podcast guest since we’re both in a similar boat right now with our careers and mental health. We both quit our jobs as Program Coordinators for local non-profits to prioritize our mental health and try to figure out what it is we want to do with our lives. We talk about the struggle of becoming deeply emotionally invested in our jobs to find meaning and purpose in our lives. This investment took a toll on both our mental health and physical health, so we stepped away from our work to prioritize our well-being ahead of our programs.
We worked in the same youth shelter during the height of the pandemic, working long hours and constantly dealing with teenagers in crisis. We touched on what it was like to staff an overdose prevention site and the challenges of working in the housing sector, especially with clientele as vulnerable as homeless youth.
We talk about the root of why we feel called to work for non-profits in a capitalist society. I work in non-profits partly because of my codependent nature, my need to be needed and my desire to fix all the broken things of the world. Darien has a different motivator, spite. Spite is a powerful motivator and is fuelled by the anger one feels when watching gross injustices unfold before our eyes.
We talk about how to use small-scale projects and one-on-one interactions to fuel systemic change. We worked in completely different fields, Darien’s work focused on anti-racism, and my work revolved around climate change action, but we both recognized the importance of making a difference in the life of just one person at a time. If I could get just one person to plant some native plants in their front yard, then maybe their neighbours would see this buzzing ecosystem and be inspired to change the landscape of their property as well. If Darien could inspire one person to give a meal to their refugee neighbours, a small community of empathy and understanding would be formed. Systemic change is only possible one person at a time.
We both left our jobs ultimately because of burnout, we were giving too much energy and emotional bandwidth to our projects and too little attention to our own mental and physical well-being. We talk about the struggle of burnout and the necessity of looking after one's self first. As the old saying goes, when you’re in a crashing plane, you need to put on your oxygen mask first before you try to help your neighbour with theirs. You cannot give from an empty cup.
We touched briefly on the McKee Neighbourhood Plan, a development plan in Abbotsford that would destroy key ecosystems for endangered species. The community rallied around stopping this plan by showing up to the city council meeting and speaking on behalf of these trees and animals that would suffer as a result of this development, yet the city council passed the plan anyway. It was a devastating blow to environmental activists in Abbotsford, but my supervisor told me that although we had lost the battle, we had not yet lost the war. I created a lot of the multimedia materials for the “Speak for the Peak” campaign, and was responsible for disseminating this message to the public, encouraging people to talk to the City Council. This topic could be an entire podcast episode/blog post in itself. We just touched on it briefly to lament over various “failed” social justice and environmental justice campaigns in the Fraser Valley and dealing with the disappointment in living in a community whose political views differ so greatly from our own.
Darien has been striving her whole life to build a community in Abbotsford; one that embraces people as they are, loves their neighbours, and rebukes injustice. Darien founded Zapta Magazine, an independent magazine focused on community development, during a low point in her life, as a creative outlet and source of connection to her community. Editing and curating Zapta is an effort to build community through information-sharing, writing, and art. She talks about feeling rejected by this community she has worked so hard to construct and be a part of, and the grind of transitional periods that threaten to upend life as you know it. She talked about the struggles of publishing an indie magazine with no ads and no funding, and how she paid out of pocket to print the magazine and could no longer afford to put any more issues online.
Burnout is a frequent topic of our conversation, the reasons why we both burnt out in our non-profit jobs; getting paid too little to do too much and putting unrealistic expectations on ourselves and our programs. We both experienced a mental health collapse around the same time this Fall. However, Darien has been much more open and honest with her mental health struggles. I gaslit myself into thinking I was okay for the longest time. I told myself that was just how the world works - everyone was miserable in their jobs, why should my life be any different? I talked about how and why I finally left my job suddenly and unexpectedly, and how everything would’ve been different if I put my mental and physical health above my career goals.
I took a leave of absence for my job mainly to let my mind and body adjust to the medication I just started to address my ongoing struggle with depression and anxiety. We talked about the side effects of mental health medications and our history with being on these types of drugs. At the time we recorded this podcast, I was still feeling all the side effects and none of the benefits from these new meds.
As global development studies students, we had to touch on capitalism and its root causes: modernization theory, the protestant reformation, and globalization. The Industrial Revolution was a turning point when new technology was used in agriculture, like steam power and mechanization. These new technologies increased productivity and decreased the need for 80% of the population to be farmers, growing their food. It opened the door to many new career pathways and income streams. Countries that industrialized saw improvements in their standards of living and infrastructure, and countries that didn’t industrialize but instead continued in more traditional ways of living were seen as falling behind. Essentially, the industrial revolution was the birth of capitalism. Society shifted from a community-based, labour-intensive way of life where we lived off the land and grew our food, into an individualistic lifestyle that grew personal capital instead of food.
The protestant reformation was another key factor to modernization as it primed Europe to take in a progress-oriented way of life. Individualism replaced communalism. Catholicism benefited greatly from social and political inequities; monarchs and nobles were seen as appointed by God and closer to God, and everything was the way it was because God willed it to be that way. Protestantism taught people that you didn’t need to be ultra-wealthy or a part of the clergy to have a one-on-one relationship with the divine God. However, this came at a price, because you didn’t have a priest to be the intermediary between you and God any more, you had to prove yourself worthy in the sight of an all-righteous, holy God. You wouldn’t know if you were going to heaven or hell until the day you die, this caused a lot of anxiety, which caused people to work to prove their virtue and devotion to God. Calvinism believed in predestination - you must prove that you are saved based on how you live your life.
The protestant work ethic saw financial success as a sign of personal virtue. God loves hard work, and the sins of Adam can only be relieved through constant toil and the sweat on his brow. Through Protestantism, all work was seen as holy work, not just the clergy or people who worked for the church. Prosperity was not a result of God’s divine favour over your life but through hard work. So, the Protestants helped to transform Europe from a communal, traditional society into an individualistic, capitalist society that focused on economic success. Modernization is the transformation of traditional societies into high-mass-consumption modern societies. It says that development happens through a change in mindset and industrialization.
This view is very Eurocentric because capitalism is king, the more capital you invest in, the better. This viewpoint ignores the fact that Europe and the Americas got rich off the backs of slave labour and the genocide of Indigenous populations. They prospered and built their wealth in a time when there were no laws against slavery or constraints on natural resource depletion.
Finally, we talk about rest. Rest as resistance against capitalism. Darien describes her typical day-in-the-life as someone whose main focus is resetting her nervous system and improving her mental health; in this effort, she has learned to become content with less. I am so trapped in this protestant work ethic mentality, that I need to prove myself and my worth through my work. I keep busy to distract myself from my depression. Darien emphasizes the importance of rest. We cannot heal our minds and bodies when we’re constantly striving for more, more, more. We must learn to be content with less.
That just about sums up our conversation. I hope you enjoy listening to it!
