self-care and staying in your own lane

Normally, when we hear the phrase “stay in your own lane,” it’s a chastisement that you’re swimming outside the waters you know, and you need to get back into your area of expertise and let experts be experts without your meddling. It’s a phrase I’m guilty of using quite a bit when talking about the anti-bioethics sort that inhabit the harder sciences, and it’s in general a bit of a hard push back on folks who want to opine about everything regardless of pesky details like, I dunno, knowledge.

So Chris Geidner’s tweet about voluntarily staying in his lane of expertise is one worth highlighting, underscoring, and otherwise supporting:

Sometimes, staying in your own lane, your own area of expertise, isn’t one of “getting back” but knowing where to place your priorities and energies. And right now, in the current political climate, resistance fatigue, where people just roll their eyes at another protest, where you feel the weight of the world pressing heavier and harder because every day, hell, every hour, there’s another thing to resist and protest and pitch a fit against…. well, it’s a serious concern. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to conserve your energy as much as you can – and one way to do that is staying in your own areas of expertise.

This doesn’t mean you don’t support everyone else, it just might mean you don’t have to organize every single act of resistance. Let other people stand up and take over, let them write the posts on topics they know best, let them be the speakers whose voices you amplify.

Take at least a day off, every week – yes, it’s hard to put everything away and be out of touch when you know bad shit is happening while your back is turned. Trust that other people will catch it while you’re gone, and be willing to hand off the protests when you come back, refreshed.

Your own self-care is now an act of resistance, especially as they seek to wear us all down. There’s nothing wrong with staying in your own lane, and utilizing the best skills, expertise, and resources you have, to make the most difference – especially if you’re high-fiving the folks in the lane next to you as you do it.