Systemic Care: Sustaining Yourself as an Intersectionally Marginalized Leader

This one is for Mental Health Awareness Month. But honestly, it is for every month, because the weight you carry never takes a break.

If you are a Black woman, a queer person of color, a disabled leader, an immigrant founder, or anyone building radical change from inside a body and identity that the systems you are fighting were designed to exclude, you already know that this moment is not business as usual. The political ground is shifting faster than most organizations can adapt to. Funding is being pulled. Rights are being rolled back. And you are expected to lead through it all with composure, personally absorbing the impact of every policy, every headline, and every setback because they all directly affect you.

Research is increasingly clear that for leaders with multiple marginalized identities, the lack of psychological safety and the need to mask are chronic workplace stressors. You are not imagining the weight. It is real, it is cumulative, and it impacts you differently than it does other leaders who are not also living inside the problem they are trying to solve.

So this is not a blog about bubble baths and journaling prompts. It is about what it takes to sustain yourself and your work when the world feels like it has reached its boiling point.

Name What You Are Carrying

Before you can sustain yourself, you have to be honest about the full scope of what you are holding. Most intersectionally marginalized leaders are carrying at least three things simultaneously: the weight of the work itself, the personal impact of the conditions the work exists to change, and the labor of making themselves palatable enough to lead in spaces that were not built for them.

Research on activists during periods of political turmoil found that nearly 80 percent exhibited moderate to severe anxiety and depression, and that the ongoing nature of the pressure, not individual personal circumstances, was the primary driver. If you've been trying to figure out why you can't seem to put your feet on the ground, it's not just you. You are struggling because something is wrong with the conditions you are operating in.

Naming that distinction matters. It is the difference between treating yourself as the problem to be fixed and treating the conditions as the problem to be navigated. You cannot do the second without doing the first.

Understand the Difference Between Self-Care and Systemic Care

The origins of self-care as a radical act come from Black women and queer activists who understood it as a revolutionary daily tactic rather than an indulgence. It's a survival strategy rooted in collective liberation. Audre Lorde described self-care as a radical act of self-preservation and political warfare.

That is a fundamentally different framing than what the wellness industry has made of it.

Real sustainability for intersectionally marginalized leaders is not about individual coping strategies applied to structural problems. The current discourse on self-care too often focuses on individual behaviors and excludes the systemic and community-level factors that encourage, sustain, or inhibit those practices in the first place. You cannot meditate your way out of an inequitable funding landscape. You cannot journal your way through a political moment that is actively targeting your community.

However, you can build the conditions inside yourself and inside your organization that make sustained leadership possible over the long term.

What Sustained Leadership Looks Like

That looks like building community with people who do not need you to explain why you are tired. Self-care without collective care is not enough. Collective care — exchanging stories and being witnessed — sustains the work of Black women organizers and movement leaders. So, be diligent, find your people, and protect those relationships like the organizational assets they are.

It looks like building an organization that does not depend entirely on your capacity to hold it together. Leadership development, clear operational systems, and distributed decision-making are sustainability strategies. An organization that can only function when you are at full capacity will

eventually cost you your full capacity. It also looks like getting honest about what you will and will not absorb. Not every crisis requires your direct response. Not every attack requires your public voice. Not every ask deserves a yes. The boundaries you set are not failures of commitment. They are evidence of the long-term thinking your community needs from you.

And it looks like allowing yourself to be human inside the work. It's less about performing resilience for the benefit of funders, boards, or social media, and more about tending to what this moment is asking of you personally.

A Note on the Current Moment

What is happening politically right now is not a temporary disruption. It is a deliberate unraveling of rights, of resources, of the infrastructure that community-rooted organizations depend on. And it is hitting the leaders and communities who were already carrying the most the hardest.

You get to name that clearly. You are allowed to grieve what is being lost. You are allowed to feel the weight of leading through it without pretending the weight is not there.

And you are allowed to ask for help from your team, your community, your peers, and, if you have access to one, a mental health professional who understands the specific terrain of leading in social change spaces.

The work of liberation has never been carried by one person alone. It has always been sustained by people who chose, again and again, to stay in relationship with each other through the hardest moments.

If nothing else resonates, we hope this will: you do not have to leave yourself behind to lead.