Cary Tennis of Since You Asked on Salon has a great response to a vegan activist’s dark night. For those of us who are activisits, no doubt we’ve felt similarly. An excerpt of his response:

Sometimes we adopt beliefs that meet certain personal needs of which we are unaware. We might have, for instance, a strong spiritual thirst that no religion can satisfy, and so we imbue our activities in the secular realm with a spiritual passion and fervor, and so we take practical setbacks especially hard. Or we might have a powerful moral sense of right and wrong and yet a very sensitive nature, and so we are drawn to debates and yet find that we take things too personally. When our activities are meeting several needs at once, particularly when some of those needs are hidden, we often find that the thing we love is also the thing that gives us the most pain. So it is important for you as an activist to know yourself well.