Stage Two: Mobilisation
When anger and grief arrive
This is part of a series about activation without containment. You can read the introductory piece here and Stage One: Disruption here.
Content note: reference to domestic and family violence, including the murder of Hannah Clarke and her children.
Disruption cracks something open. Mobilisation is what happens next.
When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, something in me collapsed.
I’m not American, but I am a fan of democracy (flawed as it is), and I’m very aware that American politics reverberates around the world. As I watched the results come in, I felt shock and then grief. A heavy, almost ancestral grief. The sense of women being let down yet again by a system that consistently privileges men, even unqualified, inappropriate, and openly misogynistic men.
It’s the same grief that resurfaces whenever we’re confronted with fresh evidence of how power shields men and exposes women.
I went to bed for three days.
Partly a response to personal trauma - watching a man who had spoken so casually about assault ascend to the highest office in the US reactivated something much older in my body.
My grief was personal as well as collective.
Systems do not wound us all in the same way. Our histories shape how mobilisation moves through us. Sometimes it ignites anger, sometimes we collapse within.
It wasn’t that a candidate had lost. My preferred candidates lose elections all the time. It was who she lost to and his position on so many issues: immigrants, climate change, women.
I didn’t feel called to speak or agitate in that moment though. I needed to sit with the existential despair as it arose. I needed to listen closely to its lessons.
When the 2024 Harris–Trump election approached, I held my hope more cautiously. A lot of water had passed under the bridge between 2016 and 2024 - #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the 2019/2020 bushfires, COVID, the Voice referendum - to name just a few. I was beginning to feel quite inured to the machinations of the world.
So I carried the image of the first Black and South Asian woman president in the US gently - like a glimmer of light in my heart. I shared her words and her work, but I was concerned there were not enough people pulling the arc of justice1 in her direction.
Mobilisation doesn’t always look like fire. Often, fire - anger - is a protective layer covering something deeper. Beneath it is grief. And grief needs time before it can become language.
I wasn’t able to hold that lesson in 2020 when Rowan Baxter set light to the car in which Hannah Clarke and her three young children were trapped.
The violence was so visceral. I remember shaking. Crying. My entire nervous system felt activated. Even now, on the sixth anniversary of that terrible day, I feel teary as I write this.
I couldn’t hold the horror of what had happened.
I posted immediately. I didn’t want people to turn away. I wanted to shout at the world. I needed to take action and see others taking action too.
I felt uprooted, scrambling for something outside myself to steady the shaking within.
With hindsight, I see how unregulated I was in that moment. News of the murders had pushed me from my centre - from the steadiness that allows power to move through you rather than destabilise you.
So I acted from shock. From collective horror. From a deep, disorienting grief that had not yet found its shape.
What I actually needed in that moment was not silence, and not volume. It was containment.
I needed someone steadier to sit beside me. Someone who could name what was happening in my body. Someone who could hold the grief without rushing to discharge it.
We don’t have sufficient structures for that kind of holding in cultures that reward immediacy and amplification.
So we do what we can. We post. We retreat. We argue. We weep. We reach for each other in whatever ways are available.
Mobilisation is the body's response to perceived injustice, threat, or loss. Adrenaline rises. The breath shortens. The muscles tense. The body prepares to move.
Certainty sharpens, and the field narrows.
This narrowing has a function. It allows us to respond quickly. To protect. To signal that something matters.
When we are experiencing emotional surges, we are more likely to speak from intensity rather than integration. We may feel an urgent need to post, to condemn, to align, to withdraw, or to demand action. Immediately.
Anger can feel powerful and clarifying. But beneath it, there’s almost always something more vulnerable: grief, fear, helplessness. By tending to the pain at this layer, you reveal a very different type of clarity - less wounded and more connected to authentic, personal power.
Many, however, cling to the anger that sits above all that vulnerability. Because anger converts pain into motion. It restores a sense of agency when we feel powerless.
At the same time, it narrows perspective. It amplifies certainty. It reduces our tolerance for ambiguity. The world begins to divide into clear lines - right and wrong, ally and enemy, action and inaction.
In that state, we can mistake urgency for wisdom.
And in a culture built on immediacy, this narrowing is easily rewarded. Platforms privilege speed. They reward certainty. They amplify volume.
Which is how mobilisation becomes performance.
We confuse expression with contribution.
Stage 2 practice
This is the personal practice I’ve been working with to respond healthily to mobilisation as we continue to be buffeted by global events.
When I notice emotion surging in response to something I see, read, or hear about, I try to pause before I post, creating room for responsiveness over reaction.
Then I move my body. Walk. Shake. Breathe deeply, making my exhale twice as long as my inhale.
If I’m feeling really unsteady, I use emotional freedom technique (EFT/Tapping) to settle my nervous system.
Then I sit with my emotions and name what I’m feeling beneath the anger.
I ask myself: ‘If there were an emotion beneath this, what would it be?’
And I offer self-compassion to whatever I find there.
Once I feel more settled, I ask myself: ‘What must be said? What must be seen?’
Regulation before influence.
Samantha x
‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Except it doesn’t bend on its own - it bends because we pull it in the direction of justice.’ Barack Obama, 30 September 2025.