Dear Conservationist, being self-sacrificing doesn’t make the world a better place.

Dear conservationist,

Our industry is full of self-sacrificing people and for a good reason. The industry basically trains us to be the monks of sustainability, sacrificing ourselves for our lord and saviour, Mother Earth. Thou shall take short cold showers with a bucket, and thou shall use that bucket to water thine plants. For fun, thou shall collect rubbish from the beach, or stay up all night nursing joeys to health or pouring over research. Thou shall wear old clothes, eat locally sourced vegetables, and reduce your plastic consumption. Furthermore, thou shall get into a life-altering argument with your mother about her questionable recycling habits.

Even more than that, conservationists like you or I, work many years without an income, volunteer our time on holidays (if you can even call them that), and do most of what we do in life for the sake of others- be they ecosystems, species, or the next generation of humans. Our whole identities are centred around caring for others.

If this letter was a movie, it would cut to me crying at my desk last December thinking to myself that whatever 2024 would bring, at the bare minimum I needed to be happier. I remember thinking that it was insane to have such a short time on this beautiful planet and to waste so many days of it being miserable. This, my friends, is not any way to live, so I set out in 2024 to embark on what I hoped would be my year of joy.

Back in 2019, I created the blog Lonely Conservationists as a place for me to write about my angst with the conservation industry. I wrote one whole blog before it became a place for everybody to write about their angst too. I wrote a few blogs here and there on various topics, but after a few years, I didn’t want to hide the wonderful community stories by clogging up the homepage with my own words so I just stopped writing. Even now, all of the blogs I have written, apart from my first, have been deleted from the site.

I always wanted the community to be the face of Lonely Conservationists. I wanted to give a voice to all the under-valued but incredibly important individuals within the industry and provide space for their experiences and feelings to be normalised and validated. Over the years, we went from publishing community-authored blogs every Wednesday, to a few blogs here and there, to one every few months if I was lucky. After a while, I felt frustrated because I couldn’t force an increase in the dwindling community submissions, but also, if I wasn’t posting community voices, then who was advocating for conservationists? The more I took steps back to let others shine, the less able I felt to use the platform I had built to advocate for the people I cared about. I racked my brain about how I could help conservationists from my place in the shadows and every day it became harder and harder to become inspired. The longer this went on, the more I felt the community and my ability to help them start to slip through my fingers.

For years, I’d take regular calls with wonderful people from all over the world. People from NGOs, businesses, academics and creatives that I discovered in my tracks. I’d always ask them for advice because I felt so stuck, and most of the time these wonderful humans would tell me that I needed to create my own website or social media pages to sell myself, not just the community. Visibility builds credibility, as they say.

Every time I received this advice, I pushed back against this idea. Somewhere along my career, I had internalised the notion that in many facets of the conservation industry, egos were detracting from the actual cause. I know I have told this story before, but have worked in circles where rehabilitated animals were killed as a result of a release date based on the schedule of a film crew rather than timing it around the appropriate environmental conditions. I didn’t want to do more harm than good by letting personal promotion get in the way of the conservationists I was advocating for.

At the end of last year, I got my very first e-reader. Hooking my new piece of tech up to a library app (heck yes, free books!), I downloaded a random book that was recommended to me. The book I chose was coincidentally by a blogger, Cait Flanders, who I’d never heard of before, but regardless, I enjoyed reading about her year of less. Reading her words, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter that I’d never heard of her before, I enjoyed being nosy and learning about her life. I wished more people would write about their plights in whatever it was they were into. To me, the most normal stories are the most interesting because they are so tangible. In fact, this is exactly why I love Lonely Conservationist stories. I love how I so easily relate to them and how diverse, authentic, and vulnerable the authors are. Cait, through her writing, reminded me that anyone can take up space, in fact, more people should feel emboldened to take up space in this world because it’s possible to create wonderfully relatable or interesting moments for those who you may not even know.

So as my first act of joy in 2024, I created this very space on the internet to tell my stories and unabashedly take up space. I also finally made myself an Instagram page sharing actual posts about my conservationist care efforts because who actually cares?! The world isn’t going to get worse because I have created space for myself. This is something I came to realise.

In fact, the world only got better. After creating this space, I found myself with a guilt-free place to write that wasn’t taking away from the limelight of anyone else. I also get so much joy out of writing these letters, that I’d honestly do it if noone ever read them. They are for you, of course, but they are also very much for me. When I feel more fulfilled, I am a more pleasant person to be around, it takes the pressure off my job to give me purpose, and my overall quality of life is better. It’s mad to think that in some respects, I had internalised that the misery I felt as a result of my self-sacrificing behaviours was a net benefit to the world at large. This is annoying because I have always been very aware of how irritated I am by people who, as we say in my family, announce that they will have the smallest piece of pie. You know, matyrs.

When you meet someone who lights up a room, and who truly brings a zesty vivaciousness to wherever they happen to be, oftentimes it’s because that person has carved out the space they need to be that alive. Similarly, I think the reason that the podcast Ologies has done so well is because we love to hear people talk about what lights them up. I have been reflecting on my own stigmas and I think partly because I’m a woman, and partly because of a range of other socio-cultural reasons, I have associated taking up space with being egotistical. Being Australian doesn’t help. My favourite comedian Celia Paquola does a stand-up set where she says that Aussies are so used to downplaying everything we do, she’s worried she’ll have a kid and when someone compliments them- she’ll instinctively say “Nah, they’re shit.”

We can think of many groups of people who feel guilty about making space for themselves, mothers and carers especially. As the sole income earner for my household, I felt extremely guilty about quitting my job this year to make physical and emotional space for myself to heal. The thing is though, after two months off I was ready to get back into the workforce. If I had stayed crying at my desk for the whole year, burning myself out even more just for an income, I would have had to spend even more time and effort undoing the damage that I could have done to myself, my family and friends, and my career. The space I carved out for myself to heal and start again was life-saving and the foundation for my joy to return. Not only did that space allow me to look after myself, but upon hearing about my friend’s cancer diagnosis, I was emotionally and physically able to help her care for her 8-month-old while she had surgery and chemotherapy. If this didn’t prove to me that self-serving decisions could be beneficial to others, I don’t think anything could.

So now we are in a new December and I am sitting at my desk with dry eyes and an inner feeling of contentedness. This year I had to reach one of the lowest points of my life to realise that me taking up space in this world and being happier for it, is not the worst thing I can do. In fact, it is probably one of the best things I can do for myself, the people around me, and even you, my dear conservationist. There are many stigmas we need to unlearn in life, but knowing that you’re not an egocentric maniac for taking up space is probably a good place to start.

So as my end-of-year present for you all, I will give you the gift of permission. You, dear conservationist, are allowed and encouraged to do the following:

• Make space for yourself to heal or thrive, in whatever way that looks like for you
• Do things that bring you joy, EVEN if nobody else ever benefits from them
• In this vein, the next time you’re in a supermarket, get yourself a little treat that only you like
• Take up more space in the world – like the night sky, there is a vastness of space for us all to shine in

As you do these things, quietly notice how you feel and how others respond. After a year of writing my self-serving blog, someone recently shared one of my letters on LinkedIn and said that I was quickly becoming one of their favourite writers. This kind post completely invalidated past Jessie who wholeheartedly believed she was doing the world a favour by not writing even though she very much enjoyed it. Thank you poster. You made my year.

In a weird twist of logic, by being more self-serving this year I have been able to give more joy to others than I was able to when I was making myself miserable trying to take up as little space as possible. So as we finish this year, I want to gift you the lessons from my year of, well, eventually getting to joy, in hopes that you can have a more joyous and self-serving 2025.

You do you, you beautiful human.

Jessie