Burnout, Grief and The Solidarity Apothecary w/ Nicole Rose

For episode 209, Elia sits down with Nicole Rose from The Solidarity Apothecary to talk about her Overcoming Burnout series, which is also a podcast and an e-book. We talked about burnout, grief, trauma, mutual aid, herbalism, and more.

Note: this was recorded in November 2025, a few days before the death of my dog Flip. This is why it took until now to publish the episode.

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Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, episode design), Nicole Rose (guest), Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics)

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Capitalism is pushing us one way—to constantly reject our bodily needs and pretend they don’t exist—and herbalism is pushing us the other way: Hey, feel your body! Observe the world, have a relationship with the land.

Nicole Rose: Thanks so much for inviting me to chat, it’s a real honor.

I’m Nicole, I’m an anarchist and a herbalist focused on supporting people experiencing state violence, through a project called the Solidarity Apothecary. It’s a whole thing, but I basically offer one-to-one support for people leaving prison, or prisoner family members. I also send herbal care packages to people all over the world who are experiencing state repression of different kinds.

I wrote a book called the The Prisoner’s Herbal, which goes to people in prison all over the world. I’m also involved in a separate project called the Mobile Herbal Clinic Calais. Before I had my little one I was working a lot in France with a clinic, a team of herbalist doctors supporting thousands of refugees and people on the move there. The project’s still going, I’m just doing behind-the-scenes medicine-making and fundraising.

I fund all of that through online courses; I teach a course about herbalism, PTSD and traumatic stress. I sell books online, like Herbalism and State Violence, and that enables me to do what I do. It’s a thing I run on my own, but I work with people all over the world, and it’s a huge collective effort.

As context, I started learning about herbalism when I was in prison, when I was twenty-one. I did a three-and-a-half year sentence as part of a repressive operation against a campaign trying to close down an animal testing company. That experience was quite foundational in what I do now. I’d already started supporting people in prison; when I was sixteen my first boyfriend got sent down, so I’ve been supporting folks in prison for twenty years now, and involved in various social struggles.

We can talk about the burnout stuff, but the very short version is I was in hospital in 2016 after a really intense anti-repression speaking tour, and I got really sick. I started writing about it, and it went viral; Active Distribution, an anarchist publisher, was like, Yo, Nicole, can we put it in a book? I was like, Go on then! That fundraises to support all the prisoner-support stuff.

Elia J. Ayoub: There are so many different ways we can go through this. I listened to Overcoming Burnout, the book you just mentioned, as a podcast. But in case people don’t know what herbalism is, can you explain it a bit?

NR: Yeah. Plant medicines have been the primary form of medicine for people as well as animals since time began. It’s a whole other massive podcast, how the birth of capitalism and more patriarchal medicine has affected our relationship to plant medicines. As a herbalist I’m working with plants, so I’m learning about their properties in depth—different medicinal actions, how they affect the body—and also studying the human body and different disease states, and trying to pair up people and plants.

It’s still the primary form of healthcare on the planet, and when I get people who are new to herbalism or are a bit skeptical, I’m like, So you don’t drink coffee? And they’re like, What? Literally, if you’re drinking a cup of coffee you’re having plant medicine every day. You’re having that stimulation, that laxative effect; maybe it’s giving you energy and concentration. That’s basically what herbalism is: just working with plants to change and interact with the body.

EA: If you put “frontline” and “herbalism” together—I love the aesthetics of this title, that’s something I’m obsessed with. But it makes you think of two different things at the same time; “frontline” is action, it’s fast, you’re confronting something—whereas “herbalism” is not quite passive but more like something someone does in the background. So putting those two together is very interesting, and one of the reasons I ended up listening to the podcast.

NR: Cool! I see a frontline as anywhere we’re doing any social struggle, social change work: a local harm reduction project working with people who are using drugs, who are being fucking attacked by the police or something, is as much a frontline thing as working in a refugee camp somewhere or doing other survival solidarity work.

Herbalism is an amazing tool because ultimately these struggles, like all processes, shape our body, shape our health—whether that’s trauma or class or colonialism and capitalism. We need all the solidarity we can get from the plant world to help survive these systems, and herbalism is a beautiful way of putting that change in practice now. What does an ecologically sustainable and beautiful reciprocal relationship with the land look like?

Not all herbalism! There is also capitalist herbalism and horrible shit going on. But plants are amazing fucking teachers in how we rebuild the world. God, that sounded cheesy, but you know what I mean.

EA: I’m a newbie when it comes to herbs in general. I do drink tea a bit, and besides coffee I would say I still have a lot to learn. I grew up drinking a lot of coffee, and now that my stomach doesn’t tolerate coffee that well I’ve been moving more towards black and green tea, and herbal tea more specifically these days.

I admit I’ve been fascinated by how much you can experiment—I’ve been putting different things together and seeing how that works. I took it for granted that it’s always there; I definitely undervalued how rich and beneficial it can be, and also how radical it can be. You can take the perspective that you’re doing this for yourself (which isn’t inherently a bad thing), but what you do very well is the perspective that if you are learning about this, it’s also important that you do so as part of a more collective project, this intention for collective liberation—and not just human liberation, but the more-than-human world as well.

NR: For sure. I love that the best way to learn herbalism is all about the body—capitalism really affects our relationship with our bodies, which is a major contribution to burnout. But herbalism is this fucking awesome teacher: you start to notice things. You mentioned your stomach, for example; sometimes you spend years not even aware of your own stomach, and then you can start having teas and being like, Ooh, this feels like this, and this is making me go to the toilet more, or less. That’s what I mean with plants-as-teachers. They teach us so much.

EA: I was stuck in a loop for a while—it’s a habit I barely thought about. When I would have coffee in the morning, I would not feel well for quite some time. It took my partner repeating this a bunch of times and then me actually realizing it: maybe don’t do that, maybe do something else in the morning. I’m a habits person, so it took me quite some time, unconsciously drinking the coffee and realizing after a couple sips that it’s not what I intended to do this morning.

I wanted to ask later on about the class component of burnout, but you mentioned the relation between capitalism and our bodies. I wonder if you’d be okay with expanding on that a bit: herbalism as a way of connecting with our bodies, and capitalism contributing to the disconnect with our bodies.

NR: Fundamentally, to exist in a world where there is so much fucking harm, oppression, and violence against people and animals and landscapes, we need to be separate from that sensory input of what the fuck is happening. Anyone will know, if you scroll on your phone through fucking Instagram for more than three minutes, you’re going to start dissociating. There’s no way on Earth you can feel that amount of suffering that is happening.

There is a real intentionality with how our systems are designed—I’m talking as someone who grew up in England and Wales, but capitalism constantly demands repression of needs. You have to get up really early and go to school, you have to go to work and sit your fucking body at a desk when really you want to be moving around and connecting with the landscape and connecting with other humans.

There is this constant self-repression of the body. I wrote a piece called “Herbalism is a Rebellion Against Self-Neglect.” Part of it was that it was herbs that taught me to start feeling my body. I had been so separate from it because of gnarly childhood stuff, sexual abuse as a child, and all this fucking horrible shit that meant it’s not safe to be in the body, and therefore you are able to just use it as a machine, or as a workaholic. I used to organize into oblivion: just keep organizing, keep going, ignore your needs, ignore your need for sleep.

I got into herbalism from a more political thing, more green anarchist shit, recognizing some of the challenges with the capitalist pharmaceutical industry. And plants, because you have to have this sensory relationship to them, began teaching me about my body. Oh! This plant can help you sleep well! Or, Wow, that’s the deepest, nicest sleep I’ve ever had in my life! Or, Wow, I slept through the entire night without a nightmare because I rubbed a bunch of lavender oil on my neck before I went to bed.

Plant medicines constantly teach you different things about your body, and then you start to notice, Ooh, I’m getting sick, maybe I’ll make a ginger decoction, or start having more garlic in my food. Capitalism is pushing us one way—to constantly reject our bodily needs and pretend they don’t exist—and herbalism is pushing us the other way: Hey, feel your body! Observe the world, have a relationship with the land. Hopefully that can help us feel that drive in us to be like, I want to stop these ecocidal, destructive systems.

EA: I went through burnout, for quite some time, and I’ve been dealing with that part of my life a bit like how one would deal with grief, in the sense that I’m not over it. I wouldn’t describe myself today as “still burnt out,” but the recovery process is not linear. There’s moments where I feel more intensely like I did at that time, it’s just not as prolonged as it used to be.

One of the components of that, which is one of the things I’m working on now to get better, is the disconnect with the body. For a number of years, I almost forgot that I’m physical, that I have a body. I knew that I need to shower and go to the loo, but self-care was pretty minimal because of depression and burnout. It’s only through that process of recovery—I went to therapy, lots of friends and my partner also helping me, also learning how to cook—that I started realizing how much of the issue had lodged itself in the body. It became a way that I atrophied—not necessarily in a physical sense; I was walking a lot. It was emotional, but I would feel it in the body, if that makes sense.

I’m almost done with the Overcoming Burnout podcast, which as you said is also a book, and a series of blog posts. I listened to ten of them in a row and then I emailed you—that’s how much I connected with it. I recognized a lot of what you were talking about. My own personal background is I used to be involved in organizing, and a lot of the burnout I ended up feeling came from work and capitalism and all of that, rather than the protest movement—which was actually energizing if anything, though there was some trauma, some repercussions. But I felt that later on, not in the moment.

I have this mode—maybe it’s adrenaline, whatever it might be—where I’m hyperfocused in the moment, for however long is required, and once that is done (or I can’t anymore) there’s a prolonged, slow and then not-so-slow crash. Now I’m better at coping with it, in some sense, but it’s never fully gone. A big part of why it’s not fully gone is that we still live in the world that caused these harms in the first place, and in many ways they have gotten worse since.

The book and podcast—there’s a convenient paragraph describing what it’s about. Would you mind reading it?

NR: Sure.

Organizing with others for human, animal, and Earth liberation can be one of the most empowering experiences alive. Frontline resistance comes with risks to our physical and emotional health that can lead many people to burn out and abandon social movements altogether.

This book is about overcoming burnout, linking the author’s journey of recovery with wider systemic forces such as classism, sexism, and power dynamics in groups, poverty, chronic illness, and ableism, as well as grief and trauma from prison and state repression.

It is a call for models of mutual aid and collective care, simultaneously deeply personal and acutely political. For anyone involved in grassroots organizing, it is a must-read.

EA: If you don’t mind, talk to us about the Overcoming Burnout series itself. You mentioned how it started off as a thing you felt like you needed to get out there, needed to write about, but it went viral. What was the feedback like? What were people connecting with?

NR: Like I mentioned, I ended up in hospital with really bad rib pain, which lasted for several years. It propelled me to do clinical training, so I am grateful for those experiences. But every blog was the outcome of something that was going on in my life in that moment, some theme that was coming up. There were twenty-three of them in the end. I’m a real control-freak planner type, but it was all unplanned and spontaneous—almost rants, to be honest. I’d often just wake up in the middle of the night and write, just to get all this stuff out.

And it just went fucking viral. People from everywhere were emailing me, being like, Oh my god, I’ve seen this in my groups. The second blog in the series is, “When Did I Get So Mean?” and I just listed mean fucking thoughts I would have about other people and about myself, and it was raw and honest. Why aren’t people taking things seriously? Everyone treats struggle like a game? People connected with it because they could see it where they were. I was always amazed at how international that was, because I was really writing as someone who had been involved in social movements mostly in the UK. So it always amazed me when someone literally from fucking Palestine would email me.

I want to acknowledge that I’ve changed a lot. I do a little introduction to the podcast series (which is a free podcast where I’m recording the chapters): I’ve grown and changed a lot since I started writing.

EA: I like the fact that you’re reading thoughts that were in the past but are still very relevant to today, and that component of it being raw.

I have in front of me episode seven, “Composting Grief,” where you have these general questions: What losses have you experienced as an organizer? How do you feel about them? Which of your losses are the most painful or incomplete? How do you talk about or work with grief in your collective? If you’ve experienced repression, how has and/or does it feel? How do you honor fallen comrades?

You read the blog post reflections, then you ask these open-ended questions, inviting the listener to also reflect on them (which I’ve certainly been doing and am still doing). I presume that must have been part of why it went viral, why so many people were relating to it, even someone from Palestine or what have you. Because at times it’s specific—you’re a specific person who went through specific experiences— but a lot of it can be more generalized; more people have experienced elements and versions of this. It’s presented in a way that is very approachable, which is not always what you find.

As part of the From The Periphery media collective, the collective this podcast is part of, we have another podcast called the Mutual Aid Podcast. They have long episodes where they have conversations with people about mutual aid, and the strength of it is it’s informal while also being semi-structured; focused and not rambly (neither is your podcast, to be clear). It allows the listener to be present and listen to the very specific things being talked about, the questions the guests and hosts are trying to answer, but also it’s broad enough that if you don’t know the specifics of what that episode is about, you can still relate to those broader questions.

Doing both at once is a difficult balance, but you’ve done it quite well.

NR: Thank you. I think there are just common themes of being a human. Since I didn’t have formal education—I left home when I was sixteen, I didn’t go to university or anything—I think it made a lot of the writing more accessible. Things like grief, division of labor in groups, and trauma are very human things. In social movements, people are very cerebral, often very intellectual, and even if it’s something related to someone’s lived experience, it’s very much like…theory. And one of the things I bring to the world is I’m a grounded, practical person—hence the herbalism—and I think people crave that.

Like we talked about already, we’re disconnected from the body. And people are fucking shit at talking about feelings. When do you learn how to talk about feelings? My mum, bless her—I was brought up by a single mum on benefits with really severe depression and suicidality, and I was literally her counselor from five years old. I eventually became a mental health nurse, but I really grew up in a culture where we would talk about feelings, I would listen to her feelings.

There’s an element of my work where I’m trying to think of what could have supported her to be a different mum. There’s things like “estrogen dominance” and “vitamin deficiencies”—and lack of social support, and fucking capitalism and patriarchy—that was affecting our lives. That’s why now in my clinic I see single mums, people whose children are in prison, and people with really intense, severe depression who start working with a herb (or different supplements or nutritional changes) and actually feel radically different.

The Overcoming Burnout book is like me in a room of people where everyone is talking about something abstract, and I’m like, Yo! Let’s think about our bodies! How is everyone feeling? Which is a super fucking femme thing to do. But especially in more anarchisty spaces, it is a little bit rare. It is changing, but that’s why a lot of people related to it. It was saying the unsaid, if that makes sense.

EA: You don’t have to give specific examples obviously, but talk to us a bit about the people you just mentioned. When they interact with herbalism as a practice, have they told you how it has been changing their lives? How has that affected them?

NR: We do follow-ups; even people who are just doing my online PTSD course will regularly email me. And it’s so hard, because the would is so fucking shit that it’s completely understandable to be depressed, and to have health issues because of all these larger factors like industrial agriculture, poverty, and stuff like this. There’s that constant anarchist tension between the collective and the individual, but there’s also lots of things people can do for themselves and each other.

For some people, when you grow up on benefits, maybe you’ve not seen a vegetable for a really long time, and someone even just taking a sip of elderberry syrup—that syrup has so many antioxidants, and iron, and diverse nutrients in it that that person almost goes into shock: Fuck me, I’ve never had nutrition like this.

And sometimes you butt up against the limits of herbalism. I can send someone a box of medicines that will be really supportive for them, that are suited to their body, constitution, and health needs—and that’s not always going to fucking compete with the fact that their child is in solitary confinement being fucking tortured, or their ex is fucking abusive and stalking them and they’re under constant chronic stress.

There’s always a balance between being able to make a real difference to someone’s life and [the fact that] recovering from burnout, chronic illness, or depression is really life changing, and sometimes it’s three- or five-percent changes that can make the difference between someone killing themselves that day—but there’s always a balance. Lots of people just need more social support, just need more friends, need people to help take care of them—they need a fucking break. Especially people who have experienced really intense poverty and homelessness and everything else: they actually just need some fucking stability and security, and that will enable their body to start repairing itself.

But I do think herbalism can be really transformational. It’s not the medicines; it’s the act of herbalism. It’s healing for people to just build a relationship with non-humans. People who’ve been through a lot of trauma don’t always feel safe with other humans, whereas going and foraging or gardening can be really fantastic for someone’s nervous system, because they can feel that sense of safety and social connection without needing to navigate a human that might feel threatening, for example.

EA: I do a meditation from a Buddhist center in France. It’s short, like seven or eight minutes, and it’s inviting me to think of where a herb came from, where did the coffee come from, what could have been its journey. It can sound pretty simple or small, but for me the reason it’s been important (and I’m trying to be diligent enough to do it on a daily basis) is because ultimately, one of the reasons it was easy for me to have coffee instead of tea is that I didn’t think too much about what is in the coffee. This is just a coffee bean, it comes from this place. It was simplistic, a shallow relationship, whereas with tea it was more intimidating to me, because if there are seven different herbs it breaks my brain—seven different places where this can come from!

This allowed me to slow down a bit. I’m not finding the answer in the sense that I’m literally googling where things are from. I do that sometimes, but the point is to just stop, pause, and recognize that its existence as a final product, as a commodity, is just the final part of that journey, it’s not all of it. In fact, the more I think of that path or that journey, the more it gets complicated. Because you cannot talk about tea without talking about labor, gender, class, geography, everything. It’s absolutely part of this global system. You can, and some very smart people have, told a version of the history of the world through tea, or through coffee.

There’s something I’m still reflecting on, and I’d love to have you on again one day when I’m more into herbalism that I can actually talk about it without being too vague. But for our purposes, there’s a couple of episodes—I like the titles and I think we can do something with that. “Composting Grief”—this is the second time in a not very long time that I heard about composting as not just a physical thing we do but as a practice, or composting as temporality, as a healing thing.

What can you tell us about “composting” grief?

NR: At the same time I was heavily into herbalism, I was really obsessed with soil science, to the point where I bought a microscope and was studying soil organisms, and got them tattooed all up my leg. I’m obsessed with soil microbiology. But composting, like you said, isn’t just about a compost pile. It’s an inherent cyclical process in nature where we are getting nourishment from death and dying, from a leaf falling from a tree that’s getting eaten by all sorts of things, and then that’s becoming nutrients in the soil that are then giving life again.

When I was going through this Overcoming Burnout book/series stuff, two of my best friends had died, and one of them was kind of a mum figure to me in the animal liberation movement; I met her when I was eleven years old. And a lot of this organizing-into-oblivion thing I talked about was because I was incapable of feeling that grief, because it was so overwhelming and life-changing and painful, so there was an avoidance of those feelings through intense workaholism.

“Composting Grief” was connecting to her personal death, but also what grief looks like in our movements. For me at the time, I’d been heavily involved in this campaign, and it got completely destroyed by the state. Twelve of us in prison; we were all—I’m not going to go into all the repression, but I was under surveillance for two years and had loads of conditions on me, and was separated from people I love. There was a lot there: huge losses and changes to the movement in terms of its militancy, and radicalness becoming more of a liberal, pacifist, consumerist thing. So it’s basically processing all those feelings.

Ironically, once I finished the series, I then had six bereavements in a row in six months, including my ex-partner who was killed. It’s weird recording this now, because next week it’s the inquest of one my best friends who died in prison. I almost canceled because I am so fucking in grief land right now. But I knew that this would be a good interview; the work you do is amazing. I had some impostor syndrome, because everyone on the show is super fucking clever.

But anyway, back to grief: I think this composting metaphor is beautiful because how do we take that pain and process it? So many fucking moments in history, of different social struggles, have been born from collective grief of someone getting killed, like the George Floyd uprisings. It’s a big fucking topic that loads of people have written about, and I guess I wrote about it too.

EA: It’s not an easy topic to close an episode on, but the reason I’ve also been thinking about composting grief and why that resonated with me, among other things, is I’m in a process right now that I can describe as “pre-grieving,” in the sense that my dog is old and sick, and we’ve been doing some tests and the prognosis isn’t amazing. We don’t know how long he has left with us. Because he’s a dog, he can’t tell us as clearly what’s going on, so the past week has been a bit like that: some morning where he seems completely fine, in the afternoon he seems like, I need to go to the emergencies immediately.

I know, because I’ve lived with dogs all my life, I can see the signs; I can see the time is coming. I don’t know when, but it’s getting there. So I’ve been thinking a lot of him (and am presently with him, he’s next to me now as we talk), and making sure he’s happy and comfortable as much as possible. But also just thinking of the routines I’m used to—as I said, I’m a habits person—and doing all those things for the most part with him. He’s fourteen years old and I’ve had him for thirteen of those.

The difficulty with all of that is it’s going to be what it’s going to be, and I know when the day comes I’m going to feel all the clear emotions and it’s going to take me a long time to heal, if that’s even the correct term. But even now, because we know, because there are clear signs that things aren’t going okay, I’ve been thinking about composting, weirdly enough, and composting grief, and this process that is not linear, that has multiple layers and those layers are also interacting with one another and it’s not clear-cut, if he passes away on a Monday, what the Tuesday is going to look like compared to the Monday after.

It’s also been a helpful framework, personally, because previously, whether it’s friends, relatives, or indeed dogs that have passed away in my life, I would describe the way I would grieve as shock and then a long, prolonged process of trying to have some normalcy in my life, whatever that meant at the time. Now it’s less about that, but it’s becoming more about thinking through his life so far, not treating him as though he’s not with us, because he is, but also not pretending he’s one year old, because he’s not.

Having those different temporalities at the same time, almost in conversation with one another—I remember him when he was two, when he was five, and now he’s almost fourteen, and that’s the same being, and also not. It’s a very useful framework. I’ll definitely do more with that when I have a bit more mental space to think about composting; the temporality behind it as a practice is something to really think through, both individually and collectively.

I guess this was my long way of saying I appreciate the framing and I’m grateful for it.

NR: I’m so sorry to hear that. What’s his name?

EA: Flip. He just looked at me because I was loud.

NR: That is what’s really difficult about grief, the lack of timeline. You think you’ve processed, and then you’re smashed with something else again. So I’m really sorry to hear.

EA: Thank you. It’s my “intellectual” way of processing things, and then I say It is what it is, which means nothing. But it is what it is. We’ll see; it’s going to take some time. And he’s okay, he’s not in pain; there are meds and stuff, so we’re grateful for that.

As a way of wrapping up, would you mind talking about the projects you are doing? How can people support your work at the Solidarity Apothecary? The website is really rich.

NR: The website is the best place to go. The podcast we’ve been talking about is available for free on there, so you can go through the store and it will send you a link automatically. It’s also available as an e-book for three pounds, and all my other books are also there. I don’t post physical books out anymore, since having a baby, but I’ve got a bunch of links where you can buy physical copies.

My Frontline Herbalism podcast is available everywhere, and I’m also active on Instagram. I know we all fucking hate social media, but it’s there, and I do share a lot of pretty pictures of plants as well as call-outs for different things.

I’m not doing many one-to-one clinics at the moment because I’m a single mum to a toddler, so it’s very challenging, but I am doing group programs; I had one the last three months called “Hawthorn,” which was for different people experiencing repression. We had group calls every two weeks; everyone got one-to-one herbal support, and we talked about the impacts of repression on people’s lives and their bodies. It’s been really beautiful, and I love the transition from that solo work to a group thing, a collective healing thing.

That’s been really nice and I hope to do more of those next year. You can donate on my website—the Herbalism, PTSD & Traumatic Stress course comes out twice a year, and it’s completely online so you can do it at your own pace. Every fucking thing I do is No-One-Turned-Away-For-Lack-Of-Funds, so seventy-five percent of people who join the course join for often quite a small donation. I’m very grateful for people who can financially contribute, because that enables all this stuff.

If you’re interested in learning about herbalism, it’s a fantastic introduction to herbal energetics, and harvesting and ecology, as well as how trauma shapes the body, and understanding the nervous system. There’s a geeky deep-dive into nervous system physiology, and then we talk in-depth about different kinds of plants and their affinity with the nervous system. Please check that out.

If anyone is experiencing repression or supporting a loved one in prison, or involved in a grassroots group who are experiencing challenges with that, you can request a herbal care package for free. It contains really lovely blends, like support for the nervous system, immune tonics, some lavender oil which is made from olive oil from the West Bank. Please request stuff! I fundraise and purposely make this medicine so people can benefit from it.

If anyone is supporting someone in prison and they want a free copy of The Prisoner’s Herbal or The Medicinal Herb Colouring Book, I’ve got online forms, you just fill it in and one of the amazing happy helpers in the US, UK, or mainland Europe somewhere will get a book in the post to them for free.

That’s my ecology of offerings. Everything is quite pretty, with roses and stuff. There’s a joke in Bristol about how one day there will be a bunch of repression against me and it will be just because they’ve connected everything with a fucking rose on it for every anarchist event and put it all together and said, Hm, this looks like Nicole’s graphic design!

EA: It is aesthetically pleasing to look at. Some people might not find that as important, but I do find this really important, for the same reason that I think being touchy-feely is very important. It should also be welcoming, it should be something that is not just text. It’s a good thing and I can see a lot of effort has gone into it and still is going into it.

Thank you, Nicole, for doing this.

NR: A pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me, it’s a real honor to be on your podcast. Take care.

One response to “Burnout, Grief and The Solidarity Apothecary w/ Nicole Rose”

Another Way Out w/ William C. Anderson – The Fire These Times

February 17, 2026 at 10:24 pm

[…] it would be good to talk about grief. I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, including the one before this one, but I’ve been dealing with my own set of griefs as of late, including what’s called […]

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