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wildpearI wrote an essay the other day, because I had some things to process. Reading it over today, I still really like parts of it, so I'm posting it here. Thoughts, responses, and alternate POVS welcomed. There's nothing easy or simple about this stuff.
<3
[ETA: sorry for the multiple re-posts, I was figuring out how to use a cut on DW!]
My grandmother always rooted for the underdog. I’m not sure what made her that way—her deep Christian faith? Her liberal politics? Her upbringing, as the lonely only child of intellectual parents? The battle with polio that put her in an iron lung for the first year of her only son’s life? The fifty years of living—not confined to a wheelchair, that’s an odious phrase—but limited in ways that had as much to do with her gender and the era as anything else but were not helped by the fact that she couldn’t walk her younger daughters to school or attend church without her husband’s support and assistance?
I don’t know.
What I know about Grandma is that she let children win games and that she always wanted the team on a losing streak to come out ahead. I know she identified more with the 10% Irish part of her heritage than the 90% English part, and that it pained her to admit the Irish ancestors were most likely the privileged Orangemen rather than the poor, oppressed Catholics. I know her favourite birds were the little, gentle ones—the chickadees and the titmice and the mourning doves—and that her affection for the flashier, more aggressive cardinals and blue jays always sat a little uneasily with her. I know that her favourite flower, the lily-of-the-valley, grew close to the ground: plain-coloured and unobtrusive, but surprising in the rich, bright sweetness of its scent.
I know she believed in fairness and patience and kindness above all else. I know she made little people feel big and important and necessary. Out of all the adults in my life, she was the one who made me feel safest, the one who gave me a sense of culture and roots and belonging. Of all the mixed-up mismatched parts of who I am, the parts that come from her are the parts I wear most easily and naturally.
*
I grew up on the boundaries of a lot of types of privilege, in the grey, nebulous space of not-quite-one-thing-or-the-other.
I grew up poor enough that my clothes were always in rags, that my working-class father still cries when he remembers the day the neighbour’s dog at my porridge and he had nothing else to give me.
I also grew up well-off enough that my middle-class mother could save for my education and teach me some of the manners and people skills I needed to win scholarships and approval in a middle-class world.
I’m a queer woman but I pass for straight—I didn’t come out, even to myself, until after I was married to a male-bodied person. I missed out on a lot of things, not figuring that out sooner—not so much the opportunity to make out with girls, though that’s true too, but the opportunity to know myself and figure myself out along with other people like me, the chance for a deeper connection to a community I’ll probably never fully feel a part of—but one of the things I missed out on was a flaming dumpsterload of hurt, danger, and oppression, and that’s a fact that can’t be denied or minimized.
I have health problems that affect my life but I’m essentially able-bodied. I struggle with depression, anxiety, and probably some other undiagnosed weird brain stuff, but I mostly pass for neurotypical. I’m a big girl: big enough to suffer social stigma and and trouble dressing myself and feeling okay out in the world, but not so big that I can never find clothing at regular stores, and not so big that everyone I meet in the street feels qualified to comment on my health and appearance. I’m white—no way around that one, I am absolutely privileged in that area and I can’t wriggle out of it.
But I want to. I want to wriggle out of all of it. I look at someone like Rachel Dolezal and I cringe, of course…but I’m cringeing, partly, out of a shameful sense of recognition. There is a part of me that would absolutely wriggle out of identifying as white if I could. I am uneasy with privilege. I am proud of being a woman, queer, and agnostic; of growing up poor; of being curvy and socially awkward; of the scars I carry and the lessons I've learned from growing up outside of the culture and emotionally traumatized. I am not proud of being white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gendered, visibly married, or from a Christian background. I am in fact almost ashamed of those things.
Why?
It can’t all be about making Grandma proud. After all, except for being able-bodied, she shared those identities. (Unlike me, she was even an athlete once-upon-a-time.) They ought logically to be among the things that connect me to her, to my cultural heritage, to my sense of self. Sometimes I can even feel that, for a moment.
But there’s this deep distaste that lives in my gut for any way that I have to identify myself with the oppressors, with the winners, with those who enjoy what others are denied. I know that sometimes when I look at men—even men I love—I see the face of the people who hurt and oppress people like me. Knowing that friends, and colleagues, and strangers on the bus, must sometimes look at me and see the same thing? It hurts. It’s hard. It’s a painful, uncomfortable place to sit.
But listen: it’s true.
It is a true thing that I have privilege, all kinds of privilege, and that I share traits with people who abuse their privilege, and that I sometimes take my privilege for granted. All the ways I’m hurt and human and particular, all the love in my heart for people who are different for me, all my righteous indignation on their behalf—they don’t change that. They don’t change the fact that when the time comes for me to re-enter the workforce after over a decade of being a stay-at-home mom and aspiring writer, it will be easier for me than for people who don’t share my privilege—and harder for me than for certain others. They don’t change the fact that when I walk down the street at night or am pulled over by the police, I have legitimate reasons to be afraid—but I am safer than many other people. They don’t change the fact that crossing the American border is a very different proposition for me than for my bearded, dark-haired, long-nosed, olive-skinned husband...or the way that equation changes when his passport is read. They don’t change the fact that I can special-order some of the clothes I need to feel good in my body…I have to make sacrifices of money and energy to do it, but it’s possible.
The thing about privilege is that I think we originally chose it because it’s not a bad word. It’s a good one. It means It’s a privilege to know you, and I feel privileged to be here. Privilege is power, and power, as we all know, is responsibility. It comes down, for me, to spoon theory. The spoons I don’t have to spend being afraid my brother will be shot tomorrow, I can spend on my work or my loved ones or my calling. I can spend them trying to make the better world I want to see and becoming the person I want to be. The spoons I do have to spend grappling with my depression and anxiety and body-image issues, of course, are spoons I cannot spend joining David Suzuki’s Blue Dot movement or putting out four new novels a year.
The concept of privilege is supposed to be empowering and empathy-provoking. “Check your privilege” doesn’t mean “shut up and hate yourself” it means “think about how this might be different for you than for the person you’re talking to.” It means “consider that in this moment, your story may be the one that has been told a thousand times while the person’s in front of you may have been told a mere handful—and consider that perhaps this is a moment to listen instead of speaking.”
It means, “hey, you’ve been handed an opportunity here: stop and appreciate it.”
There is something twisted in wishing that in addition to everything I struggle with, I could be further burdened so that I might feel less responsible and more righteous. It’s not healthy, and moreover, it keeps me focused on myself. I can feel sorry for myself about my privilege and the way it makes other people see me—the way some might be inclined to discount my suffering and vulnerability and focus only on my power. Or I can be grateful for the little bit of breathing room I’ve been given so that I may help myself and others. As an emotionally-disordered and culturally-confused mother and creative person, I only have so many spoons to spend…and here I am wasting them on feeling guilty that I do not have fewer.
My privilege is a thing to be celebrated—humbly, reverently, with awareness and compassion. It is an occasion for joy to be able, in some way. Able to listen, able to pursue my calling, able to share my strength with others in whatever ways I am capable of. We are almost all of us privileged in some ways, and lacking privilege in others. (Yes, even the angry young straight white cis-male gamer boys, though I struggle sometimes to remember it. I need to remember it, lest I eat my own anger and choke on it.) Many of these are not immediately visible to the naked eye, so we are never in a position to decide how much another person ‘ought’ to be able to give or understand; we can only be responsible for ourselves. It is okay to be grateful for strong limbs, or a healthy mind, or an inheritance that frees us up to do the work we find meaningful. It’s okay to be grateful when our loved ones are safe. It’s even okay to be grateful for this while knowing and grieving that it isn’t the case for someone else.
It’s not okay to forget that what is true for us is not true for others—but it’s okay to love ourselves anyway. To go for a walk and breathe in the sunshine. To not talk about politics for a night when we need a break—even if there are other people who don’t get breaks. You put on your oxygen mask first, not because you’re worth more than the person who can’t reach their own, but because that is the only way you can give yourself a fair chance of having the strength to help them.
*
My grandmother wasn’t less than me because she couldn’t walk: she was so much more. The cost of her disability was real: she was, I believe, stuck in an abusive relationship partly because of it. She couldn’t get things from her own basement, or dust things on high shelves, or come swimming in the lake, or pick herself a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley. But she could make a little girl feel more loved than anyone else knew how to do. She could play the snoringly boring Peter Pan board game 20,000 times when no one else would. She could make my favourite foods, every time I came to see her. She could teach me the right way to peel a peach or polish a silver spoon. She could watch my questionable ‘ballet’ performances as if they were both fascinating and inspiring.
She could ask me to pick the flowers, and dust the knick-knacks, and cut the chives from the garden, exactly eleven of them, cut off right next to the ground so they wouldn’t wither down ugly and brown. And I could do that. I had strong, healthy legs and a willing, attentive ear and so I could be her hands for the things she couldn’t do for herself, and it made me—weak and struggling in other ways as I undeniably was—feel utterly important and valuable.
It was a privilege.
<3
[ETA: sorry for the multiple re-posts, I was figuring out how to use a cut on DW!]
My grandmother always rooted for the underdog. I’m not sure what made her that way—her deep Christian faith? Her liberal politics? Her upbringing, as the lonely only child of intellectual parents? The battle with polio that put her in an iron lung for the first year of her only son’s life? The fifty years of living—not confined to a wheelchair, that’s an odious phrase—but limited in ways that had as much to do with her gender and the era as anything else but were not helped by the fact that she couldn’t walk her younger daughters to school or attend church without her husband’s support and assistance?
I don’t know.
What I know about Grandma is that she let children win games and that she always wanted the team on a losing streak to come out ahead. I know she identified more with the 10% Irish part of her heritage than the 90% English part, and that it pained her to admit the Irish ancestors were most likely the privileged Orangemen rather than the poor, oppressed Catholics. I know her favourite birds were the little, gentle ones—the chickadees and the titmice and the mourning doves—and that her affection for the flashier, more aggressive cardinals and blue jays always sat a little uneasily with her. I know that her favourite flower, the lily-of-the-valley, grew close to the ground: plain-coloured and unobtrusive, but surprising in the rich, bright sweetness of its scent.
I know she believed in fairness and patience and kindness above all else. I know she made little people feel big and important and necessary. Out of all the adults in my life, she was the one who made me feel safest, the one who gave me a sense of culture and roots and belonging. Of all the mixed-up mismatched parts of who I am, the parts that come from her are the parts I wear most easily and naturally.
*
I grew up on the boundaries of a lot of types of privilege, in the grey, nebulous space of not-quite-one-thing-or-the-other.
I grew up poor enough that my clothes were always in rags, that my working-class father still cries when he remembers the day the neighbour’s dog at my porridge and he had nothing else to give me.
I also grew up well-off enough that my middle-class mother could save for my education and teach me some of the manners and people skills I needed to win scholarships and approval in a middle-class world.
I’m a queer woman but I pass for straight—I didn’t come out, even to myself, until after I was married to a male-bodied person. I missed out on a lot of things, not figuring that out sooner—not so much the opportunity to make out with girls, though that’s true too, but the opportunity to know myself and figure myself out along with other people like me, the chance for a deeper connection to a community I’ll probably never fully feel a part of—but one of the things I missed out on was a flaming dumpsterload of hurt, danger, and oppression, and that’s a fact that can’t be denied or minimized.
I have health problems that affect my life but I’m essentially able-bodied. I struggle with depression, anxiety, and probably some other undiagnosed weird brain stuff, but I mostly pass for neurotypical. I’m a big girl: big enough to suffer social stigma and and trouble dressing myself and feeling okay out in the world, but not so big that I can never find clothing at regular stores, and not so big that everyone I meet in the street feels qualified to comment on my health and appearance. I’m white—no way around that one, I am absolutely privileged in that area and I can’t wriggle out of it.
But I want to. I want to wriggle out of all of it. I look at someone like Rachel Dolezal and I cringe, of course…but I’m cringeing, partly, out of a shameful sense of recognition. There is a part of me that would absolutely wriggle out of identifying as white if I could. I am uneasy with privilege. I am proud of being a woman, queer, and agnostic; of growing up poor; of being curvy and socially awkward; of the scars I carry and the lessons I've learned from growing up outside of the culture and emotionally traumatized. I am not proud of being white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gendered, visibly married, or from a Christian background. I am in fact almost ashamed of those things.
Why?
It can’t all be about making Grandma proud. After all, except for being able-bodied, she shared those identities. (Unlike me, she was even an athlete once-upon-a-time.) They ought logically to be among the things that connect me to her, to my cultural heritage, to my sense of self. Sometimes I can even feel that, for a moment.
But there’s this deep distaste that lives in my gut for any way that I have to identify myself with the oppressors, with the winners, with those who enjoy what others are denied. I know that sometimes when I look at men—even men I love—I see the face of the people who hurt and oppress people like me. Knowing that friends, and colleagues, and strangers on the bus, must sometimes look at me and see the same thing? It hurts. It’s hard. It’s a painful, uncomfortable place to sit.
But listen: it’s true.
It is a true thing that I have privilege, all kinds of privilege, and that I share traits with people who abuse their privilege, and that I sometimes take my privilege for granted. All the ways I’m hurt and human and particular, all the love in my heart for people who are different for me, all my righteous indignation on their behalf—they don’t change that. They don’t change the fact that when the time comes for me to re-enter the workforce after over a decade of being a stay-at-home mom and aspiring writer, it will be easier for me than for people who don’t share my privilege—and harder for me than for certain others. They don’t change the fact that when I walk down the street at night or am pulled over by the police, I have legitimate reasons to be afraid—but I am safer than many other people. They don’t change the fact that crossing the American border is a very different proposition for me than for my bearded, dark-haired, long-nosed, olive-skinned husband...or the way that equation changes when his passport is read. They don’t change the fact that I can special-order some of the clothes I need to feel good in my body…I have to make sacrifices of money and energy to do it, but it’s possible.
The thing about privilege is that I think we originally chose it because it’s not a bad word. It’s a good one. It means It’s a privilege to know you, and I feel privileged to be here. Privilege is power, and power, as we all know, is responsibility. It comes down, for me, to spoon theory. The spoons I don’t have to spend being afraid my brother will be shot tomorrow, I can spend on my work or my loved ones or my calling. I can spend them trying to make the better world I want to see and becoming the person I want to be. The spoons I do have to spend grappling with my depression and anxiety and body-image issues, of course, are spoons I cannot spend joining David Suzuki’s Blue Dot movement or putting out four new novels a year.
The concept of privilege is supposed to be empowering and empathy-provoking. “Check your privilege” doesn’t mean “shut up and hate yourself” it means “think about how this might be different for you than for the person you’re talking to.” It means “consider that in this moment, your story may be the one that has been told a thousand times while the person’s in front of you may have been told a mere handful—and consider that perhaps this is a moment to listen instead of speaking.”
It means, “hey, you’ve been handed an opportunity here: stop and appreciate it.”
There is something twisted in wishing that in addition to everything I struggle with, I could be further burdened so that I might feel less responsible and more righteous. It’s not healthy, and moreover, it keeps me focused on myself. I can feel sorry for myself about my privilege and the way it makes other people see me—the way some might be inclined to discount my suffering and vulnerability and focus only on my power. Or I can be grateful for the little bit of breathing room I’ve been given so that I may help myself and others. As an emotionally-disordered and culturally-confused mother and creative person, I only have so many spoons to spend…and here I am wasting them on feeling guilty that I do not have fewer.
My privilege is a thing to be celebrated—humbly, reverently, with awareness and compassion. It is an occasion for joy to be able, in some way. Able to listen, able to pursue my calling, able to share my strength with others in whatever ways I am capable of. We are almost all of us privileged in some ways, and lacking privilege in others. (Yes, even the angry young straight white cis-male gamer boys, though I struggle sometimes to remember it. I need to remember it, lest I eat my own anger and choke on it.) Many of these are not immediately visible to the naked eye, so we are never in a position to decide how much another person ‘ought’ to be able to give or understand; we can only be responsible for ourselves. It is okay to be grateful for strong limbs, or a healthy mind, or an inheritance that frees us up to do the work we find meaningful. It’s okay to be grateful when our loved ones are safe. It’s even okay to be grateful for this while knowing and grieving that it isn’t the case for someone else.
It’s not okay to forget that what is true for us is not true for others—but it’s okay to love ourselves anyway. To go for a walk and breathe in the sunshine. To not talk about politics for a night when we need a break—even if there are other people who don’t get breaks. You put on your oxygen mask first, not because you’re worth more than the person who can’t reach their own, but because that is the only way you can give yourself a fair chance of having the strength to help them.
*
My grandmother wasn’t less than me because she couldn’t walk: she was so much more. The cost of her disability was real: she was, I believe, stuck in an abusive relationship partly because of it. She couldn’t get things from her own basement, or dust things on high shelves, or come swimming in the lake, or pick herself a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley. But she could make a little girl feel more loved than anyone else knew how to do. She could play the snoringly boring Peter Pan board game 20,000 times when no one else would. She could make my favourite foods, every time I came to see her. She could teach me the right way to peel a peach or polish a silver spoon. She could watch my questionable ‘ballet’ performances as if they were both fascinating and inspiring.
She could ask me to pick the flowers, and dust the knick-knacks, and cut the chives from the garden, exactly eleven of them, cut off right next to the ground so they wouldn’t wither down ugly and brown. And I could do that. I had strong, healthy legs and a willing, attentive ear and so I could be her hands for the things she couldn’t do for herself, and it made me—weak and struggling in other ways as I undeniably was—feel utterly important and valuable.
It was a privilege.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-26 11:39 am (UTC)My approach to privilege has always been that it shouldn't have to be a zero sum game. I shouldn't have to feel guilty for the privilege I have (and I have a lot of it) because it's not me having privilege that's the bad thing, it's the fact that everybody doesn't have the privilege I do. Everyone should have a wonderful education, loving parents, fantastic health(care), freedom of sexuality and religion and dress and all that stuff, and an able body and mind. And it's complicated, finding ways to level the playing field. But it doesn't require me to deny or disrespect the gifts I have, in order to lift others up to that level.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 06:17 pm (UTC)