I have social and generalized anxiety. I occasionally suffer from anxiety/panic attacks. My stress level often has immediate and massive effects on my body. It usually starts with decision paralysis. For me the first signs of an anxiety attack are words like "I don't know", "I guess", and "whatever you want should be fine". Most of my friends will tell you that, despite how much I try to be a tough guy, I have pretty particular tastes and sensitivities when it comes to my comfort levels. When I am not in touch with these preferences I stop trusting my own senses. That's when my breath begins to shorten and the knots start tying up my stomach. Sometimes my heart will ache or feel pinched.
I've used a lot of things to mitigate my anxiety in the past. None of them are actual medicine or where prescribed by a doctor. Often it's been foodstuffs. I find comfort in foods like cupcakes or cheese plates or toast (it's usually sweet but doesn't have to be).
I started a very restrictive diet six weeks ago. One of the things I noticed right away is how often would crave certain food when I felt down. In some ways this makes sense. I'm the kind of person who will have some kind of mini-meltdown if I skip a meal or two.
This new awareness of how I've used food to regulate my feelings made me start to wonder. What else am I doing to manage my mood and keep anxiety levels to a minimum?
In the absence of consumable anti-anxiety measures (like of cheese, beer, and sugars) I've been noticing what I have been doing to maintain a healthy mood. Having direct online contact with my friends has been indispensable (my internet was cut for a mere 36 hours this week it affected my mood acutely). I also take walks and ride a bike.
Though lately I've been biking less and less. It occurs to me that I always forget how much I really like cycling alone until I am actually out there cycling by myself. I feel power and resonance with the landscape. I feel confident and in control.
Consequently this is also how I feel when I'm writing or editing something I've written (which also falls under the category of writing for me). And yes, free-writing regularly (every day) has also been one of the ways I manage my anxiety. Fortunately these days free-writing now feels like a reflex. I've been writing every day for more than three years. But I've only edited spurts when working on projects. The editing itself feels marvelous and in control and not the least bit anxious.
When I'm editing I can feel as "in the zone" and electric as I've felt while jotting down the first draft of a striking poem. I feel just as resonant as I do when riding my bike a long way solo. But for some reason it is devilishly difficult to get myself to schedule and start doing either of these things.
Why is that?
Well the anxious parts of me fight viciously against the memory of how powerful, liberating, and healthy these experiences are. I used to think I was just not the type of person like to organize. But what I've come to learn over the years is that it's not ME that doesn't like to organize or prioritize (or at least not all of me). It's the anxiety that doesn't like it when I organize.
I feel resistance to organizing my shit. Whether it be my actual physical stuff (my partner can attest to this) or the less physical more conceptual stuff involved in my life. For instance I have trouble showing up for physical fitness activities like yoga or bike rides unless it is made clear that there is going to be some social component. It's a battle for me to schedule things to do alone that enjoy, especially if they require me to be independent or decisive. This doesn't mean that I'm can't or don't enjoy being independent and decisive. I can and do. But my anxiety tries to convince me otherwise.
It's tell though that even on the brink of an anxiety attack I am able to do simple non-demanding organizational tasks that combat my stress and anxiety. One of the more reliable methods of staving off an anxiety attack is to make a list. It's usually a to do list, but it can also be a random list; What groceries do I need? How many blue things can I think of? What countries have I visited, which ones would I like to visit? how many prime numbers can I list until I feel better?
The fact that I find such solace in lists makes apparent to me how much I actually DO value organization. As the most stripped down, basic definition what is a list but an organizational tool? The tool of lists is often what I need to keep my anxiety levels down and my mind clear of self doubt and blame.
A list provides me with an organization system, a way of prioritizing. It lets me know that as a human I can reliably identify what deserves priority. I can discern what matters to me and to my surroundings. A list is concrete proof that I can be trusted as a decider, me and my senses know what's what. (remember that my anxiety attacks start with the decision paralysis of not trusting myself).
And really what is writing but constantly trusting your own instincts of organizing words and meaning? I take joy in choosing the right words or choosing the right idea. All writers do. But I have this force in me this anxious mess of untrusting. A force that even if, while I try to manage it, can derail and discourage me from taking the decisive actions I so enjoy.
I'd love to end this post triumphantly proclaiming "and this is how I beat anxiety!" but the struggle is not like that. All of the above conclusions were slow to germinate. And while I know a few flimsy, but effective techniques for managing my anxiety and combating its effects, the progress is slow going and complex. This post, while empowering to write, is only an exercise in shining light on the mechanisms of my anxiety. A declaration against the conniving, invalidating, anxious parts of me, a message that says "I see what's going on here buster."
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Orange is the New Black and Trojan Horse Tactics
In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it's a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it's relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It's useful.
- Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange is the New Black
I find the use of the "trojan horse" clever but not heroic. I understand and respect Kohan's use of this tactic. I am incredibly glad that her show Orange is the New Black exists. I love it (and it's problematic elements). What I find unfortunate, nay, deeply annoying is that such a masking maneuver is necessary for those looking to tell the stories of non-white, queer, and otherwise marginalized women of color.
I don't hate the trojan horse tactic of making progressive media. I think it can be a powerful tool, but it is a tool that is primarily used to educate and entertain the kind of people who will be placated by the white, well-off, conventionally attractive, seemingly straight main character. This is important because it squarely aims the show at a white, straight, "conventional" sort of audience.
I guess one of the things I'm upset about is that this show can't really be claimed by women of women of color or poor women as full representations. Non-white and poor characters are featured prominently but the show itself is not about them.
The trojan horse approach to making media is problematic because it does two things simultaneously.
1. In order to be passable to the gatekeepers of Hollywood it puts forth a conventionally acceptable protagonist (white, well off, good looking, seemingly straight) which reinforces the cultural view of who's narratives are acceptable & worth our cultural attention.
2. It panders to the audience of straight, white, well off viewers. The reason Hollywood's gatekeepers give again and again for why people like Piper must be in the foreground is that "it's what the people want".
On this second point I call bull. As someone who has tendency to distrust and dehumanize people with wealth, I don't think that white wealthy straight people (the "they" the gatekeepers are referring to) want to continue to see the boring parade of people who are similar to them dance across their screens. I bet they are bored.
Special letter to the 5 straight white people who read my blog:
Seriously folks, aren't you bored? Aren't you yawning from the painful ease it is to always sympathize with the protagonists Hollywood pushes out? Don't you want to have a protagonist that is viciously different from you? Don't you want to see the world from the eyes of someone the world has insulated you from empathizing with (like say Suzanne AKA Crazy Eyes)? I know you are capable of empathizing with people who are different from you. Can you call up those gatekeepers and tell them you are bored and that you are not as stupid as they think you are? You don't need to be coddled as an audience. Let Hollywood know that having a protagonist with a different race, sexual orientation, or class status than yours will not make you loose your shit? Tell the gatekeepers you're an adult and can handle empathizing with people who don't look like you.
Thanx,
WRM
Monday, November 4, 2013
No. Consent isn't sexy.
This morning on my twitter feed this question showed up:
After writing two different replies I noticed that perhaps I have more thoughts and feels about this question than can be contained in 140 or even 280 characters.
First off the answer is simple. No. Consent isn't sexy.
There is a huge campaign surrounding the notion that it is and I think it is bull. Or at least too narrowly framed.
There are many non-sexy contexts in which we use the tool of consent.
Consent can be decidedly unsexy when in order to travel by plane we must consent to have our bodies and out belongings searched.
But consent outside sexy contexts doesn't have to be unsavory. On the adorable but certainly non sexy end we have a parent saying yes and allowing their 7 year old son to crawl onto their back for the piggy back ride he's been begging for.
In the questionable middle ground there're many kinds of legal and medical consent that have absolutely nothing to do with sex at all and are unlikely to inspire the arousal of most.
Don't get me wrong consent is extremely useful in sexy contexts. It helps prevent harm. It helps us get clear on our sexual wants and boundaries.
It helps make sex (and other interactions) easier and more doable for those who are interested in doing it with others regularly. On a societal level consent makes sex a more sustainable way of interacting and reduces the physical, mental, and emotional harm we do to each other.
But the consent itself is not sexy in and of itself. In the same way that our bodies and body parts aren't always sexy because we don't always consider them to be. When I'm not aroused or thinking about things/people in a sexy context having my body or parts of it objectified or identified as others as "sexy" can leave me feeling violated/dehumanized.
The claim that "consent is sexy" falls apart especially in the case of asexual folks. Consent, and even consent surrounding intimacy totally exists for asexual people. It's just not sexy. Which is TOTALLY FINE. In the same way that not all sex attracts all people, not all communications of consent are universally sexy.
Consent itself is not what we find sexy. The unique ways that individual people give consent can be vey sexy but that's the delivery not message not consent itself. What we find sexy is their words/behavior. In this sense the delivery of consent can be extremely sexy, however this sexiness is completely subjective.
For instance I once asked a woman I didn't know very well but was attracted to (we'd both been drinking at a party) if I could top her sometime. She smiled, turned around and bent over to signal her consent. Had we been in another context I would've probably found this very sexy, but because I didn't know her very well and we were in a room with other partygoers, I felt a little intimidated, anxious, and even felt pressure to "act more toppy" in that moment. Any "sexy" I'd been feeling in that moment was swallowed up by my social anxiety. This person was consenting to something I asked for (and we did get to play later) but the way she communicated her consent intimidated me and was not sexy to me in that moment.
Fortunately, more often than not, we're going to find the ways that people we're attracted to communicate their consent to sexual activity with us to be sexy. This doesn't mean that the consent is sexy. It means that you find the way that person communicates sexy. Which is actually much more intimate than seeing consent as the sexy stuff. This way of thinking gives me the freedom to give compliments like “I love the way you do consent.” and “The way you say yes is really fucking sexy.”
Now I'm not going to yell at or angrily correct someone saying "consent is sexy". In fact when I hear people using this phrase I'm able to identify them as potential allies in my community. People who say this care about consent and building less harmful and more sustainable sexual practices. And these are people I want to connect and collaborate with.
That said my politics place focus more on consent more than they do on sex. As a consent-positive advocate for less harmful human interactions I'm annoyed when the tools of consent are limited to the context of sexuality. The phrase "consent is sexy" at worst enforces this limitation. At best it does not do what the necessary work of broadening awareness about and use of consent in all human interactions (not just the sexy ones).
After writing two different replies I noticed that perhaps I have more thoughts and feels about this question than can be contained in 140 or even 280 characters.
First off the answer is simple. No. Consent isn't sexy.
There is a huge campaign surrounding the notion that it is and I think it is bull. Or at least too narrowly framed.
There are many non-sexy contexts in which we use the tool of consent.
Consent can be decidedly unsexy when in order to travel by plane we must consent to have our bodies and out belongings searched.
But consent outside sexy contexts doesn't have to be unsavory. On the adorable but certainly non sexy end we have a parent saying yes and allowing their 7 year old son to crawl onto their back for the piggy back ride he's been begging for.
In the questionable middle ground there're many kinds of legal and medical consent that have absolutely nothing to do with sex at all and are unlikely to inspire the arousal of most.
Don't get me wrong consent is extremely useful in sexy contexts. It helps prevent harm. It helps us get clear on our sexual wants and boundaries.
It helps make sex (and other interactions) easier and more doable for those who are interested in doing it with others regularly. On a societal level consent makes sex a more sustainable way of interacting and reduces the physical, mental, and emotional harm we do to each other.
But the consent itself is not sexy in and of itself. In the same way that our bodies and body parts aren't always sexy because we don't always consider them to be. When I'm not aroused or thinking about things/people in a sexy context having my body or parts of it objectified or identified as others as "sexy" can leave me feeling violated/dehumanized.
The claim that "consent is sexy" falls apart especially in the case of asexual folks. Consent, and even consent surrounding intimacy totally exists for asexual people. It's just not sexy. Which is TOTALLY FINE. In the same way that not all sex attracts all people, not all communications of consent are universally sexy.
Consent itself is not what we find sexy. The unique ways that individual people give consent can be vey sexy but that's the delivery not message not consent itself. What we find sexy is their words/behavior. In this sense the delivery of consent can be extremely sexy, however this sexiness is completely subjective.
For instance I once asked a woman I didn't know very well but was attracted to (we'd both been drinking at a party) if I could top her sometime. She smiled, turned around and bent over to signal her consent. Had we been in another context I would've probably found this very sexy, but because I didn't know her very well and we were in a room with other partygoers, I felt a little intimidated, anxious, and even felt pressure to "act more toppy" in that moment. Any "sexy" I'd been feeling in that moment was swallowed up by my social anxiety. This person was consenting to something I asked for (and we did get to play later) but the way she communicated her consent intimidated me and was not sexy to me in that moment.
Fortunately, more often than not, we're going to find the ways that people we're attracted to communicate their consent to sexual activity with us to be sexy. This doesn't mean that the consent is sexy. It means that you find the way that person communicates sexy. Which is actually much more intimate than seeing consent as the sexy stuff. This way of thinking gives me the freedom to give compliments like “I love the way you do consent.” and “The way you say yes is really fucking sexy.”
Now I'm not going to yell at or angrily correct someone saying "consent is sexy". In fact when I hear people using this phrase I'm able to identify them as potential allies in my community. People who say this care about consent and building less harmful and more sustainable sexual practices. And these are people I want to connect and collaborate with.
That said my politics place focus more on consent more than they do on sex. As a consent-positive advocate for less harmful human interactions I'm annoyed when the tools of consent are limited to the context of sexuality. The phrase "consent is sexy" at worst enforces this limitation. At best it does not do what the necessary work of broadening awareness about and use of consent in all human interactions (not just the sexy ones).
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Cold Hard
Today writing was hard. I really didn't want to show up for my writing today.
I just wanted curl in in bed for the entire afternoon. Even when I got down to writing it seemed it was mostly no good, and it was slow going, taking three hours to reach the minimum 1,667/day required by this NaBloWriMo challenge.
I've had a cold for the last few days. During breakfast while my partner and I were geeking out about tiny houses my cold came down hard with sinus pressure and a micro-migraines. A crown of pain and ringing developed and grew. The constant burble of cafe noise became tinny radio chatter turned about three ticks too loud. Even behind my sunglasses the california sunlight was piercing to the point of disorientation.
Even now, hours later, after he's taken the train back to the city, as I sat in this room with the lights switched off and the filtered lights coming in from the closed blinds and my computer's screen reduced to it's dimmest setting, I feel my heart warm to think of the house we drew together this morning. I am lucky to have him in my life. Despite the cold.
Even in this dark painful place I have enough to show up for writing today. I feel the resistance. It's hot and piercing like sunlight. But I can handle it I am here for the day. I even had a story idea strike me last night. A fortune as unexpected as daylight savings.
I think the organ in my body that produces new ideas somehow remembered that last night I would be allowed one more hour to sleep. And that meant one more hour of scheming creativity.
Committing to daily blogpost this month has required me to severely scale back my expectations. The part of me that is still afraid people will notice I am not really all that exceptional is screaming that this is a bad idea. But I disagree. I'm messy, complicated, and sometimes I break down. This is especially apparent if I don't give myself the time to clean/edit.
I am still reeling about the fact that I would've liked more time to hold onto and mull over the concepts I posted about yesterday. I'm working on being more okay with the mess of my work. And it's important work. I don't have to stop work on my ideas just because they've been published/become public.
So yes. Today was a hard one. But I believe in the power of showing up so I am here for my craft and for myself. If you are reading this thank you. I'm glad you showed up too.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
On Restorative Justice and Breaking Cycles of Abuse
I don't know much about cycles of abuse. I have never had to learn. What little abuse I have suffered has either been incidental or been suffered at the hands of institutions I'd trusted to take better care of me and my concerns (employers and schools). I'm also just starting to learn about restorative justice (and I want to know more). So I'm extremely hesitant to talk about this and probably have very very few pieces of this puzzle. Please, please, please note that this post is part of a daily blogging project. This topic came up today unexpectedly probably as a result of the things that have been happening in my communities lately and what I've been reading.
I fully intend to come back to this topic. This is just the beginning of a long and ongoing conversation. It is highly likely that some of the following content will be poorly worded or just plain wrong.
What I want to talk about has to do with restorative justice and survivors of abuse and oppression. All humans at some point suffer from oppression but not all humans suffer equally. Often this oppression takes the form of (systematic) abuse.
An integral and necessary part of radical politics is acknowledging this oppression, it's discriminating distribution, and offering space and resources for the healing processes of those hurt by oppression and abuse.
This is the sankofa bird. It's associated with the Ghanian proverb “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." and emphasizes the value of of reaching from the past in order to move forward with wisdom.
I chose this image to demonstrate that finding wisdom in the past is essential to moving forward sustainably. I also believe the reverse to be equally true. If we do no make strides to move forward after going back to retrieve what we have forgotten, it may not mature into the wisdom we need.
When the healing process in our communities stops us from moving forward it stops history from becoming wisdom. This doesn't mean forgetting or abandoning our histories but moving forward means not dwelling on our own healing process to the detriment of others who want to share our community.
Helping each other heal is one of the most important functions of radical politics, but it's not its only function.
So what does this mean in the real world? It means that women who claim they cannot heal in spaces that includes people with genitals and childhood experiences of gender that differ from their own ('feminists' who exclude trans women) need to realize that their healing is not the only job to be done.
It means that while victims/survivors of harassment & assault deserve to have their community insulate them from their abusers and offer resources for their healing, the abuser and those who match the abuser's demographic must still be respected as human beings.
Being treated in an inhumane way does not give the recipient of that suffering someone a free pass to treat others inhumanly or incite the inhumane treatment of those who contribute to their healing process.
Believe me when I say, that was a hard sentence for me to write. There are certainly people in my history I want to yell at and even do physical harm to. I personally will not hesitate to use physical violence to stop someone from physically assaulting someone I love.
But when we enable and encourage the inhumane treatment of our abusers/oppressors and those who look/behave like them we are enabling the cycle of abuse. We send the message that violence and exclusion are the proper way to heal and even that such violence is radical. We excuse such violence by calling it solidarity for victims/survivors.
I don't mean to invalidate the very real instances where immediate violence is required for personal survival. That shit exists and I hate that it does. I don't think there is a single anti-oppression activist that would feel otherwise. But I now realize that encouraging the violence and exclusion between ourselves and our oppressors/abusers perpetuates the notion that that there are people who are abusers and people who are not.
We are all capable of treating others inhumanely. Saying or thinking that some people just can't help it or thinking that they are unable to take responsibility, enables us to think of them exclusively as abusers and even monsters, and to treat them inhumanely.
This nasty loophole of twisted solidarity & assumption can enable cycles of abuse to continue. Some men abuse some women, and some of those women go on to use their experiences of abuse/oppression as an excuse to to exclude, deny and dehumanize trans women because they are assume that trans women are "like the men who abused them". Some men abuse some women, some of those women and those who care about them say "kill all/your rapists" in order to 'support' survivors of rape. This is the same loophole that allowed 2nd wave feminists of the 70s to claim that all penetrative sex was rape.
Make no mistake. I am in no way saying that rage over experiences of abuse are unwarranted. I feel mad as all fuck about the injustices of rape and abuse. There is wisdom to be found from that rage. And we do not have to forgive or even let go of that rage if we don't want. But we do have to take personal responsibility for it.
It's not our fault that certain traits trigger past memories of abuse and trauma, but it IS our responsibility to treat the people with those traits humanely. Trauma is not an excuse to deny someone from existing. It's totally okay not to be able to deal when past trauma is triggered. But what triggered it, no matter who it was attached to, has less to do with your trauma than the person who inflicted that trauma on you.
I personally struggle a lot with this distinction. I have a tendency to dismiss and feel ill-at-ease around people who show apparent signs of wealth and financial flexibility. If a person I don't trust touches me in a certain way or place on my body my trauma comes up. And sometimes (later) I am viciously angry. But the trigger I have aren't the fault of the people who triggered. Oppression, abuse, and violence are the source. I don't need people who trigger me to be excluded or punished. And doing so will certainly not serve to protect me or other prevent harm to others in the community.
I don't need the people who've abused me to be punished either (though I will want to be excluded from spaces that I & other they have abused will be). Survivors/victims of abuse don't need anything from their abusers. They need support and resources from their community in order to start their healing process.
It's the community that needs the abuser to responsibility. We've been hoodwinked by punitive justice systems to think that someone has to "pay" for what happened. I believe in restorative justice model is better for this. Which doesn't mean that the direct relationships between abusers and those the abuse should be repaired, but that we can raise our expectations and build better more respectful scripts for interaction. It also means that we know who needs to work harder at respecting the humanity of other and taking responsibility for their actions.
Let's stop essentializing abusers, oppressors, and those that look like/remind us of them with violence and oppression. The potential to be violent and oppressive exists within all of us and each of us has the power to be less oppressive and violent. Let's hold everyone acceptable to this. It's what can heal communities and makes them safer, less harmful places. It's how we can both look look back and move forward at the same time.
I fully intend to come back to this topic. This is just the beginning of a long and ongoing conversation. It is highly likely that some of the following content will be poorly worded or just plain wrong.
What I want to talk about has to do with restorative justice and survivors of abuse and oppression. All humans at some point suffer from oppression but not all humans suffer equally. Often this oppression takes the form of (systematic) abuse.
An integral and necessary part of radical politics is acknowledging this oppression, it's discriminating distribution, and offering space and resources for the healing processes of those hurt by oppression and abuse.
 |
| image credit |
This is the sankofa bird. It's associated with the Ghanian proverb “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." and emphasizes the value of of reaching from the past in order to move forward with wisdom.
I chose this image to demonstrate that finding wisdom in the past is essential to moving forward sustainably. I also believe the reverse to be equally true. If we do no make strides to move forward after going back to retrieve what we have forgotten, it may not mature into the wisdom we need.
When the healing process in our communities stops us from moving forward it stops history from becoming wisdom. This doesn't mean forgetting or abandoning our histories but moving forward means not dwelling on our own healing process to the detriment of others who want to share our community.
So what does this mean in the real world? It means that women who claim they cannot heal in spaces that includes people with genitals and childhood experiences of gender that differ from their own ('feminists' who exclude trans women) need to realize that their healing is not the only job to be done.
It means that while victims/survivors of harassment & assault deserve to have their community insulate them from their abusers and offer resources for their healing, the abuser and those who match the abuser's demographic must still be respected as human beings.
Being treated in an inhumane way does not give the recipient of that suffering someone a free pass to treat others inhumanly or incite the inhumane treatment of those who contribute to their healing process.
Believe me when I say, that was a hard sentence for me to write. There are certainly people in my history I want to yell at and even do physical harm to. I personally will not hesitate to use physical violence to stop someone from physically assaulting someone I love.
But when we enable and encourage the inhumane treatment of our abusers/oppressors and those who look/behave like them we are enabling the cycle of abuse. We send the message that violence and exclusion are the proper way to heal and even that such violence is radical. We excuse such violence by calling it solidarity for victims/survivors.
I don't mean to invalidate the very real instances where immediate violence is required for personal survival. That shit exists and I hate that it does. I don't think there is a single anti-oppression activist that would feel otherwise. But I now realize that encouraging the violence and exclusion between ourselves and our oppressors/abusers perpetuates the notion that that there are people who are abusers and people who are not.
We are all capable of treating others inhumanely. Saying or thinking that some people just can't help it or thinking that they are unable to take responsibility, enables us to think of them exclusively as abusers and even monsters, and to treat them inhumanely.
This nasty loophole of twisted solidarity & assumption can enable cycles of abuse to continue. Some men abuse some women, and some of those women go on to use their experiences of abuse/oppression as an excuse to to exclude, deny and dehumanize trans women because they are assume that trans women are "like the men who abused them". Some men abuse some women, some of those women and those who care about them say "kill all/your rapists" in order to 'support' survivors of rape. This is the same loophole that allowed 2nd wave feminists of the 70s to claim that all penetrative sex was rape.
Make no mistake. I am in no way saying that rage over experiences of abuse are unwarranted. I feel mad as all fuck about the injustices of rape and abuse. There is wisdom to be found from that rage. And we do not have to forgive or even let go of that rage if we don't want. But we do have to take personal responsibility for it.
It's not our fault that certain traits trigger past memories of abuse and trauma, but it IS our responsibility to treat the people with those traits humanely. Trauma is not an excuse to deny someone from existing. It's totally okay not to be able to deal when past trauma is triggered. But what triggered it, no matter who it was attached to, has less to do with your trauma than the person who inflicted that trauma on you.
I personally struggle a lot with this distinction. I have a tendency to dismiss and feel ill-at-ease around people who show apparent signs of wealth and financial flexibility. If a person I don't trust touches me in a certain way or place on my body my trauma comes up. And sometimes (later) I am viciously angry. But the trigger I have aren't the fault of the people who triggered. Oppression, abuse, and violence are the source. I don't need people who trigger me to be excluded or punished. And doing so will certainly not serve to protect me or other prevent harm to others in the community.
I don't need the people who've abused me to be punished either (though I will want to be excluded from spaces that I & other they have abused will be). Survivors/victims of abuse don't need anything from their abusers. They need support and resources from their community in order to start their healing process.
It's the community that needs the abuser to responsibility. We've been hoodwinked by punitive justice systems to think that someone has to "pay" for what happened. I believe in restorative justice model is better for this. Which doesn't mean that the direct relationships between abusers and those the abuse should be repaired, but that we can raise our expectations and build better more respectful scripts for interaction. It also means that we know who needs to work harder at respecting the humanity of other and taking responsibility for their actions.
Let's stop essentializing abusers, oppressors, and those that look like/remind us of them with violence and oppression. The potential to be violent and oppressive exists within all of us and each of us has the power to be less oppressive and violent. Let's hold everyone acceptable to this. It's what can heal communities and makes them safer, less harmful places. It's how we can both look look back and move forward at the same time.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Getting Over My Toxic Exceptionalism
I'm applying for grad school this fall. Specifically I'm applying for MFA programs in order to study both poetry and creative non-fiction.
As some of you may know I have a fraught history with education. I dove straight into college after high school and after college straight into graduate school for teaching (which I failed to finish).
My motivation for crashing headlong into academia was a strange amalgam of insecurity, fear, shame, and a trust in the messages public school had taught me about exceptionalism. I was taught and believed that I was exceptional based on my high achievement in early schooling and ability to charm adults. I believed I was exceptional and this belief has derailed my life for a long while.
In high school my grades started to slip little bit, for a few weeks this terrified me, but eventually, in order to maintain my view of myself as exceptional, I decided that some parts of high school just didn't matter, that I was above them and that I should just concentrate on getting out because college was where I would really succeed anyway.
Being a fist generation college student I always felt a sense of non-belonging in academia. There were words and social structures I didn't understand (like fellowship), and even though I was sure that my intelligence made me exceptional, I felt constantly terrified that I would be spotted as an impostor in this unfamiliar world of academia.
In order to blend in I concentrated on more "rigorous" studies. I eschewed full time focus on some of my greatest passions poetry, writing, feminism, queer studies. These where things I KNEW I loved but didn't let myself do so openly. Somehow I learned that no successful person ever showed anything but ancillary interest in such topics.
By the time I reached my senior year in college I had been able to weave some of my passions into the conventional academic success route. I was working as a tutor at the writing center and taking courses in education and literature.
I knew that to survive and be acceptable as a literary & creative person in this world I would have to be a teacher. And my current politics and conception of the world told me I needed to be a public high school teacher. And I LOVED the idea of teaching. I still do. But for a long time I ignored the realities of what a public school teaching position meant. I care about pedagogies and how people learn but I don't have the capacity to throw my full self into the physically demanding often 60 hour work week of being a radical high school teacher.
Though I ultimately failed in the program, it was through Evergreen's MIT program I learned the most invaluable tool for deconstructing the lie of exceptionalism.
On the very first day all the students in the cohort read a small section of a study by Carol Dweck. It demonstrated that children who were taught that their intelligence and skills where changeable attributes vastly outperformed children who where taught that their intelligence and skills where fixed. The belief that your skills are changeable enables you to take the risks necessary for doing great work. Even though I learned it that day on a conscious level it has taken years to really sink in and integrate into my views of the world.
My intelligence and skills are not exceptional. Nor do I need them to be. Knowing this frees me from the burden of "using my gifts wisely and graciously". It frees me for the expected paths of people of high/exceptional intelligence. Part of me is ashamed that I once thought of mysef this way.
But another part of me knows that thinking this way was a reflexive short cut to getting myself into a different situation in life.
I knew I didn't want to have the same sort of life my older cousins and my neighbors where having, so I latched onto an idea that obfuscated my responsibility for those wants. I didn't want a different life because I just wanted it, I of course wanted it because I was a different sort of person than my family and community. I let myself believe I was excpetional.
This was of course a mischaracterization of both myself and those in my communities. I wanted the things I wanted because I wanted them, it was simple as that.
The terrifying freedom in Dweck's growth mindset is that I no longer have a excuse to duck the things I feel compelled to do and to do well and frequently. I can no longer hide behind my "gift" of intelligence as an excuse to do what the world has deemed to be the right thing. Now I'm forced to look into my own wants and based on what I find there, create "the right thing".
Increasingly in the last 3 years this has been writing and the study of feminism, classism, and queer issues. I never directly studied such issues in college (though I enjoyed supplemental courses and queer/class/feminist lenses whenever they were brought into classes).
It's funny that being in the "real world" rather than in school has really brought home for me in a material way how very little it matters whether one is exceptional or not. Commitment to and showing up for what I want to do matters so much more. Effort is the only real measurable form of progress I can make toward creating a significant body of work.
In some sense I have always known that writing was the life for me (mind you not the only life I live). Even before I knew how to write, I remembered the thrill of telling stories to my siblings and friends on camping trips or on the playground.
I had a strikingly beautiful realization my junior year of college that's resonated since. When assigned to do an anthropological study on the language of students who are in the age group you anticipate teaching. I chose to record a conversation between my two sisters (15 &17 at the time). In listening to the tapes afterward I realized that the family & community I had so tried to escape and exceptionalize myself away from where the very source of my love of language and my ease at slipping into playing with it. My family's dinner tables is rife with puns and amusement at near/internal rhymes and regularly engage in both intentional and unintentional spoonerisms.
When I started writing poetry in the 9th grade My father claimed to have no interest or ability to understand poetry. To this day that moment, or I suppose the many moment that led up to my reaching this conclusion, infuriated me. At the time I used my frustration as an excuse to distance myself from my "lowbrow" family. But today I know, my lowbrow family is the source of much of the rich, risky, unselfconscious choices I make in my writing. And that my father was simply reciting what his teachers had told him about his ability to understand language.
I am not an exception to my community of origin. I am what I am to a large extent because of that community. My family taught me not to be afraid to play, and they didn't teach me that because they thought I was exceptional, they taught me that because they loved me and I was a part of them. I still am. My family will always be a part of my writing.
Since leaving school I'm so grateful to have gone through the euphemism of "getting back to my roots". And so as I start drafting my artists statement and gaze over grad school applications I am terrified. I am terrified that by going back to school I will once again fall into thinking about myself as exceptional or that I will not be accepted if I refuse to. I am afraid that this deeply important connection I have developed to my families (both blood and chosen) will not be seen as valid or rigorous enough. I am afraid.
But I am applying anyway. Because I want learn how to put a book together. I want to learn what tools I need to make a living out of my passion and how to use those tools. I want the credentials to teach and to have the professional and academic communities offer a venue for my ability to recognize and mentor the voices of others.
So yes, I'm scared. But it is no longer the fear of being found out as non exceptional, or as an impostor. I know that I will always feel a little bit strange and out of place in the academy.
I'm afraid of the cost, not just in dollars (most application to grad schools cost at least 50$) but also on my psyche and on my relationships with the people in my communities and families. I know that schooling will pull me away from the people I love (especially considering that some of these schools are hundreds of miles away). Never again do I want to be encouraged to disregard my roots. But if through an MFA program I am pulled closer to my craft and I'm able to cultivate a more sustainable relationship with my passion it might just be worth it.
Postscript:
This post was of course inspired greatly by the work of Carol Dweck, my family, my own failures, the process of deciding to apply for grad school and Sherman Alexie's fantastic piece for the Atlantic about the poem that changed his life (which I found both deeply inspiring and unfortunately slightly dismissing of his culture of origin).
Some of my upcoming posts may include drafts of my artists statement.
As some of you may know I have a fraught history with education. I dove straight into college after high school and after college straight into graduate school for teaching (which I failed to finish).
My motivation for crashing headlong into academia was a strange amalgam of insecurity, fear, shame, and a trust in the messages public school had taught me about exceptionalism. I was taught and believed that I was exceptional based on my high achievement in early schooling and ability to charm adults. I believed I was exceptional and this belief has derailed my life for a long while.
In high school my grades started to slip little bit, for a few weeks this terrified me, but eventually, in order to maintain my view of myself as exceptional, I decided that some parts of high school just didn't matter, that I was above them and that I should just concentrate on getting out because college was where I would really succeed anyway.
Being a fist generation college student I always felt a sense of non-belonging in academia. There were words and social structures I didn't understand (like fellowship), and even though I was sure that my intelligence made me exceptional, I felt constantly terrified that I would be spotted as an impostor in this unfamiliar world of academia.
In order to blend in I concentrated on more "rigorous" studies. I eschewed full time focus on some of my greatest passions poetry, writing, feminism, queer studies. These where things I KNEW I loved but didn't let myself do so openly. Somehow I learned that no successful person ever showed anything but ancillary interest in such topics.
By the time I reached my senior year in college I had been able to weave some of my passions into the conventional academic success route. I was working as a tutor at the writing center and taking courses in education and literature.
I knew that to survive and be acceptable as a literary & creative person in this world I would have to be a teacher. And my current politics and conception of the world told me I needed to be a public high school teacher. And I LOVED the idea of teaching. I still do. But for a long time I ignored the realities of what a public school teaching position meant. I care about pedagogies and how people learn but I don't have the capacity to throw my full self into the physically demanding often 60 hour work week of being a radical high school teacher.
Though I ultimately failed in the program, it was through Evergreen's MIT program I learned the most invaluable tool for deconstructing the lie of exceptionalism.
On the very first day all the students in the cohort read a small section of a study by Carol Dweck. It demonstrated that children who were taught that their intelligence and skills where changeable attributes vastly outperformed children who where taught that their intelligence and skills where fixed. The belief that your skills are changeable enables you to take the risks necessary for doing great work. Even though I learned it that day on a conscious level it has taken years to really sink in and integrate into my views of the world.
My intelligence and skills are not exceptional. Nor do I need them to be. Knowing this frees me from the burden of "using my gifts wisely and graciously". It frees me for the expected paths of people of high/exceptional intelligence. Part of me is ashamed that I once thought of mysef this way.
But another part of me knows that thinking this way was a reflexive short cut to getting myself into a different situation in life.
I knew I didn't want to have the same sort of life my older cousins and my neighbors where having, so I latched onto an idea that obfuscated my responsibility for those wants. I didn't want a different life because I just wanted it, I of course wanted it because I was a different sort of person than my family and community. I let myself believe I was excpetional.
This was of course a mischaracterization of both myself and those in my communities. I wanted the things I wanted because I wanted them, it was simple as that.
The terrifying freedom in Dweck's growth mindset is that I no longer have a excuse to duck the things I feel compelled to do and to do well and frequently. I can no longer hide behind my "gift" of intelligence as an excuse to do what the world has deemed to be the right thing. Now I'm forced to look into my own wants and based on what I find there, create "the right thing".
Increasingly in the last 3 years this has been writing and the study of feminism, classism, and queer issues. I never directly studied such issues in college (though I enjoyed supplemental courses and queer/class/feminist lenses whenever they were brought into classes).
It's funny that being in the "real world" rather than in school has really brought home for me in a material way how very little it matters whether one is exceptional or not. Commitment to and showing up for what I want to do matters so much more. Effort is the only real measurable form of progress I can make toward creating a significant body of work.
In some sense I have always known that writing was the life for me (mind you not the only life I live). Even before I knew how to write, I remembered the thrill of telling stories to my siblings and friends on camping trips or on the playground.
I had a strikingly beautiful realization my junior year of college that's resonated since. When assigned to do an anthropological study on the language of students who are in the age group you anticipate teaching. I chose to record a conversation between my two sisters (15 &17 at the time). In listening to the tapes afterward I realized that the family & community I had so tried to escape and exceptionalize myself away from where the very source of my love of language and my ease at slipping into playing with it. My family's dinner tables is rife with puns and amusement at near/internal rhymes and regularly engage in both intentional and unintentional spoonerisms.
When I started writing poetry in the 9th grade My father claimed to have no interest or ability to understand poetry. To this day that moment, or I suppose the many moment that led up to my reaching this conclusion, infuriated me. At the time I used my frustration as an excuse to distance myself from my "lowbrow" family. But today I know, my lowbrow family is the source of much of the rich, risky, unselfconscious choices I make in my writing. And that my father was simply reciting what his teachers had told him about his ability to understand language.
I am not an exception to my community of origin. I am what I am to a large extent because of that community. My family taught me not to be afraid to play, and they didn't teach me that because they thought I was exceptional, they taught me that because they loved me and I was a part of them. I still am. My family will always be a part of my writing.
Since leaving school I'm so grateful to have gone through the euphemism of "getting back to my roots". And so as I start drafting my artists statement and gaze over grad school applications I am terrified. I am terrified that by going back to school I will once again fall into thinking about myself as exceptional or that I will not be accepted if I refuse to. I am afraid that this deeply important connection I have developed to my families (both blood and chosen) will not be seen as valid or rigorous enough. I am afraid.
But I am applying anyway. Because I want learn how to put a book together. I want to learn what tools I need to make a living out of my passion and how to use those tools. I want the credentials to teach and to have the professional and academic communities offer a venue for my ability to recognize and mentor the voices of others.
So yes, I'm scared. But it is no longer the fear of being found out as non exceptional, or as an impostor. I know that I will always feel a little bit strange and out of place in the academy.
I'm afraid of the cost, not just in dollars (most application to grad schools cost at least 50$) but also on my psyche and on my relationships with the people in my communities and families. I know that schooling will pull me away from the people I love (especially considering that some of these schools are hundreds of miles away). Never again do I want to be encouraged to disregard my roots. But if through an MFA program I am pulled closer to my craft and I'm able to cultivate a more sustainable relationship with my passion it might just be worth it.
Postscript:
This post was of course inspired greatly by the work of Carol Dweck, my family, my own failures, the process of deciding to apply for grad school and Sherman Alexie's fantastic piece for the Atlantic about the poem that changed his life (which I found both deeply inspiring and unfortunately slightly dismissing of his culture of origin).
Some of my upcoming posts may include drafts of my artists statement.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
My NaNoWriMo Project (NaBloWriMo)
So here's the thing.
I participated in National Novel Writing Month exactly once (Nov. 2011). The novel I wrote then remains unedited and unread. It was fun and viciously challenging. I'm glad I did it. However I far from primarily consider myself a novelist. My writing priorities actually go something like this,
poetry
essays/blogposts
prose poems
short stories
novels.
So while I won't say I'm not a novelist I will say that writing a novel is not high on my list of priorities right now. In light of this preference and my fierce passion to get better at nonfiction, this year I've elected to hold myself to the daily 1,666 word count demand of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words in a month). Free from the expectation of a novel I'll encouraging myself to daily draft both a personal essay/otherwise creative nonfic piece and a poem.
In addition to writing the directed 1,500+ words I'm resolving to blog every day this November. As someone who generally posts about twice a month obviously this terrifies me. Writing 1,500+ words can take at the very least 40 minutes (and I'm anticipating the switching genres will only take longer) and editing a drafted blogpost usually takes 1.5-2 hours. This is a huge undertaking. And it is bound to have some kinks.
In the past two years I've tried to hold to content of this blog to some standard of coherence and relevance/usefulness the communities I care about. I will still attempt to meet this standard, but I can't promise that the quality of my upcoming daily posts will not be somewhat erratic. Bear with me friends, it's gonna be a long month. And please please please comment on upcoming posts, especially if something you read sounds interesting yet unfinished. I plan to make updated/expanded/edited post on the things I'll likely only be able to skim by doing daily posts.
Thanks!
<3 WRM
I participated in National Novel Writing Month exactly once (Nov. 2011). The novel I wrote then remains unedited and unread. It was fun and viciously challenging. I'm glad I did it. However I far from primarily consider myself a novelist. My writing priorities actually go something like this,
poetry
essays/blogposts
prose poems
short stories
novels.
So while I won't say I'm not a novelist I will say that writing a novel is not high on my list of priorities right now. In light of this preference and my fierce passion to get better at nonfiction, this year I've elected to hold myself to the daily 1,666 word count demand of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words in a month). Free from the expectation of a novel I'll encouraging myself to daily draft both a personal essay/otherwise creative nonfic piece and a poem.
In addition to writing the directed 1,500+ words I'm resolving to blog every day this November. As someone who generally posts about twice a month obviously this terrifies me. Writing 1,500+ words can take at the very least 40 minutes (and I'm anticipating the switching genres will only take longer) and editing a drafted blogpost usually takes 1.5-2 hours. This is a huge undertaking. And it is bound to have some kinks.
In the past two years I've tried to hold to content of this blog to some standard of coherence and relevance/usefulness the communities I care about. I will still attempt to meet this standard, but I can't promise that the quality of my upcoming daily posts will not be somewhat erratic. Bear with me friends, it's gonna be a long month. And please please please comment on upcoming posts, especially if something you read sounds interesting yet unfinished. I plan to make updated/expanded/edited post on the things I'll likely only be able to skim by doing daily posts.
Thanks!
<3 WRM
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