Feminist Transportation

My mouse is a bit sticky, and seems to keep picking up large portions of my folders and dropping them in other quadrants. This is thanks to an unfortunate run-in with a cleaning wipe — you wouldn’t think they’d be as dangerous to a laptop as they are.

All that’s to say, my post may have a particularly unusual syntax today.

I took the bus during my hiatus from the Internet, due to a breakdown with the car, and it was quite an experience. Makes me consider feminism in a whole new light.

I’m one of those people who says, “I’m not a feminist, but…” and has never taken a women’s studies class but owns at least one Judith Butler book. In other words, I am the sort of feminist that some feminists love to hate. I acknowledge that — all of the privileges, none of the responsibilities.

ANYWAY. My point is that I got on the bus. Within a block, I’d been visited by a middle aged man who tried to kiss my hand, and I can’t believe this, but I felt bad for scolding him for trying to do so. Even though I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him. He didn’t ask. It was a blatant invasion of personal space and creeped me the heck out.

So this is where the feminist responsibility should have come in: I could have scolded him more sternly, could have let it go afterwards instead of feeling guilty that I might hurt his feelings or offend him. I could have called him on it. Instead, I played the blame game: what did I do to make myself deserve it?

I understand that this is exactly the mentality that gets girls (and women) blamed for their own rapes. They shouldn’t have worn that skirt, those shoes, walked that street, walked at night. What did they do to make themselves deserve it? And yet, while I would never blame a woman for being raped, I somehow turned that same mentality on myself and blamed myself for being hassled on the bus.

Augh. How frustrating, how offensive, how demeaning to myself. That is the “not a feminist” part of me that acted. I wish the part of me that is the exception to the “not a feminist” would act more often.

From poverty of speech to writer’s waterfalls

A few months ago I wrote on this blog that I was afraid of the moment — of that moment of intense anticipation, where I could choose to jump into the future or hold back, and wasn’t sure which was the right course of action. That moment caused me to stop writing for several months, and now I am faced with another moment.

Except.

This moment is different. Psychiatrists call it a “poverty of speech,” that earlier moment. Artists call it writer’s block. It was both, and neither, and I was left with nothing to say. This moment, I have so much to say that I am not sure where to start, so I hope that bodes well for this moment being a better moment than the last.

To put this in more down-to-earth terms: I am thinking about moving! I am thinking about changing jobs and countries and trying out something entirely new in my life! I am both excited and fearful to think about what this might hold for me, but I push on.

On being afraid of the moment

I have always believed that there is a moment, somewhere in my future, where I will know what to do and accomplish and and I will be flawless and unafraid. I believe that in this moment, somewhere in the middle of it, I will be great and accomplish great things. And I have let my belief in this moment rule out the possibility of action in the here-and-now.

That belief is gone.

That moment won’t come.

The only moment I have in which to act is the present one, and I am afraid that the present moment doesn’t bring with it great feelings of competence and eloquence and all the things I hoped for.

Legacies and changing themes

Well, I’m changing up the theme here. It’s been green for long enough, so until I start customizing some things (and adding a blogroll!), it’s going to be red and white. No, I’m not looking for Christmas. Though it is cold today!

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I do what I do lately. I mean that in the broadest possible sense: why I eat, walk, have conversations, work. I do not mean it in a depressed or hopeless way. In fact, exactly the opposite: the last few weeks have been such an opportunity to celebrate my own hope that the world can be better.

Because, you see, that is why I do what I do. Whether it is getting out of bed in the morning, taking a walk, going to work — I do these things precisely because of my hope and faith that they will affect what comes next. I believe that, like dominoes, each thing I do will affect something further down the line. I believe that my actions can push us further on the road to equality and justice.

At the same time, what I do has been very much changed over the last few weeks. I am not a direct action person. I am not a particularly angry person, not a particularly passive person, just a person. I am inclined to plan for the future and hope for the best, but what I am ultimately is a facilitator. I lie to help others bring their ideas to fruition. My ideas? They are of the strategic sort. They are about how to help other people best succeed.

This has been a rather painful realization for me, because I feel that facilitators don’t leave legacies. While I am neither particularly angry nor passive, I am not a peaceful enough person to be thrilled with this. I want a legacy! And I want it to be fully mine, not just helping others shape their ideas into successes!

But, as someone said to me recently, it is what it is.

My next step is coming to peace with it.

A titleless post

Family is amazing. That is all.

Should I fill out a census?

It has been another while since I have posted, almost a month, a long while in which I’ve noticed something interesting about myself. I write — I push myself — when I am unhappy. Right now I feel terribly complacent, which is perhaps why I haven’t pushed myself so much lately but also why I lack that drive and desire and why I’m not in pursuit of a world shift right now.

Whew. That was a long sentence. It was also a long thought: something that’s come slowly to me. I’m not too happy about it!

But anyway, today is Monday and on Mondays I usually write something about mental illness and this Monday shall be no different, I am determined!

I am determined because I have really been struggling the last few weeks with how to tell my story. I know I need to do it, not just for myself — therapy — but also for others — so that they understand where I am coming from and why I am passionate about the things I believe in.

I can tell you a story about being a girl from the country in the city, about life choices and disappointments and learning to live with those disappointments. But other than the fact that show chickens and a coffee farm feature heavily in my story, it is not so different after all from anybody else’s story.

The story that’s different, that’s wholly mine, is the story of what happened after my words fell apart. I do what I do, and I put this writing online almost every Monday, because I believe that no person should have to go through the isolation and pain and trauma of trying to find one’s way through a system that doesn’t recognize him or her as a person. This belief that more of us should get to be people, not just partially but in every aspect of our life, is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I get up to turn that belief into reality, both through the work I do and through the act of doing it.

And yet I am struggling to come to terms with how people have violated my belief in my own humanity. I don’t want to face it full on. And a response! To respond is even harder — how to answer when somebody denies you your personhood? You respond, a priori, as a non-person.

For several years now I have been given de facto full person status. Nobody knows I’m crazy. Nobody asks any questions. Suddenly, we are all asking — people who know me; people who don’t; me, who wonders how well I know myself. Do I count? Should I be counted?

I wonder what the census bureau has to say about all thus.

Holding my tongue

When I started this blog, I thought I’d write about madness on Monday and work on Wednesday, because, well, it’s alliterative and it might help me. No more! These things are increasingly merged together. Today is no different. I was at a community meeting today and it really struck me how much disability affects our professional lives (or lack thereof!).

I know how privileged I am. I have a job, an education, all the trappings. I am so well hidden that I got quizzed today on whether I was “really” disabled. “Yes,” I assured the woman. “I am.” Inside I was shaking because it was the first time I’ve said those words and I said them to a room of strangers.

It could have been a teaching moment: “the disabled” aren’t all the same, just as any other category of people has a continuum, so do we. Disability can be invisible, I could have said. I could have pulled apart the stereotypes. But I didn’t. I held my tongue, so shocked by her question and by my response that I had nothing more to say. I could have said, the minimum wasn’t enough for me either — I want to be more than average, more than the stereotypes, more than the statistics. I didn’t say that either. I held my tongue.

This post is short, and a bit circuitous. I am tired and it has been a hard day. I am still sitting back in that moment where I said yes and turning it over in my mouth. It tastes unusual, I think.

Fitting In and Social Misfits

I have been following the story of Amy Bishop, the professor who shot several of her colleagues, with a bit of trepidation. I feel that when something like that happens, it is so unexpected and shocking and incomprehensible that we feel that the person must be intrinsically and irrevocably damaged in some way. It is not that they had a bad day or don’t handle stress well. It is that they are in some way crazy (a comment not on brain chemistry or not fitting in but on behavior). Because do not want to admit that we, too, could respond in this way. That we, too, are this vulnerable. We don’t want to confess that we, too, could change our lives so quickly as Amy Bishop did hers and theirs.

So while I do believe that there’s a place here for judgment, I don’t now where that place is. I’m not the person to pass it. But I empathize with the others who are trying to understand what happened, either by finding an appropriate box or taking it out of the box and examining it in its full complexity. I empathize with this need to understand.

I mentioned earlier that I go to church. This doesn’t give me any moral foundation to judge. Or comprehend. Or, really, do anything else in this situation except to wonder… she, too, conformed in some way to the standards expected of her. She was educated. She was a professor, for crying out loud. (I won’t get into the difficult of female professors and academia and what is expected of them here.) She must have, at some level, looked as though she matched the image to have jumped through so many hoops of success.

I have heard the words, too: “Social misfit.” “Too complex.” These are the kindest of them. They emphasize the disconnect, the slippage, the fragile hanging on to how others see us — even if it is not who we ultimately are. I suspect the words will be different now, and I won’t speculate on what they will be other than to say that they will be clinical ways to explain this, that they will not be generous about the mismatch between people and their society, that they will be harsh and pointed and suggest intrinsic unchangeable flaws.

There are no words for this pain. Not on either side. I am so removed from the situation that I can’t really talk about it except in theory. I can say that this story happens at the cusp: we can continue to believe that any flaw is internal, or we can break the mold ever so slightly and admit that sometimes fitting in is hard to do. We can ease the pain of being a misfit, not by labeling it as an illness but by finding real solutions.

I don’t know what the best course of action here is. I just hope that there is a better course of action than what we’ve found so far.

Reflections on Lent from the Outside

This week seems to be the week of faith. On Tuesday, my friends ate pancakes. On Wednesday there were ashes, which I referred to as dirt at first glance. Today, my daily book recommendation was “An Altar in the World,” which was touted as elegant and ardent as well as faithful — this means that I will be picking up a copy as soon as possible.

I am glad for these reminders, though it makes me feel estranged in my own world. These are people I know and love — and yet this week has been a reminder that they have traditions that are not my own, that are utterly foreign to me. Why pancakes? Why ashes? Why faith!?

This isn’t the first time I’ve come face-to-face with my own lack of faith and traditions. It’s been a recurring theme, really — why do I not believe when so many others do? More to the point, how can I not believe when I know that my life is so fragile and altered by so many unexpected moments? How can I look at this procession of transformations and not see in them something bigger than myself?

On the other hand, how can I?

I am not a person who disbelieves. I am not anti-theistic, nor anti-religion. There is simply a certain dependability that I don’t see in my world, a certain faith that I don’t encounter, a struggle I don’t always engage in. It is more that there is a language that I don’t speak — and often, a language I wish I did. I know a few words. But that’s all.

And so, when my friends eat pancakes and celebrate Ash Wednesday and give up things for Lent, I find myself utterly astray in a world where I am only able to read a few signposts and, if lucky, orient the guidebook. It is a strange land to me, one which I wish I understood better. I wish I knew where the marketplace was and the terrain of the streets and the proper greetings.

But I don’t. And so I feel somewhat adrift, watching people I love engaging with this strange world of faith where I can’t follow. It is an odd feeling. And I know that there are places I go where they can’t follow me, and so this season serves as a reminder of that as well.

In the end, maybe what I should take from this is that our struggle is that of connection in the face of isolation, that our ability to talk and love through our foreign languages and broken worlds and faiths is worth something too.

But I’m not sure of that either.

Why I Work

Lately with the job and everything, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I work. Part of this is obviously about necessity: I work because I need to live. It’s easy to get caught up in the paycheck and benefits, the early morning alarm and the five o’clock exit. But lately, as I am excitedly waiting for the results of the fellowship process, I’ve thought about it again. Why am I so excited about the prospect of this particular job? Even when I like my current job?

These are the reasons I work, aside from the obvious:

1. I work because I love the act of creating something for the first time.
2. I work to be part of something bigger than I can be alone.
3. I work to contribute to the society that supports me.
4. I work because I love the search for something better than what is.
5. I work to change the world.
6. I work because the world doesn’t always believe I can.
7. I work because I love the feeling of accomplishing something I didn’t know I could.

And of course, I don’t mean work simply as wage-work! Plenty of people work in ways that they don’t get paid for, or even often recognized for — mothers or caretakers come to mind in particular. And then there are all the types of work that we do and don’t recognize as work. We learn, for instance, to fix our kitchen sinks or mow the lawn, change our car’s oil, knit, write, cook. These, too, are forms of work.

Also, I realize how immensely privileged I am to be able to work, both legally and physically. Not everybody gets that shot. Not everybody gets to have a choice about the kind of work one does, or where, or who one’s boss is. So I feel very blessed that I do get to have those choices in some way. Maybe that’s at the root of it. It is not what I do, but that I have the choice to do it, and that is a feeling for which I am intensely grateful and aware of my privilege.

Why do you work?