oppression

But Some Lives Don’t

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I removed a comment from my Facebook post this morning.  Its basic message was “ALL LIVES MATTER”.  I was as kind and respectful with the one who commented as I was able, but I could not leave that comment on my page.

It isn’t that I think all lives mattering is a bad thing.  I’m all for that.  I would love to see that.

The problem is I see very clearly and close-up that some lives don’t matter.  And that isn’t right, and it isn’t good, and it needs to be rectified.

I think that a lot of people miss the point of the Black Lives Matter movement, and other similar movements that are pressing for equity and safety and opportunity for those who are marginalized in our society.  The point is not that these lives matter more than the “all lives” that some use to counter these movements.  The point is that these lives already live under the oppressive and marginalizing weight of being treated like they don’t matter.

Last night I posted because I watched a young man be shot across the street.  He was a black man, living in an underserved neighborhood—my neighborhood—and he was just walking down the sidewalk when he was struck with bullets and fell to the ground.  There were lots of people out last night, on that same sidewalk on this block.  Women, children, elderly people, and young men all shared the moment.  We sprang into action.  I called for the police and an ambulance.  Several others ran to where the victim had dropped, peeling off their shirts and pressing against wounds, administering what first aid they could and keeping him conscious until help arrived.  And after the event, I posted a plea for an end to this injustice, racism, classism, and access to firearms that transforms quiet blocks on the Westside into blue-lit, yellow-tape-covered, crime scenes.

Many responded with sadness, some with shock.  One left the “ALL LIVES MATTER”.

They don’t.  They matter in the sense that I believe in equity and that humans deserve love and respect and opportunity and safety and security as humans.  They don’t in the way our society currently treats the brown and the black and the poor and the sick and the suffering.  We are treated like shit.  We are treated like our lives are not worth the air we breathe.  We are treated as though our lives mean less to others than “rights” to have entitled and privileged and unfettered space for the most white and most rich and most cis and most male and most heterosexual.  We are treated as though our lives don’t matter.

Here I will interrupt myself for a moment and clarify something.  I’m not black or brown.  I am poor and sick and queer, so I understand much of the marginalization that my neighbors experience, because I experience that too.  But my plight is not their plight, exactly.  I can pass for a normative, respected, acceptable person when I am not asking for money or ranting about the problems that disability creates.  I can simply not share with others that I am unable to work and struggling to survive.  But my neighbors can’t pass as white-bodied individuals.  And no matter what other status or wealth or purpose or good works they may have associated with them on an individual level, they are judged first and foremost by the color of their bodies.  And that judgement leaves them unsafe, disrespected, gunned down, impoverished, and more.

I live in an area where I am one of very few white people.  It took me living here for over a year to even meet some of my neighbors.  There was a suspicion that floated about me.  Why was I here?  What did I want?  Why would I not live in a “better” or “safer” area?  After all, I am white, so I should be able to easily find a place to be among the other white people.   But I am poor and disabled, so I cannot afford to live among the other white people.  And, as my neighbor so poignantly expressed last night, “None of them are buying you a house in the suburbs, are they?”

Nope.

Nobody has offered me a place to live in the relative safety that they live in.  Some will help with finances so that I can continue to eat and heat or cool my home and stay alive in my marginalized state.  Many will judge me and treat me poorly and say bad things about me to others in order to discredit my claims that the system is rigged against people like me and my black and brown neighbors.  “Lazy, free-loading, welfare queens” is how they see us—not as hard-working people of integrity who just happen to have arbitrary traits that prevent us from being valued in our society.

I stood outside and talked with my neighbors for some time last night after the shooting had happened.  We talked about how nobody wants this for themselves or the ones they love.  We talked about how a teaching career and a host of graduate degrees and the love of god and fellow humans means nothing, because we have that arbitrary trait of ours that negates all of the good, purposeful traits.

We are good people, by and large.  We are families.  We hold down two or three jobs.  We learn from a young age to appease the system at all costs, to prevent increased suffering.  We learn that even appeasing that system all the time will not necessarily prevent suffering—it might still end in us shot on the sidewalk.  It may even cause us to be shot by the people who are sworn to protect and serve us.

I’m not black or brown-skinned.  But I count myself as “we”.  I count myself that way because I have been immersed in this culture, in this neighborhood, and in this experience for over five years.  That is but a fraction of the years that these others have and will be marginalized due to arbitrary standards, but it is enough time for me to know and to feel the pain that is endured here.  Not fully, of course, but in part, I feel what those around me feel.  I hear their cries.  I listen to their stories.  I relate to their pain and fear and frustration.

I had PTSD long before I began living in a ghetto-like environment where people of color are trapped for lifetimes, and living to age 50 is a landmark worthy of parties bigger than the reception after most weddings.  But being here triggers much, because the traumas of being black surround me, even though I am white.  I’m not afraid of or in my neighborhood.  I am afraid for my neighborhood, and the people within.

Our lives do not matter to politicians or manufacturing companies or many of the police or “decent” white people living in large houses in nice areas where you don’t even lock your doors at night.  Our lives don’t come with the assurances offered to others.  Our lives are lived moment by moment, challenge by challenge, and triumph by triumph.  And we value life more than most, because we see the fragility, and we understand how quickly and without comment we can be removed from this world.

There were no news vans or helicopters last night on my block.  There were only those who live here and those paid to come here and help.  This young man was gunned down in the street, and only those who live and work here even know about it.

Sure, there might be an article on Monday about how many shootings and homicides happened in Chicago over the weekend.  But this young man may not even be mentioned specifically, and all the people with power to change the situation will pass over that article and give it over to statements including drugs, gangs, “black on black” crime, or “ALL LIVES MATTER”.  They will give it over to excuses, and not to the truth of the matter.

The truth of the matter is that we do not matter.  The sick, the aging, the black or brown, the woman in hijab, the man with prison tattoos, the person with the name you don’t know how to pronounce, the mother who has three jobs to provide for her children, the veteran on the corner with a sign and a paper cup asking for care and respect and the ability to live—we don’t matter.  And we feel the weight of that every day.  We know you don’t believe we matter.  If you did, you would change your actions and fight for our rights and stop saying that “ALL LIVES MATTER” to justify your ignorance and lack of care for the most vulnerable in our society.

If all lives really mattered to you, you would stop purchasing fast fashion to save the lives of Bangladeshi men and women.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would demand that social security support those who are disabled without years of suffering and waiting to be heard and offered care.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would be screaming at your representatives to put an end to the sale of handguns and assault weapons in our country.  If all lives really mattered to you, I wouldn’t be trying to crowdfund my existence because you would be generously donating funds or making certain that there were safety nets for those who need them in this country.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would reassess your views regarding women and birth control and safe access to abortion to make certain that you were not looking at the issue from a privileged viewpoint.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would fight for the rights of the formerly incarcerated, sex workers, and juvenile offenders.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would call for an end to the “war on drugs” and private prisons and mass incarceration.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would celebrate love between people, regardless of their gender, and use the pronouns and names that transgender or queer individuals have chosen for themselves, and stop looking sideways at men in dresses, or women with shaved heads, assuming that they are “wrong” somehow, for being who they are.  If all lives really mattered to you, you would be outraged by the oppression of, marginalization of, or limited rights of any and all people or groups.  If all lives really mattered to you, they would matter equally.

I can hug a homeless, mentally ill, prostitute on the corner and wish him a good day and ask how he is doing.  His life matters to me, regardless of anything he does or does not do.  And if all lives matter, then he should have healthcare and medication and safe housing and opportunities to make money in other ways than selling the only “capital” he has—his body.  If you wouldn’t go near such a man, then all lives do not matter to you.

If you would not sacrifice a portion of your own comforts and securities to make certain that all others had equal, or at least basic, comforts and securities, then all lives do not matter to you.

And if you cannot admit that you treat lives in a hierarchical manner, placing some lives higher than others, then you are in no position to say “ALL LIVES MATTER”.

This post is harsh.  But I won’t apologize for that, because it is necessary.

People with extreme privilege need to stop pretending at care for all lives.  Instead, all people need to care for one another in a manner that demonstrates we want a world without privileged status—we want a world where each life matters as much as our own.

I don’t see that from most of the people who say things like “ALL LIVES MATTER”.  I don’t see that from many of my acquaintances or my Facebook “friends”.  I don’t see that from most of my family members.  I don’t see that in my neighborhood or in my city or in the way that the problems we are facing are addressed.  I don’t see equity.  I don’t see lives that matter.  I look out my window and I see a sweet young man, who passes my home almost every day, bleeding on the sidewalk—shot, wounded, and not mattering much at all.

So, please, for the love of all that is good, stop pretending and making excuses and going forward without challenging the systems that are oppressing others.  Grow.  Think.  Listen.  Consider.  And then change, so that you are participating in a society that offers equal rights and equal benefit and equal status to all.

Don’t say all lives matter until you are doing everything you can to honor every single person living on this planet, and have your actions be intimately tied to the care and concern for every single one of those lives.  My guess is that following this suggestion will create a situation where only a handful of people I know—maybe less—will be able to say that all lives matter.  The rest need to sit and study and wrestle with the concepts of privilege and oppression and injustice and equity for a longer time and with more intent.

Yes, all lives matter.  But no, we aren’t treating people in that manner.  So start treating people as though they matter, or stop fucking saying that they do.

This morning the blood is washed away and people are out doing work.  The men across the street are working on fixing a car.  Next door to them is a man working diligently to rehab a house that has been boarded up for about four years.  I’m sitting in my office, overlooking the children and the young people and the men and women moving about.  We just go on.  We just keep on doing life in the best way we know how, in the midst of trauma and terror and task forces and terrible social support systems.  We are resilient and we are strong and we are good.  We keep fighting for change and working toward peace and summoning hope and praying for better situations.

Even if you don’t show us our lives matter, we know that they do.  So we live our lives, in the best possible ways we can.  Our lives matter to us.  We hang on to one another, and we work together, and we keep telling our stories, hoping the world will one day hear and respond.  Hoping one day we will see that our lives matter, that all lives matter equally, on a global scale.

May that day come soon.

 

When The Pain is All That Is

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

When I was younger I used to write late at night often.  I was a single mother, trying to raise a child and finish college and figure out life all at once.  The late nights and the early mornings were the times I could write without taking time away from my little girl.  Early mornings were usually reserved for assignment completion, since my brain was fresh and unencumbered by the thoughts of the day to distract me.  But at night, the emotions were what flowed onto the page.

I used to write with ink pen and notebook … I suppose most of us did.  But for me it was an emotional expression that needed the feeling, the movement, the flow.  And you could tell whether I was feeling nostalgic or angry or confused by the way the letters formed and the speed with which they formed and the strength with which I pressed the pen to paper.  I wouldn’t have made it through those years without pouring thoughts on paper.

Now I rarely stay up past ten at night and can’t use a pen or pencil for more than a few minutes at a time, so that pouring out has largely disappeared.

But tonight is a different story.

Tonight I am letting it flow, in lots of ways.

The past few days have been an ongoing assault for me.  Early December reminds me of death, and death reminds me of my mother’s death, and my mother’s death reminds me of all the other deaths, and so it goes with grief.  The more loss you have experienced the more deeply each loss is felt, because they tie themselves to one another in some strange cosmic or cognitive way that none of us fully understands.  But I don’t need to understand it to feel it—deeply.

So, I am in the middle of this grief spurt, of sorts, where feeling anything seems difficult and feeling something means feeling loss and pain.  And of course, that is when I jump on the bandwagon of organizers everywhere and comment about the social problem that plagues my country now: gun control.  (I actually could have chosen from any number of social problems.  I wish that would have been a self-evident choice, but there are too many issues here to not name it specifically.)

And then the judges rule.

And by judges I mean people that are not at all qualified as judges or to make any particular judgments about the issue.  Some of them put out a string of falsehoods.  Some of them accuse me of “name-calling” because I use “stupid/classist/racist” as reasons one might think more guns would be better while simultaneously commenting on the number of shootings in Chicago.  None of them do, or have ever to my knowledge, lived in Chicago, mind you.  I do. In an area where gun violence is a constant. So, I am well aware and educated regarding what may or may not be helpful in ending this violence.  And when I tried to fight back and stand up for my views, I was called a bully and treated like I am being a terrible person, or morally corrupt, or some other form of bad.  Except those things arose after multiple people basically said a whole bunch of stuff about how wrong I am and how dumb my ideas are, and I responded with reasoned arguments and strings of facts.  The idea that I am being mean, or bullying others by stating facts and reasoned arguments is ridiculous. The idea that a bunch of people ganging up on me to say how wrong and dumb and morally bankrupt I am, for expressing factual information about gun violence, seems a lot more like bullying than anything I have EVER done, in my entire existence.

I am, by the way, the opposite of a bully.  I learned how to behave politely in the midst of great struggle and to pretend that my world wasn’t spinning out of control from a young age.  I was the one who was bullied, repeatedly and viciously, by others.  I was crying myself to sleep by age 9 and suicidal by the time I was 18.  I’m not the oppressor, but the oppressed.  I always have been.

I remember a time when my daughter was struggling with asserting herself, and in therapy this was something she was working on.  One day, on the playground, she called a boy a name and told him to leave her alone. That boy had been bullying her for months on end, and she finally stood up to him, and she was sent to the principal and I was called to come get her because she refused to follow a teacher’s instruction to apologize.  When I picked her up, I got angry with the principal, and said she most certainly would not be apologizing, and that we had been working all year to get her to voice her frustration and stand up to this bully.  This was a moment of triumph, not a moment of failure, for a timid girl who always ended up under the sole of someone else’s boot.

She learned that by watching me.

There are things you don’t mean to teach your children.  They are a part of you, so they become a part of them.  I always bent to the will of others.  I always hid the secrets.  I always played the part.  I tried and tried and tried to be the perfect daughter, and I failed.  Because perfection isn’t actually a thing. Nobody is perfect, we say, but then we try to force people to be exactly that, and we strive for exactly that. It makes no sense.  I taught my daughter to play the part too, and to not ruffle too many feathers and to not rock the boat, and I didn’t intend to, but she was subject to the same consequences I had been—being abused and manipulated and taken advantage of by others.

So, here is how I know I am not the bully.  I can’t be that.  I never learned how, and I am still trying to learn how.  Every week in therapy we talk about how I deserve to be happy and I don’t need to care what others think and I don’t have to live up to any expectations and I get to choose whom I wish to be.  Every week.  I don’t know how to be a bully.  But I am learning to voice my opinion and not back down and say things without sugar-coating every single word.  And that is met with all sorts of opposition.

It occurs to me tonight, after enduring days of negative comments about me and my thoughts and my action and my words and my ideas and probably the size of my ass, when you get right down to all the comments I have heard in the past week or so, that maybe those other people—the ones making me out to be the bully–are actually the bullies themselves.  Maybe they are so accustomed to people telling them what they want to hear, and to me being polite and diplomatic, that they lash out the moment that is taken from them.  Or, perhaps the converse is true, and those people are the ones being abused by others, and my insistence on maintaining my views without any pandering or trying to be perfect opens up a view to their own insecurities.  I’ll probably never know (especially because I unfriended most of them on Facebook, and I don’t think they have any other way to contact me).

It doesn’t really matter why they reacted in the way they did.  It doesn’t even matter if how I was speaking made them think I might be a bully.  Because the thing I can see, even in the midst of much pain and loss, is that I am not the kind of person they described, even at my worst.  Anyone who knows me well knows this to be true.  My good friends have watched me in the darkest and worst moments, and they know that I am love to the core, and that frustration only comes with pain, hunger, exhaustion, or injustice.  It doesn’t live in my core, but it assaults me from without.  I have the best of intentions, and the kindness of a saint, and love enough to pass it on to even the most desperate and marginalized among us.  Hugging homeless prostitutes isn’t something that you do when you are a bully, or morally corrupt, or without character.  That depth of love and understanding and that level of acceptance is a rare gift, and I am one of those blessed with that rare gift.  And I don’t need someone else to tell me this.  I know who I am.

Even though pain is all I feel and struggle is all I can seem to find these days, I know who I am.  I am not what those people who haven’t seen me for the last 7 to 20 years believe me to be.

Even when the pain is all I feel, I am still looking inside for my value and my worth, not to the outside.  I am finding the voice within and letting it out.  I am the girl on the playground who is fighting back with her words against an onslaught of injustice and being called to the principal’s office for doing so.  And that is fabulous and amazing and good.  That is a triumph!

I know that few to none of my friends throughout the years struggle from C-PTSD, so I understand that they don’t get how important it is to find value in yourself and to let go of the expectations of another and to stand on your own, even if the other doesn’t appreciate you doing so.  But it is extremely important.  Earth-shatteringly important.

The PTSD mind is a mind divided, and often accompanied by a confusion or a lack of knowing the self.  You can’t always—or maybe ever, in the beginning—trust what you feel to be yours and to be true.  Those core beliefs that you have held for your whole life are false, and it takes so much work to root them out, recognize them, and respond in ways that help to break those down.  To find your worth and to let go of shame and to release anger and to love yourself are nearly impossible.

I’m doing those things.  In the face of all sorts of criticism, I am holding on to me, and letting myself feel what I feel and believe what I believe and stand up for both.

When the pain is all you feel, it is really hard to have breakthrough moments like this, or to find your footing at all.  Today I am stomping with confidence, not just finding my footing.  And if other people felt on the bottom of my boot sole, I suppose that saddens me a bit, but not enough to let up right now.  Because I didn’t actually do any intentional harm to anyone, but others did do intentional harm to me.

Earlier this evening I posted that you cannot offer violence and expect peace in return.  This is how I feel about my whole life, not just the past couple of days of comments.  I was offered year upon year upon year of violence, and it is a wonder and a joy to know that I was not so damaged by that to deliberately harm others, or to deliberately harm myself, or to end my life, or to lose my mind completely.  I was repeatedly offered violence, and ninety-nine of a hundred times, I respond with peace.  That is a lot of peace, under the circumstances.

I am not a bully.  Even when the pain is all that is.

So, I end the night and begin the morning having peace within once more.  The assault of depression might linger for some time, or it might lift in a matter of days or weeks.  Eventually I will find ways to feel joy again.  I know, because I do it time and again.  I always will.  But, I rest in the knowledge that my strength is being found and held and kept against that which would seek to define me against my will.  I am still me, even when me is a pile of grief and loss.  And I will keep on being such, no matter who opposes me.

And it is a triumph.

Excellence

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

Sometimes it feels like a challenge to hold on to the good qualities I have, and not get stuck in an endless cycle of negativity.  The whole growing up in a Dutch Reformed area where you are constantly told how depraved you are thing probably didn’t help matters.  Having a mother who followed compliments with a “but…” certainly didn’t help matters.  And the added weight of shame and confusion and pain from childhood trauma compounded the focus on the bad things, and the distance between me and the knowledge of my skills.

And our society didn’t help me to hold the good qualities.  I was recently reading a theory of how school takes what was creative and forces it to be linear.  Blobs with legs are left behind, and in their place sit letters and numbers with distinct requirements and a lack of creative expression.  And as we become more and more focused on the “correctness” of penmanship and math equations and memorization, we start to lose confidence in the blobs with legs and the ways that we expressed our thoughts and emotions through our drawing or singing or dancing, without a care of skill or proper technique.  This theory struck a chord with me (no pun intended).

I was one of those children who loved to draw and paint and sing and dance and run and climb and express myself with abandon.  I know this, not because I remember doing those things as a child, but because my spirit still cries out to do these things.  And I rarely do them, despite those cries.  I haven’t sung alone in public since high school, perhaps.  I haven’t painted a picture since elementary school, I would guess.  And dancing only happens when I drink too much at a club or when I am shuttered away behind the most closed of doors, even though my body wants to throw out my arms and twirl more often than I might like to admit.  Something in me still desires all of that expression.  Bits of it spill out at times:  singing in the college choir, decorating a cake, doing a bit of DIY furniture refinishing, tapping my foot in time with the music streaming through my headset while I ride the bus.  But, for the most part, my artistic self is hidden behind walls of “not good at” and “not appropriate” and “just something I threw together” and plain old avoidance of the production of art.

“But you write, Christy”, might be a response that has occurred to you already.  It occurred to me too.  But I realized that it has taken many years to for me to embrace my writing as a skill or an art form or an outlet for emotional expression.  And I also spent many years practicing that skill and art in secret … writing poems or letters in hidden notebooks that never met eyes other than my own.  And I did so, because I feared the judgments of others, and felt like my expression wouldn’t be “good enough”.

I have the word “Enough” tattooed on my arm.  I see it every morning when I get dressed.  That tattoo is meant for the whole of me—to see myself as enough as I am, without outside affirmation or some need to perform as others would prefer.  But I think that this word also applies to accepting my expression as enough, whether others judge it so or not.

I remember when I was in elementary school I loved to work on my paintings.  And at one point, probably around grade five or six, there was an art competition for our grade.  I spent time before school and at every recess working diligently on perfecting a landscape that would be entered for the competition.  I put all of my heart and soul into that picture.  And it was eliminated in the first round of competition—just picked up and placed aside, for a reason I would never learn, in the pile of rejected art.   It broke me.

Having my expression judged as unworthy hurt me. Deeply.

And that wasn’t the first time, though it stands out as a stellar example.

I remember working so hard on penmanship—practicing the letters over and over and over—and having a big “unsatisfactory” mark on my report card anyway.  I remember sitting alone at a table during the lunch recess and attempting to be faster in the timed math quizzes, and never improving.  I remember working tirelessly to memorize spelling words in grades four, five, and six, because I was a terrible speller, and working my way from the lowest level to the highest and then losing the spelling bee because of the word commitment, which I gave an extra “t”.  Shattered over and over by the ways I tried and failed, I didn’t give up like you might imagine I would.  I kept trying.  But I kept failing.  And it wasn’t that I failed because I wasn’t skilled or creative or capable, but it was failure because I expressed myself in ways that weren’t what others desired from me.  Dark paintings, a loud voice, not the right height for the part, a penchant for modern when what we want is classical, playing by ear instead of reading the notes, and on and on and on.  I was too much, or too little, or too big, or too small, or too raw, or too stiff, or too…

I was never quite right.  My expressions were never quite right.

So, I stopped telling the truth.  I stopped expressing myself truly and deeply and passionately.  I started being what was expected and acceptable, and in the process I stopped being me.  I stopped knowing me, in many ways.

I did begin to write again, in those secret notebooks, after a book I was reading encouraged me to look back at my childhood self and to try and remember what she loved.  As a woman in her twenties, who had a toddler of her own, I finally looked back and saw that I loved to climb trees and to play with my easy-bake oven and to dance around and to act in plays and to draw and to paint and to sing and to express art in all sorts of ways.  One of the first things I wrote was that list of things that I loved as a child, and inadvertently, I sparked the knowledge that I love to write.  I loved to tell stories.  I loved to say all the things.  But I was silenced by modern academic practices and the idea that performing well was more important than the trying and the expression and the feeling of creating.

So, today I stand as one who still, ultimately, judges every word and every post and every page and every canvas and every project and every single thing about her work with harshness and perfectionism, because I can’t seem to be that child who loves to do the things and say the things, even though I now have full knowledge of her and what she wants and its importance in being whole as an adult woman.  Because I am her and she is me and that which was silenced needs to find its voice once more.

I am learning that what is excellent is not, necessarily, performing in ways that meet the expectations of others, or some arbitrary standards, or to the public perception of success.  What is excellent is being free to express the whole of me, and to say and do and create with that freedom.  Expression itself is excellent.

It is our right to express things, in theory—freedom of speech.  But somewhere along the line that “freedom” started to mean the ability to promote the status quo, in the minds of many.  And true freedom of expression is lost to us.  Offering the whole story, or having the narrative be told by the ones who experience the events firsthand, or allowing the narrative to change based on new information, or letting all voices be heard and judged with equal merit and weight, or just listening to a new perspective is practically non-existent.  What we offer instead is the acceptance of that which meets our criteria and the rejection of all else.  People get put in the pile of rejected art, without ever knowing the reason.  Nations get put in the pile of rejected expression.  Religions get put in the pile.  Races get put in the pile.  Redheads get put in the pile.  All sorts of arbitrary conditions now threaten to put you in the pile of rejected expression, because you didn’t meet the standard of expectations.

And I have yet to figure out who created the standard of expectations.  My best guess would be white, male, heterosexual evangelicals in positions of power or with wealth…or both.  Because patriarchal heteronormative expressions with straight lettering and correct math seem to be accepted above all. (Well, the math is questionable, because things like the number of shooting deaths correlating to the number of accessible handguns seem to be frequently ignored or misrepresented.) Because things that declare the name of Jesus seem to be accepted above all (even when Jesus himself NEVER SAID THOSE THINGS).  Because things that make rich white guys more rich seem accepted above all.  Because “traditional values” like the racism and oppression of the 1950’s seem to be accepted above all.  Basically anything that promotes the white, male, heterosexual evangelical with power or wealth or both is accepted above all, so it is safe to assume they are the ones writing the rule book on acceptable expression.

But regardless of who created the standard of expectations, we need not appeal to that standard.  We are capable and skilled and creative whether the current standards say so or not.

And we ALL spent time as children creating blobs with legs and calling them Grandpa, so we all have the capacity to create without the linear expectations of an alphabet controlling the outcome.  We have enough imagination to flood the world with expectation-breaking media!  We have the ability to sing and dance and climb and paint our way into a new world, where each of us is enough, and where nobody gets put in the pile of rejected expression, but every narrative is told and every story is honored and heard.

Rich, straight, white guys don’t get to tell us what to say.  Mothers that don’t know how to compliment us without adding “but…” on the end don’t get to tell us what to say.  Teachers who care more about an Oxford comma than a beautiful expression of life don’t get to tell us what to say or how to say it.  Judges at the grade six art competition don’t get to tell us what to say or how to say it.  We can take back our right to speak, and use it as a form of expression that sets the world ablaze.

I think often of people who set the world ablaze with their expressions.  Organizers,  poets, composers, pastors or priests or popes, writers, philosophers, politicians, bloggers, and parents or teachers or mentors who let the truth of their stories and ideas flow freely and who influenced people or events or movements or generations with their expression are my heroes.  And even the writers of the super hero comics use creative expressions to offer us ideas of justice and peace and good. (Those are some of my favorite expressions.)  Any voice that counters the violence and injustice of the patriarchal heteronormative narrative that is so pervasive in our society and world at present is heroic and beautiful and good, in my opinion.  Because every incidence of counter-expression is a little nudge toward true freedom.  Every example of free expression fights against oppression and fascism and maintaining the status quo. And I am all about fighting against oppression and fascism and maintaining the status quo.

I think my childhood art expressed that fight, regardless of whether anyone understood such art.  The pictures were dark because my life was painful, and my voice was loud because I needed to be heard, and the raw me was too much because it expressed a difficult to bear narrative, and the stiff me was too guarded and kept because I recognized the way the raw me caused people to flee.  And the truth of my self and my story was locked behind closed doors for many years.

As my young self emerges, and as my art emerges, and as my story emerges, I am still met, at times, with judgments and shaming and rejections and people who would prefer all of it stay hidden.  But that doesn’t break me anymore.

My story and my expression and my art have become stronger than the voices of dissent and disagreement.

I have begun to see the excellence in my expression as expression.  I have begun to travel a road toward recognition of my right and my need to place my feelings on paper and to act them out with my body’s movements and to paint them on canvas and to craft them in various ways, and toward recognizing my desire and my intent and my action in doing so as excellent.

Just because you don’t fit in with the normative standard of the society doesn’t mean that you are not excellent.  It might mean that the normative standard of your society is shit!

So, to inspire you, and to affirm me, here is a list of excellence to get you thinking about your own excellent self and expressions:

The Excellence of Christy

  • Christy makes excellent soup
  • Christy has excellent toes—super cute ones
  • Christy is an excellent painter
  • Christy makes excellent baked goods
  • Christy is an excellent advocate for her own health and wellness
  • Christy decorates cakes with excellence
  • Christy finds excellent clearance sales to create a cheap but excellent wardrobe
  • Christy excels at writing well and beautifully
  • Christy is an excellent dancer
  • Christy excels at napping
  • Christy has excellent listening skills
  • Christy excels at showing compassion to others
  • Christy crafts excellent, diplomatic, and kind Facebook comment rebuttals
  • Christy is an excellent friend
  • Christy excels at talking on the phone for hours
  • Christy is excellent at finding value in objects others cast off
  • Christy excels at treating the marginalized like they are human
  • Christy navigates public transit (with one hand and two grocery bags) with excellence
  • Christy is an excellent researcher, teacher, and student
  • Christy gave birth to an excellent child and became an excellent parent
  • Christy excels at seeking assistance when shit gets difficult
  • Christy is excellent at getting others to rally around a cause she finds important
  • Christy has an excellent singing voice
  • Christy excels at inventing songs throughout her day, so it seems as though she lives in a musical
  • Christy excels at watching musicals
  • Christy excels at swallowing a handful of pills at one time
  • Christy performs Harry Potter quizzes with excellence
  • Christy draws excellent self-portraits
  • Christy is excellent at cleaning up after her dog, and at feeding him too many table scraps
  • Christy is excellent at not defining her sexuality
  • Christy excels in finding partners just slightly less neurotic than the last
  • Christy excels at learning tasks very quickly
  • Christy is excellent at pinning items she will never create to Pinterest
  • Christy excels at making lists about how excellent she is (Just kidding…that was actually kind of difficult, but a good exercise, nonetheless, and one I think you should also try—only about you, not me, of course, and then go out and express yourself in those excellent ways! I’m going to make some soup and take a nap.)

 

 

Don’t Struggle, Just Stab

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

There are several ways of being in the world, I suppose.  We all choose in every moment how we will interact with the world around us.

This morning, I emptied a container of one of the two chemical-laden delicacies I allow myself–flavored non-dairy creamer (the other is processed cheese…because it melts so beautifully and reminds me of my grandmother, which is probably another story for another day).  Do not fear!  I was at Costco the other day and have a pack of three more bottles in the back of the fridge.  But the crux of our story is not the creamer itself, but that little foil seal that covers the bottleneck to ensure freshness and no leakage.  That little foil seal can open up worlds of understanding.

You see, in general, I stand for several minutes pulling on the tiny flap of foil that pretends to be the secret to removing the seal.  You are just supposed to pull that flap, and voila, it opens, right?  Wrong. I end up pulling with my right hand, then pulling with my left, then pulling with my right again.  Then I begin what we will call the “pep talk stage”, where I begin to offer myself encouragements:  You can do it!  Just hold tightly and pull steadily.  You’ve got this.

The next stage is called “pep talk two” and shifts my encouragements to self over and begins encouragements of the bottle seal:  C’mon!  You are almost there.  Just peel back a little more.  You can do it!

And then, finally, we reach “frustration”:  Why in the fuck can’t I open this thing?  Is it so hard to make a seal that opens?  We can send people out to live in space, but we can’t invent a seal for the coffee creamer that you can open!  AAAaaahhhhhh!

And there we have it folks.  This is the way I interact with my world, on the regular.  This is how I live.

There are myriad reasons why I turned out to be a person who fights at a thing.  I was sort of born a fighter.  My mother realized this early on, and it plagued her for many years to come.  I needed a “why” to stop my fight—a really good explanation or reason for the end to my search or struggle.  Another person’s word that it was easier to tie with “bunny ears” than in the convoluted way I was approaching tying my shoes was never good enough.  I needed to struggle with those shoes for years to get to the way I discovered was easiest (which turns out to be bunny ears).

I think the two most affecting reasons for my struggling attitude, however, are stubbornness and intellect.  One is usually seen as a positive, and the other as a negative.  But, often in life, I see them conversely to the way many might.  Stubbornness, which is usually considered bad or wrong or unhelpful has gotten me through many a difficult situation.  When you are oppressed or captive or addicted or overwhelmed in any way, stubbornness can be your savior.  Being stronger in will than my opponent got me through not only debate team, but through years of abuses and marginal living.  I kept up the fight some days only because I was too damn stubborn to lose—too damn stubborn to die there in that bad space.  And the other reason, my intellect, is definitely often a positive thing.  I am so glad that I am capable of abstract thought and love to dive deep into research and just tend to be smart (sorry for the horn tooting there, but it is true that I am smart).  But, the desire to know is often the desire that gets me into trouble as well.  I want to know how that feels or see how that works or decide for myself which is the best way to approach an idea … so I have to do all the things and explore all the ways of approaching that idea on my own, which has gotten me in spaces where I would rather not be.  If people could have said to me, “drugs are bad”, and I could have accepted that as true without further investigation, I wouldn’t have found my great joy and deep struggle with cocaine.  But because of my intellect and that desire to explore ideas to their conclusion, I did find that joy and that struggle.  Lucky for me, the stubbornness to not be controlled by a substance has won the day for about 5,500 days in a row now. (One day at a time!)

So, today when I needed to open the coffee creamer, my stubborn and smart started getting together to fight the fight and open the foil, once more—because this is obviously a regular occurrence.

But, something about the way that I have interacted with the creamer for the last 25 years suddenly seemed ridiculous.  Suddenly, I was tired of fighting the foil.  And I said to my self aloud, “Don’t struggle, just stab.”

Don’t struggle, just stab.

Where did that come from?

I’ve spent every foil opening experience in the same way.  I’ve always tried until I succeeded.  I’ve always kept up the fight.  But not today.  Today I chose a different way of interacting with my world.  I chose a different way of being.  I chose a knife to the foil.

Now, this choice might seem insignificant to most.  But it isn’t.  It is significant because this is a core way of being for me.  It is deeply ingrained in my psyche to fight.  A core belief is that fighting is the only way out.  And it is coupled with other core beliefs, like you have to make it on your own because others won’t help, or not engaging shows a weakness, or life is a series of conflicts, or only the strong survive.  All false beliefs, by the way, but core beliefs are not quick to change. And mine were shaped in some terrible circumstances, so rooting them out and finding them so that you can change them takes years of facing those terrible circumstances again.  It pretty much sucks to do that.

I am doing exactly that.  I am facing years of terrible circumstances and trying to find ways to interact with those things differently, and to see myself and my world in a better way.

Stabbing the foil embodies the change that is happening in me.  Don’t struggle, just stab.  Take the easier route to your desire.  Give up the fight.  Yield.  Do the smarter not the harder thing.  Win by letting the foil win.

Learning to engage life and thought and people and things in new ways is really difficult work.  But, the foil is evidence that I am learning to do just that.  I am doing that difficult work, and after years of doing it am seeing results.  I like those results.

I took a knife and stabbed that foil—killed that shit.  And it took mere seconds to accomplish. And I don’t feel like I lost the fight.  I feel like a winner!  I am patting myself on the back (figuratively, not literally, because the neighbors may be watching)!  I am looking at all the ways that offering myself the easy option might change the world for me.  Finding Mr. or Ms. Right Now, rather than keeping up the struggle to find Mr. or Ms. Right, letting Luke lift the groceries when he knows I am exhausted rather than trying to be stronger and less tired, realizing that swimming and bathing and eating and writing a bit can be my weekly activity rather than trying to return to the concept of “better” that causes me to strive for more strength and more strength of will than I am able to obtain in this disabled body.  I choose how to interact with the world, and I am starting to choose letting it all go.  Don’t struggle, just stab.

Unfortunately, this mantra won’t literally work in all situations.  When I am frustrated with my brother, I can’t just stab … at least not in the literal sense.  (No killing relatives, people!  I am in no way promoting actual stabbing in all situations!)  But maybe in the figurative sense, I can just go the direction he wants to, even though I am aware that he is going the wrong way. I don’t have to convince him he is going the wrong way, but can let him figure that out on his own.  I’ll just turn up the radio and enjoy the scenic route. And that way I haven’t lost anything. But I’ve won on the inside, just like I did with the foil, and can figuratively pat myself on the back for not engaging in futility.

Don’t struggle, just stab.

And I know that my stubbornness is still a gift that will get me through the tough times.  And I know that my intellect is still a gift that will bring me joy and difficulty.  But I know that I get to choose when to fight and when to not fight.  And I get to leave behind any of those core beliefs that are false, as soon as I am able.  And I am changing on the inside, and learning to be a better form of me.  I’m letting go of some of the instinct to approach the world with anxious striving, and learning how to approach it with a quiet knowing—seeing the chaos but not being drawn into it.

I don’t need to react in the ways that society expects me to react.  I don’t need to react in the ways I did before, even when before was just yesterday or earlier this morning.  I don’t need to react at all, if I don’t want to.

We choose the way we interact with the world around us.  And I am choosing more wisely and in ways that help instead of harm me.  I am choosing not to struggle and fight and churn and flail through life.  I am choosing to just stab at the foils of life—deleting that Facebook friend, or ignoring that comment, or choosing joy in the moment, or letting my inner child be my outer adult, or sliding down banisters instead of tiring on the stairs, or smiling instead of scowling as I walk through the subway tunnel, or offering peace instead of lecturing when my daughter is having a bad day, or offering myself kindness instead of chastising my lack of productivity.

Don’t struggle, just stab.