woman of (an)other color

It’s definitely one of those weekends where the weather got suddenly rainy and cold and it’s all I can do to keep from staying in bed all day. I finally felt the overwhelming impulse to write again - it’s hard when the majority of my time is spent feeling anxious about producing papers and thesis work. Blogging has moved from the backburner to the tupperware in the fridge, and that’s just the way it’s going to be for a few months. The occasional post is my way of making sure the remains of this site doesn’t spoil.

I canceled three individual sets of plans in the last week; plans that I had initiated making with people that I thought I could catch up with; plans that I backed out of because I didn’t have time because I was trying to write a thesis chapter and had deadlines to deal with….plans with men.

Ok let’s recap. The last time I intentionally spent time with a man in any capacity was in November. He was/is a good friend and we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. We grabbed coffee and what I thought would be a superficial play by play of our lives turned out to be a very wonderful conversation that allowed me to share my anxieties about my last year in college. He was a great listener, we had worked very closely together for a year, and he really heard me. Furthermore, I was able to listen to him speak about his own life, where he was at, and feel comforted by the level of openness we had silently committed to that evening. I’m a sucker for good conversation and could write extensively about it - right now, let us just say that good conversation is truly a few and far between aspect of my life these days. Is this the nature of being around very busy people? Of not truly wanting to open up to everyone I see? Or maybe it’s just a rare thing, and that’s why it’s so wonderful when it happens. Thinking back, I want to believe that every conversation I’d ever had was amazing; I doubt that’s true. I think with some people, family, certain friends who connect with you, it’s possible to replicate good conversation because it just clicks. Something in the air. Something in ourselves, as well.

Tangent aside, it was a great conversation, and yes, of course part of the reason why is because it was a rare occasion where I found myself able to be frank with a man about how I was doing, because I was comfortable.

I don’t really want to get in to why I have such few male friends; regular readers can probably guess, and for those of you who have stumbled across this post, let’s boil it down to bad relationships, the insecurities that were created out of them, and a genuine and strategic desire to spend time building a network of friends who are women of color. This last bit makes me want to clarify that 99% of me has absolutely no regrets about the way I have prioritized getting to know people.

But that isn’t what this post is about. It isn’t really about any of that. It’s about the fact that I haven’t had a good conversation with a man in a long time, but then I committed to swimming back to this island and working through some of issues that keep me from simply picking up the phone and calling someone who I’ve been friends with for a year and want to see.

But I finally did that last week. I made plans to catch up. And then the day before, I emailed to cancel. Thesis chapter, I said. No time.

Two days before I backed out of going to this lecture with this guy that is a really good guy and under other circumstances, I think we could have become great friends. Thesis chapter, I said. No time.

Four days before that I canceled lunch with this same person.

I initiated all of these plans - I took a deep breath and made them all, and then one by one, I canceled them. Shuffled away, and it didn’t really hit me that having work was not the problem until recently. Lord knows I’ve made plenty of plans while being swamped in work. I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t allow myself to feel close to a man in any capacity - one a once-close friend and one a possible new one.

What’s the big deal, right? It’s just lunch, it’s just catching up. I know everyone’s thinking it. But it is definitely a big deal. I think that’s just what happens when you’ve experienced such closeness to friend after friend and they eventually just walk away or you wake up and realize that their attempts to make you a better person or a better partner are actually just verbal attacks on your well-being.

The difference between me now and me a year ago though, is that even though I recognize this, I want to work through it. I can’t keep letting these demons follow me around forever, not about something like this.

But it’s so hard because I’m at a loss of what to do and I think a part of me childishly just wants to write it off as, well I’m a busy person and I don’t want to take initiative on anything that has to do with men. Why should I after all; shouldn’t they take some initiative? When was the last time I knew a male peer to have to schedule plans? All the women I know are so swamped in extracurriculars and running organizations and working that it’s all we can do to plan a weekly meal. So when I meet someone who has no real schedule, why shouldn’t I expect them to take the two steps forward?

There’s a lot to be said about vulnerability and intimacy and trust, but this post is long enough, and I haven’t quite figured out what to say about it, and it would also require a long prequel about the gender-based attitudes placed on women regarding these issues.

Five days ago, a professor of mine, in a class that I am required to take, that is centered around 18th century European (read: white, male) philosophy, announced to the class that I had visited him during his office hours to let him know that I struggled to understand the course material (this was in an effort to meet with a new professor and discuss with him my feelings about his class - and people wonder why many women of color often resist asking for help).

This is a class in which I already feel insecure, due to my race, gender, and inability to relate to any of the material on a personal and political level.

How humiliating. I’ve written about insecurities in the classroom before, so I won’t reiterate. For those of you that don’t understand why this is problematic and hurtful, please do not contact me about this.

Lesson learned: the next time I visit a professor, I will ask for a verbal contract of confidentiality, even if it sounds ridiculous.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where crying was nothing that needed to be sheltered - there was no shame in it (although neither of my parents ever seemed to do it). But then you know, I grew up to learn about when it’s “okay to cry” and when crying makes women look weak (turns out, the answer is ‘always’), and when it’s  a matter of pride, a matter of saying “there’s no way I would give you the satisfaction of seeing me so upset” - this latter feeling has turned up in the classroom more times than I’d like to admit.

Then in the fall, I found myself stifling emotions further and further, until my ability to strategically be open with other people became a flawless talent - where I could spend hours counseling and guiding others only to spend the remainder of the evening sitting and doing work while tears leaked out of my face for reasons that are too overwhelming at this point to write about at all, let alone in public. I’m an expert at avoiding my own life and focusing instead on the needs of others. WOC? Could be.

I spent yesterday with a woman who is truly phenomenal, who has lived a life I thought I would only hear about through memoirs and rumors. She’s wise and smart, and stunning. And whenever I see her, I just feel compelled to work out those little issues that aren’t really little at all. That’s how it goes though - she’s a woman who knew my mother before I was born, who has insight on my family I could never conceive of, and has statements to make about my own life that make me feel  blessed and confident about the uncertainty of where it is headed.

Coming home - to my parent’s home - has always been a space where I could curl up and cry - a good cry; the kind of cry that resonates out of your guts, where you can’t see and you can’t breathe and liquids are pouring from your face and every time you try to breathe deep it gives you enough time to rethink all the things that made you cry in the first place, forcing a new surge of heaves and sobs to rise out again. And you think of the people you love and the people you’ve lost and the things you are afraid of, and it keeps going until finally you start to breathe a little normally and brutally rub at your face until it starts to regain feeling and dryness and you sort of…keep going.

That’s really the best way I can describe the good cry. Maybe I’m not the writing type after all.

In any case, I saw this phenomenal woman, and I came home and I finally had a good cry - a cry that had been working it’s way out in short and uneasy spurts throughout the last few months, but had been suppressed for as long as possible.

Also, I really have no problem crying in front of strangers. It’s the people I care about, the people who care about me, that I hate crying in front of.

Yes, that does say quite a lot about me.

Anyway, what a lacking post - but here it is - I’ve written something, and it was about a good cry.

Until next time -  I’m sure the next few months will be filled with things worth ranting about and turning over in my head.

From her collection of essays, Sister Outsider. Because sometimes, when we are at a loss for words, we should turn to the writing of the people who help us to remember that we are not alone.

“Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.

It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change…

Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to mobilization of women’s joint power.

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend…

The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.

Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.

Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same…

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying…”

Yes, there is a new look - I was getting tired of looking at a dark screen, and even though I loved the template I had before, I needed a change. I won’t admit how long it took me to settle on this and even though it looks different, and makes my words look more naked than they already are, I’ll keep it. If you’re a wordpress user and have suggestions for other templates, let me know - I’m always open to aesthetic suggestions.

Also, yeah, I definitely haven’t written a lot in the last three weeks - but that’s how it goes, isn’t it? When you have the time to blog, you don’t necessarily want to blog at all - and when you’re swamped with work, that’s when you’re itching to put it all down on virtual paper.

In any case, I’m headed towards my last semester of college; there are too many feelings associated with this that aren’t worth writing about because such is the nature of change, and transition. I’m in the process of looking for a job - offers, links, connections and words of wisdom are of course, most welcome.

What I have been doing for the last three weeks is reading - I check my feed about five times a day and I’m loving the opportunity I have to check the blogs I love, read the news frequently, and think about politics a little bit more. This blog is political but not about politics, however, which means I don’t really feel ready to blog about Bhutto or the U.S. primaries or Obama vs. Hillary. I feel fine about this - there are bloggers who are writing about these things and they have been doing it longer and do it better than I ever could.

I’ve also been making my way through The Wire. What a fantastically well-written show.

This post was written mostly to dip my toes back into the blogging waters - but I’ve been turning a lot of things over in my head, so I will be writing steadily over the next couple of days.

Warning: this is a long post, and it is a bit confusing and will probably be edited after the New Year. Until then, happy holidays.

**

I took this macroeconomics class, in an attempt to branch out of my field and my imperatives and incorporate some mainstream jargon into my everyday life. I sort of felt like a not-so-undercover spy the entire semester, as I took notes in the back, trying to hold back laughter or tears or anger at the extremely-pro-capitalist arguments presented to me and made by classmates around me.

Everyday, I had a story about this econ. class. Everyday, I had some comment, some rant. I think it shaped my semester in ways that I’m only now thinking about, because, well, I have the time now, and it’s time to start owning up to things, and being a bit more honest with myself.

So the truth about macroeconomics was, I felt stupid there. I felt like my lens of analysis was unimportant, impractical, and irrelevant. I felt like the one time I couldn’t hold back my opinion, the majority (I’ll get to this clarification in a minute) of the classroom looked at me like I was crazy; and instead of feeling like I was speaking up for myself, I doubted my intelligence because it takes me a long time to understand GDP and aggregate demand. What does she know? said the voice, every time I stepped into the classroom.

That class reminded me how important it is to carve out a supportive space for oneself; because we can’t always avoid the Dominant Voice, and we can’t always yell and cry and scream about every problematic notion that passes us by. Sometimes we just have to find a group of people who understand us, and help us through the day-to-day. I’m so happy for having found people like that in college. You know who you all are.

Something interesting happened in my economics class as well: I finally ran into a straight white man who I had to (very reluctantly) admit was pretty smart. I mean,  after having spent the last 2 years meeting man after man who either claimed to be really progressive and wasn’t, or was just a racist/sexist/classist/homophobic asshole, I met someone who said critical things in the one class I least expected.

It finally hit me how distrustful of everyone I have become - how hard it was for me to articulate that there was someone smart in this class, who could talk about racism and xenophobia (albeit in an academic context).

But of course I have become distrustful, right? After all, I have been in bad relationships, I have been called too sensitive, too radical, too emotional, too loud, to awkward, too aggressive, too stubborn and too stupid, by men along the way, and I have felt betrayed by the ones who I, even now, consider to be good friends.

In conclusion, my macroecon. class became the very space in which I was able to recognize that it was time to start at least thinking about what it means to swim back to the island.

A wonderful friend, I’m talking one of the best, inevitably sat me down one day to verbally slap me in the face with a fantastic metaphor that a professor had shared with her. She said that we all are on a kind of island that we have spent our lives on, and that certain things might happen that make us want to leave the island. So we do. And the struggle comes in swimming back to the island, because swimming back is difficult, and often long and definitely tiring. But once we swim back, once we have set our own pace, the same island we left long ago has a different meaning. Because this time we arrived on our own terms.  She also reminded me, cleverly, that sometimes, we may decide never to return to the island. And that’s ok.

I only recently swam back to the island of my South Asian identity. I had rejected it for years, having associated it with cultural norms and politics that I could not support. After years of living off the island, attempting to ignore my race and my roots and my skin, I came face to face with a wave of politics that shaped my identity as a woman of color. This process encouraged me to swim back, back to an island that I could dis-identify with, find my support in, and even embrace.

The island I’m struggling to swim back to now is one that I left the moment I was able to use the term “patriarchal,” the day I was able to name my longest romantic relationship an emotionally and verbally abusive one. I thought I could never go back, because I thought it made me insecure and ignorant and weak. I thought I could never want to go back. I rejected and ignored this part of my life for a long time, forgiving the experiences, but never myself. How can we ever learn to trust again? After a history of colonization and a context of oppression, how can we ever be honest with another human being?

(There are three people I feel I trust completely: two are my best friends, and the third is my mother)

It turns out, being away from the island has also made me feel insecure and ignorant and weak. Because now, instead of actively resisting, I’ve just started to float around (recall the image of passively standing on the moving walkway). I need to be swimming. I need to reclaim the agency I stripped away from myself because I was scared to be honest and truthful with myself about what I want for fear of being hurt and traumatized.

I don’t know what to label this island, because I don’t know what it means for me to go back. But the process begins with self-care and it begins with writing. So I wrote.

Until 2008 dear readers.

Oooh it’s so hard to write about self-care. But not harder than actually doing it.

The thing is over the last month, that is, the last four weeks of the semester, I’ve done a lot of taking care of others. And that’s fine. Because I love my friends, and I care about them, and because that’s what it means to be a friend.

But the problem is, that I use taking care of others as an excuse to not take care of myself.

When I should have been looking for a job, I looked for jobs for other people.

When I should have been writing cover letters, papers, and studying for econ., I was having semi-fake heart-to-hearts with people, asking them for advice about things I already knew the answer to, in an effort to feel like I was paying attention to myself.

When I should have taken the time to think about my own life, to figure out what I want from the next two years, I was doing….well…not that. I was performing…let’s call it “self-care procrastination” - mixing up the difference between actual self-care and things that seem like self-care.

Self-care varies. Self-care is a process. And you know what else? Self-care can’t happen all the time. Because if I spent all my time taking care of myself, I’d probably have to take a semester off from school to recover. Survival and self-care are not always synonymous. But they do dovetail.

Here’s another thing I am remembering again and again: Self-care is hard. It has never been easy for most of the women of color I love and admire. It’s usually the first thing we are willing to sacrifice, because it doesn’t hurt the people around us. And when we meet other people who don’t practice self-care, and even more people who don’t even have to think about practicing self-care because it’s normalized into their daily lives, self-care starts to seem more like a privilege we can’t afford. I do have the privilege of being able to think about self-care. I have the privilege to think about practicing it, and then practicing it. So here I go.

I used to think it was just about sleeping a reasonable number of hours a night, about eating three meals a day. But it’s about doing things that make my body feel good, and getting those chores done that I put off in exchange because that little subconscious voice is telling me it’s ok that I’m living in clutter. But I deserve better for myself - I would tell a friend that, wouldn’t I? Why is it so hard to take the advice we give others?

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to do those things I’ve been dreading, that scare me, that make my stomach flip: like thinking actively about my life after graduation, like looking for a job, and like taking space from people and their relationships, and figuring out what I want from my own life and my own relationships. It means writing again - being creative while I have time.

Once again, I’ve written so much and never got around to the island metaphor. But I will - because it’s hard to write about and because I’ve been putting it off.

Until tomorrow.