Entry tags:
My privilege
Last night ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oliviacirce and I stayed up past our bedtimes giggling on the telephone. We were cracking ourselves and each other up, and Olivia was going to make a post quoting our hilarious hilarious conversation. And then she read it out loud, and both of us paused.
It turns out that what the two of us find hilarious late at night is primarily of interest to us because it consists of shouting down our own triggers by being intentionally crass about them. And outside of knowledge of our particular family histories, what we were saying just looked crass and insensitive.
Olivia and I are both survivors of family history of mental illness. Neither of us has the neurochemical wonkiness that lurks in our DNA, but both of us have seen it in action in the people we love. Both of us live in the conspiracy of silence that surrounds mental illness; both of us know the damage that silence does; both of us know that the silence is a vital protective mechanism to help our loved ones stay in the closet. Because as bad as the silence is, outing our loved ones carries more consequences for them.
The thing about being in someone else's closet is that you don't have the right to seek your own release. So you find other people who are in the same closet, and you whisper to each other about what you can't tell anyone else. And then you feel guilty because you know, if the person you just outed knew, they would be furious and hurt, and they would have every right to be.
When someone says something awful on the internet, and then follows it up with something like "I'm not racist|sexist|ablist|homophobic because my friend|family member is black|female|not able-bodied|gay" it's generally out of a defense mechanism to avoid taking on their blame. But also sometimes, when you are the able (for now) one who has spent a lifetime being silence and guilt-tripped about the privilege that affords you, you act out. Intentionally. To say, "look at me universe, I have a voice too."
Which, I realize, is an awfully privileged thing to say, because it comes from a position of pure privilege, of not having to pass, of having never once [for instance] been hospitalized for my emotional state. I can walk away at any time, I can say anything at any time and I won't be the one who has to deal with the consequences.
But still.
Sometimes the privileged among us need to shout into the dark. We say terrible privileged things and then we laugh about it, because the only other option is to cry.
P.S. We cast Helena Bonham Carter as Sylvia Plath and Johnny Depp as James Tayler, hanging out together at McLean in defiance of linear time, being Symbolic Mad People Creating Art. It was actually pretty funny if you've ever been forced to sit through a movie of that genre, and if movies of that genre bother you as much as they do me.
P.P.S. Thanks toolviacirce for reading this and telling me it was ok to post it.
oliviacirce and I stayed up past our bedtimes giggling on the telephone. We were cracking ourselves and each other up, and Olivia was going to make a post quoting our hilarious hilarious conversation. And then she read it out loud, and both of us paused.It turns out that what the two of us find hilarious late at night is primarily of interest to us because it consists of shouting down our own triggers by being intentionally crass about them. And outside of knowledge of our particular family histories, what we were saying just looked crass and insensitive.
Olivia and I are both survivors of family history of mental illness. Neither of us has the neurochemical wonkiness that lurks in our DNA, but both of us have seen it in action in the people we love. Both of us live in the conspiracy of silence that surrounds mental illness; both of us know the damage that silence does; both of us know that the silence is a vital protective mechanism to help our loved ones stay in the closet. Because as bad as the silence is, outing our loved ones carries more consequences for them.
The thing about being in someone else's closet is that you don't have the right to seek your own release. So you find other people who are in the same closet, and you whisper to each other about what you can't tell anyone else. And then you feel guilty because you know, if the person you just outed knew, they would be furious and hurt, and they would have every right to be.
When someone says something awful on the internet, and then follows it up with something like "I'm not racist|sexist|ablist|homophobic because my friend|family member is black|female|not able-bodied|gay" it's generally out of a defense mechanism to avoid taking on their blame. But also sometimes, when you are the able (for now) one who has spent a lifetime being silence and guilt-tripped about the privilege that affords you, you act out. Intentionally. To say, "look at me universe, I have a voice too."
Which, I realize, is an awfully privileged thing to say, because it comes from a position of pure privilege, of not having to pass, of having never once [for instance] been hospitalized for my emotional state. I can walk away at any time, I can say anything at any time and I won't be the one who has to deal with the consequences.
But still.
Sometimes the privileged among us need to shout into the dark. We say terrible privileged things and then we laugh about it, because the only other option is to cry.
P.S. We cast Helena Bonham Carter as Sylvia Plath and Johnny Depp as James Tayler, hanging out together at McLean in defiance of linear time, being Symbolic Mad People Creating Art. It was actually pretty funny if you've ever been forced to sit through a movie of that genre, and if movies of that genre bother you as much as they do me.
P.P.S. Thanks to
olviacirce for reading this and telling me it was ok to post it.
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