It’s Monday, and the sky is a sheet of muddy gray. We have a winter weather advisory in effect, they’re warning of rain but it’s in the high 20s, so that seems like a bad situation.
Raining ice is not fun for anyone.
Speaking of not fun, I’ve had a few experiences lately that remind me, firmly, of what it means to be a woman in a world where men see your humanity as conditional, as something they bestow and something they can take away at any time.
One instance still leaves me flummoxed, as this guy had read, presumably, at least my spouts if not any of my posts here. And yet he thought my mind so limited, my vocabulary so limited, my problem-solving so limited he believed I needed a three-letter word faithfully defined for me.
It did not even cross his mind that I would Google a word I didn’t know. Might have crossed his mind that I could know the word because when I asked him if he seriously thought I needed the definition, he said he was “torn.”
TORN.
Yes, I’m still on it, and if your wondering why I’m still on it you’re probably on the doing end and not the receiving end.
In order to think that lowly of my intellectual abilities, what did he think all the other things I’d written were? Flukes? Accidental successes?
A reflection of his own great insight making sense out of gibberish?
Do you get it now?
People making these assumptions don’t limit them to gender, I’ve seen it in real time as “well-meaning” people try to “explain” things to Black friends online, for the world to see.
So right now, I’m talking about gender. But there are men who can relate.
And then last night, the bombastic husband of a family friend, who honest-to-goodness yelled as he made up both sides of his argument. First he was obsessed with Black trump voters, and he refused to believe that there are so few they do not impact anything. He did a reverse “not all,” when I said the vast majority were white men, saying “all trump voters are problematic.”
Even explaining repeatedly that the four white people sitting there were not in a position to discuss or evaluate the votes of Black people provoked ire. At one point he glared at me across the table, openly.
I pretended not to notice.
His wife tried to rein him in, but you could see the effort of every attempt. The topics changed but his combative tone did not. Unfortunately you cannot block a person in real life, but I did the next best thing. I asked him what I had said, he had no idea, I told him the conversation was over, it was a waste of my time, and when he tried to start again, I just angled my body away and ignored him.
But here’s the difference between those two. The one who was angry at me on line showed his anger, blocking me, expecting me to apologize or capitulate. But his anger was merely words on a page.
The one in person showed his anger and raised his voice, but his anger was right there in the space with us, reverberating against the walls. That is what the anger is for, to frighten us into some kind of submission.
It’s what keeps people from speaking out at Thanksgiving, because it seems the person who erupts in anger is never blamed; instead those of us who speak out are at fault for “provoking,” “triggering,” “getting him going.”
Like they are allowed to take up all the oxygen, because if they are not, their anger will burn it up.
I have no solutions today. I am not going to shrink myself into a palatable little daisy, always smiling, never thinking. I’m not going to let people say things that sound like they come from a place of bias unchallenged. Not in my earshot.
Not while I’m in the room.
Those flames of anger have burned at me, around me my entire life and all they’ve done is carbonize my reserve. Underestimate me, underestimate us at your own peril.
We are changing this world if we have to drag it with our fingernails.
Have an empowered Monday.
A Bit to Read 