Years ago, I loved a boy. As with all stories that begin thusly, it is a very long tale. The long and short of it was he didn't love me. And I went through a few months of deep, bottomless despair during which I would often find myself lying prostrate on the floor of my room, wondering what the hell was happening to me. He's gone now, thank the universe.
But lately I have found myself stuck on the same emotional Mobius Strip I was on back when he was around. I lie awake in the moments before I fall asleep asking myself why my life is where it is, and if there is anything I could have done differently. The focus of my angst is not some guy, but my job, and its implications for my activist identity, and the person I am trying to be in the world. I tell my friends and my partner that one day out of the five days a week I am at work, I have a hoot laughing at some of the truly ridiculous things that happen when a group of people decide that they know how to best define activist conversation on a particular issue. The other four days, I just want to cry. I want to cry because I am actively participating in something that I feel will end up doing more harm than good. I am spending my days, 9 to 5, aiding and abetting acts of 'social change' I don't believe in. I am actively helping people who I believe are perpetuating the racist, sexist assumptions that got this country to where it is in the first place.
I want to cry because I am afraid of what this job is doing to my voice. One of my colleagues wrote a moving essay about how she has had her voice taken from her during the time she has spent at this place. I told her that I believed that even in our measured, carefully regulated silences (that are broken only on anonymous blogs and in private conversations) there is voice. Silence is resistance. I absolutely believed that when I said it to her a few days ago. But there are days like today, where I'm not so sure anymore. It took every ounce of strength I have to muster the courage to make a point (not a controversial or original one, mind you) in a staff seminar the other day. The minute I opened my mouth, I started shaking, and I was sure I would not be able to finish a single sentence, let alone a thought. But I did it. And, man, was it liberating! It hit me this morning that surely I should be able to speak without shaking, surely I should take for granted my freedom to interpret data and report it without fear that I am not towing a particular line? If I do not exercise my voice, in spite of the restrictions placed on it, where will it go? If you are in an environment where your voice is subsumed, and you can only ever use it on anonymous blogs, and in private conversations with your friends, or yourself, does it disappear? Are you guilty of not using it?
The only immediate answer available is to be silent in loud ways. I have decided that, no matter what it looks like on my CV, no matter how scary it is going to be to literally halve my salary as I am on the cusp of starting a life with my partner, I am going to leave my job at the end of next month. It's not the loudest of protest; in fact, it is tantamount to silence. But I expect that it is silence that will be loud enough to restore my voice.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
A little writing, a little healing
Ok, so I know this blog is supposed to be about topical race-place-gender-space-related stuff, and this is a major transgression. But I am coming out of the back end of a truly awful week. Just horrible. And when I feel awful, I need to write it out, expel the words from my body, put them somewhere where someone else (my six followers! yay!) can see them so I don't feel so terribly alone with my angst.
Here's what happened to me this week. My body finally succumbed to the stress of my job (not that the work itself is stressful - I arrive at work, and immediately begin to ooze stress), and the regrettable emotional eating that is a direct result of said stress, and I developed a raging tooth infection. I think it is absolutely perfect that the pain in my body is coming, at this present moment, from my head. It's as if my head wants a break. From all the thinking. Why am I spending all this intellectual energy - that I ought to be spending applying my fairly well-educated mind to some professional pursuit - analysing my workplace? My mind is sick and tired of working at a place where half of all I do is think about all the very good, very clever reasons why I need to leave. And so my head sent me a message via an infected tooth: Get the Hell Outta Dodge.
Aside from the tooth, and all the very expensive family drama that came with it, my partner was also sick this week. First he had a persistent cough and then developed a more worrying, aggressive UTI. Which meant a lot of nervous tension on my side. Which is where it gets vaguely confusing for me. If you're other people - other, saner, normal, well-adjusted people - you express your worry for your partner by making soup, or a get well card...or something. (I don't the frack know what well-adjusted people get up to.) If you're me, you develop a full-blown nervous obsession. Last year, this meant I would call him every five minutes, to make sure he was still feeling as well as he was five minutes before. This year, my thing seems to be to develop relationship-related queries that I simply have to bring up this very moment, even though he has a fever. What the frack is wrong with me, you ask? I am working on it. Anyway, I realise his being sick is not exactly something that "happened to me" and it is an ugly thing to behold in myself, this selfishness. The only way I can make sense of my reactions to his bouts of ill health (other than that I am a selfish monster) is that they indicate bigger Things, Things that need to be thought over, and then, written about (maybe not in that order). My partner is a quadriplegic, which means many things, one of which is that his body is not as strong as any of us would like it to be. He had a huge health scare 6 months into our relationship and ended up in hospital for a week. I get scared when he is sick. So scared that I make every illness an Event, crowding out whatever he is feeling with my own drama. So, there are Things. I will think, I will write.
Finally, yesterday, I left work a bit later than usual (for a Friday, anyway), and my bus buddy colleague and I were stuck waiting for the bus. No big deal, we do this every day almost. Only yesterday, on a Friday, the bus never showed up. I panicked quite a bit. No, no, I was positively hyperventilating. For all my hyper-awareness about how "crime can happen anywhere" and "townships are as safe as suburbs in South Africa", I could not think anything else other than "I am stranded in a township on a Friday evening, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod". Luckily, I was not alone (shoutout to my level-headed, extremely patient colleague and friend here) otherwise I would have never made it home for all my carrying on and fussing. So, another ugly revelation about myself. Not only am I a selfish jag, I am also slightly racist and classist. I kept saying to my colleague (as we walked briskly to the taxi rank) that this right here - the woes of having to transport my body in and out of the townships everyday when I do not have car and only have a learner's license - is one of the reasons I will leave this job soon; I do not love the work, I care very little for most of the people who work there (in fact, some I find odious - there, I said it), so what is the point of the cost and the high drama of taking public transport so far out? If it was a job I loved, it would be worth it, right? Which is all very well, except what I was saying that it is only worth going into townships for something I love. Otherwise, big fracking nuisance. So could part of the fact that I hate my job (it needed to be said) be that I cannot deal with the reality that confronts day in and day out in the area where I work? My privilege, and the violence it wreaks on people's everyday existences is writ large, for all to see, in the townships. Maybe that is where my discomfort comes from. The bus travels steadily from the cushy suburbs, where I live, past the mostly coloured areas, out of town into the the mostly black areas. And as we travel along this path, you literally see the poverty levels rising before your very eyes. It is a complete mind-fuck. And yet, still, when I take the bus home, I feel relieved as I begin to approach the cushy 'burbs. What does this say about me? How can I sit here and write and think about racism, structural inequality, neoliberal this-that, and still breathe a sigh of relief the moment I see lush middle classness? Can I honestly be both this wide awake socially conscious being I have always thought myself to be, and this raving loon who can't be around poor people past 6pm on a Friday night?
I don't have many answers today. But I can honestly say that I am glad this week is over, and (as fey and middle class as it may be) I am glad I can return to the relatively safety of my head to Think About Things.
Here's what happened to me this week. My body finally succumbed to the stress of my job (not that the work itself is stressful - I arrive at work, and immediately begin to ooze stress), and the regrettable emotional eating that is a direct result of said stress, and I developed a raging tooth infection. I think it is absolutely perfect that the pain in my body is coming, at this present moment, from my head. It's as if my head wants a break. From all the thinking. Why am I spending all this intellectual energy - that I ought to be spending applying my fairly well-educated mind to some professional pursuit - analysing my workplace? My mind is sick and tired of working at a place where half of all I do is think about all the very good, very clever reasons why I need to leave. And so my head sent me a message via an infected tooth: Get the Hell Outta Dodge.
Aside from the tooth, and all the very expensive family drama that came with it, my partner was also sick this week. First he had a persistent cough and then developed a more worrying, aggressive UTI. Which meant a lot of nervous tension on my side. Which is where it gets vaguely confusing for me. If you're other people - other, saner, normal, well-adjusted people - you express your worry for your partner by making soup, or a get well card...or something. (I don't the frack know what well-adjusted people get up to.) If you're me, you develop a full-blown nervous obsession. Last year, this meant I would call him every five minutes, to make sure he was still feeling as well as he was five minutes before. This year, my thing seems to be to develop relationship-related queries that I simply have to bring up this very moment, even though he has a fever. What the frack is wrong with me, you ask? I am working on it. Anyway, I realise his being sick is not exactly something that "happened to me" and it is an ugly thing to behold in myself, this selfishness. The only way I can make sense of my reactions to his bouts of ill health (other than that I am a selfish monster) is that they indicate bigger Things, Things that need to be thought over, and then, written about (maybe not in that order). My partner is a quadriplegic, which means many things, one of which is that his body is not as strong as any of us would like it to be. He had a huge health scare 6 months into our relationship and ended up in hospital for a week. I get scared when he is sick. So scared that I make every illness an Event, crowding out whatever he is feeling with my own drama. So, there are Things. I will think, I will write.
Finally, yesterday, I left work a bit later than usual (for a Friday, anyway), and my bus buddy colleague and I were stuck waiting for the bus. No big deal, we do this every day almost. Only yesterday, on a Friday, the bus never showed up. I panicked quite a bit. No, no, I was positively hyperventilating. For all my hyper-awareness about how "crime can happen anywhere" and "townships are as safe as suburbs in South Africa", I could not think anything else other than "I am stranded in a township on a Friday evening, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod". Luckily, I was not alone (shoutout to my level-headed, extremely patient colleague and friend here) otherwise I would have never made it home for all my carrying on and fussing. So, another ugly revelation about myself. Not only am I a selfish jag, I am also slightly racist and classist. I kept saying to my colleague (as we walked briskly to the taxi rank) that this right here - the woes of having to transport my body in and out of the townships everyday when I do not have car and only have a learner's license - is one of the reasons I will leave this job soon; I do not love the work, I care very little for most of the people who work there (in fact, some I find odious - there, I said it), so what is the point of the cost and the high drama of taking public transport so far out? If it was a job I loved, it would be worth it, right? Which is all very well, except what I was saying that it is only worth going into townships for something I love. Otherwise, big fracking nuisance. So could part of the fact that I hate my job (it needed to be said) be that I cannot deal with the reality that confronts day in and day out in the area where I work? My privilege, and the violence it wreaks on people's everyday existences is writ large, for all to see, in the townships. Maybe that is where my discomfort comes from. The bus travels steadily from the cushy suburbs, where I live, past the mostly coloured areas, out of town into the the mostly black areas. And as we travel along this path, you literally see the poverty levels rising before your very eyes. It is a complete mind-fuck. And yet, still, when I take the bus home, I feel relieved as I begin to approach the cushy 'burbs. What does this say about me? How can I sit here and write and think about racism, structural inequality, neoliberal this-that, and still breathe a sigh of relief the moment I see lush middle classness? Can I honestly be both this wide awake socially conscious being I have always thought myself to be, and this raving loon who can't be around poor people past 6pm on a Friday night?
I don't have many answers today. But I can honestly say that I am glad this week is over, and (as fey and middle class as it may be) I am glad I can return to the relatively safety of my head to Think About Things.
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