I spent most of last week in Oxford, England, attending events at the Marmalade Festival and connecting with people attending the Skoll World Forum. I came away reinspired, connected, and renewed in who I am, how I be in the world, and my visions for love and justice.
Time and time again, I am reminded that what I say and what I write ring true for many people. I am also reminded that writing supports my own process of healing and wellbeing. I have shared off and on through this blog, while holding a deep hope that I will write more frequently. I have been held back by fear, but also just busy from the realities of living in this world.
I can’t promise that today will be the start of more frequent posts, but I can recommit to that intention. This approach to life alone, allowing myself to set an intention and not hold myself at a psychological knife’s edge to “get it done”, is new for me. It’s part of my learning about and allowing myself to be free. (Putting a pin in this topic for later. )
One of the sources of fear keeping me from writing, surprise surprise, is the ongoing oppression of women of color and people with disabilities. I’ll start with the oppression of people with disabilities - also referred to as ableism. First, I’ll take responsibility for my own internalized ableism, which really stems of white supremacy. Notions of productivity and “normal” functioning come from the culture of whiteness and capitalism. I particularly am referring to Calvanism and the Protestant Ethic (see sociologist Max Weber), which took material success as a sign of being saved (instead of damned) by God. This naturally implied that everyone who could not “succeed” in material ways was damned, inferior, and are among the people who, at best, need charity. This, of course, did not question the environmental factors that enable “success” and only assigned success to the individual.
Meritocracy - the idea that each person earns their success and lives on their own merit - ignores the fact that key institutions in society (including social institutions) are designed to enable the success of some and not others. Thus, how could women achieve material success if they weren’t allowed to work? Through marrying a husband and gaining success through proxy. What does this mean for women who were not allowed to marry the “successful” men, did not fancy men at all (were LGBTQI+), or just didn’t want to be treated as less than a man? They were still seen and treated as less than, or treated as stubborn, mocked, and pushed toward marraige (see less academic, The Law According to Lidia Poet, on Netflix for dramatization of this). How does disability come to play in this? On one level, women who couldn’t have babies or do housework were deemed undesireable. Even if a woman was able to get pregnant, this was treated a disability. In fact, to this day in 2023, pregnant women are treated as if they have a disability. (Side note: Yes, I’m skipping over so much history and at least a sociology degree’s worth of information.)
So if “perfectly capable” women are disabled when pregnant, what about the women who could not walk, had severe mental illnesses, were deaf, etc? And what about the men who could not achieve material success because their disabilities? You guessed it - relegated to be seen “not as good as” the successful folks, and then treated paternalistically and in need of care. Let’s also note that the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published in 1952 called homosexuality a pathology.
So how does this relate to me and my struggle to write?
I often write about issues related to healing from trauma. That means my posts may include details about my trauma and how they affect my work. The people reading my blogs might be people I work with - employees or wider sector colleagues and/or people who are currently funding my work or potentially going to fund my work. And not once, but multiple times, I’ve been told by people in my work life to be careful what I post on social media. There has been an implicit judgment (and maybe protectiveness) toward people who share a lot on social media. We are seen as oversharers and this leads people to conclude we have poor boundaries.
And look, I have been on a journey to understand what it means to have a private life when I also want to share openly to challenge shame or to provide stories to connect with others. There are ways to share details about one’s life and still remain private. However, the problem is that people feel more comfortable hearing about someone recovering from a simple physical injury than a traumatic injury. What is too much sharing? If someone says their ankle aches, people wouldn’t jump to say they are worried about you. But if you share that your heart aches, people express worry or might even say to you, you shouldn’t post that because it worries other people about how you are. There seems to be a no win situation.
Additionally, I have found that in the anti-trafficking field, once someone has heard some level of detail about your life, they start to feel obliged to other areas of your life. This is true especially if you are a survivor of human trafficking IMHO. People want to share in your successes in a totally normal and beautiful way; but also, people can be quite nosey, and paternalistic, sharing in successess that helps them feel good about your success, despite not having anything to do with it. If we are genuinely friends or colleagues, wouldn’t we share challenges and successes both ways? If not, then where is the reciprocity in the relationship?
Anyway, so the fact that there is ableism, systemic oppression against people with severe mental illness and/or mental illness diagnosis, has made me afraid to write more. I’m supposed to be one of the “good ones” - yet again tokenised as someone who doesn’t show her trauma that much or isn’t affected by it. The baseline standard of the work world is ableist because it assumes that everyone should be able to park their trauma at the door and deal with it before/after/outside of work hours and it should not diminish one’s performance.
So what if I write something that makes someone worried about my capacity to “perform”? What if they think I’m about to have a psychotic break at any moment? What if my blog writing reinforces this idea that survivors of trauma are just a hot mess? These things will exist to some degree and I can manage my responses to those perceptions as best as possible. What I can’t manage, is having so much to say and not saying it.