REFUSAL

To the deniers of racial or patriarchal privilege --

The best way to dehumanize someone while claiming you’re not is to believe you are just the same. You erase their experiences and perspective, their struggles and obstacles, their unique way of having to deal with those things in a world that also erases them.

With the words, ‘but humans are humans’ or the bullshit dramatics of ‘we all bleed red’ normal people can simply pretend that if we all did things the way they did, then everything would work out okay. But, yes, we all bleed red but you don’t treat a papercut the same way you treat a gash, you don’t treat an infected wound the same way you treat one that isn’t, you don’t treat a wound to the leg the same way you treat a wound to the gut.

You are not acknowledging someone’s personhood when you ignore the very things that make their lives different than yours, and when you refuse to understand that their circumstances have given them their own perspective that is just as valid as yours.

More valid in fact – their perspective about their experiences that you haven’t been through is far more valid than anything you could ever think about it.

SEXISM

By being mean to other women, you’re allowing sexism to happen in a way. You’re not getting what you want because you called the girl in the tube top dress a whore.

SELF LOVE

But as it stood, I disliked myself deeply and could only find faults in the person I was becoming. I had no respect for myself and, because he chose to love me anyway, I lost respect for him.

You cannot come to someone else as a puzzle with a few crucial pieces missing and expect that they will fill it over with whatever spares they happen to have around. Because we are not mechanics. We are not here to fix someone’s own view of themselves, and convince them that what we see is what is real. Self-love is a complex journey requiring of just as much time and effort and attention as the love we give to someone else, and it isn’t something that we will magically find when someone tells us that we should feel it.

I had run to him because I wanted to believe that I was lovable, that I could find something, that a relationship could be my one “thing” in life that I was good at. But he was in that relationship, too, and deserved just as much back from me as he was offering. When I realized that I couldn’t give it, and likely never would be able to until I proved to myself that I was good and capable on my own, I had to leave. But that’s never easy to explain.

Sometimes we say that we met people at the wrong time. But maybe we meet them when we are the wrong person, when we have not yet met and fallen in love with ourselves. We are only half of a thing — even if we can imagine that there is a better version of us out there — and we are hoping that someone else will fill in the missing parts so that we don’t have to.