pronoia

All the Queers are White, All the Blacks are Straight; or, Seriously? We're Still Falling For This Nonsense?

It's taken me a while to recover from the news about Proposition 8. While I know that the march of progress will continue, it's hard to be the ones whose lives and relationships hang in the balance in the meantime.

And I'm pretty disturbed by the turn the conversation around Prop 8 has taken -- blaming people of color and in particular Black people for its passing. The argument seems to be that the extra people-of-color turnout for Obama is about the same as the margin of victory -- therefore, it's their fault.

This argument is specious on so many levels, not the least of which is that A HUGE PROPORTION OF WHITE VOTERS HAD TO VOTE FOR IT TO PASS BEFORE THESE "NEW" VOTERS WOULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com has a lovely rebuttal of the blame game, pointing out that if California's electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, the measure would have passed with an even greater margin.

But do we then have news stories arguing that white people are homophobic? No, we don't. And we don't because we don't ever assume that white people do anything as a block, but we do assume that people of color are homogenous. Does the news media stop to think about the fact that there are people of color who are also queer? Or that many people of color are highly progressive, while many white people are very, very, very conservative? Apparently not.

One of the things stories like this accomplishes is to further balkanize different identity groups. Let me be clear: white-identified/begun equity movements have often brought such balkanization upon ourselves by assuming that white experience constituted the whole of the movement. Just look at the history of feminism and the ways it excluded the experience of women of color as well as queers. LGBT struggles have often done the same thing: assumed that white (often male) experience was the "norm" and marginalized everything else.

But moments like blaming minorities for the passage of Proposition 8 only reinforce such division and hatred. What they really do is suggest that there's only room for one (non-male, non-white, non-straight, non-rich) identity group at the table at any one time -- and so we have to fight each other to be that chosen group.

Resist this. Resist the idea that we are in competition, that justice for one group necessarily means injustice for another. Resist the idea that the groups are themselves separate and homogenous, that we don't all overlap each other in so many ways.

Stories like this, they're business as usual. While I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe they're deliberate, they participate in an age-old consolidation of power that keeps those out of power unbalanced, disconnected, and squabbling.

There is room for all of us at the table. All of us. One day. But we have to stop falling for the idea that we're not all in this together.

And a shoutout to my white, queer friends: examine your own racism in this. Seriously.

But also

Despite all of my optimism and elation about the presidential election and what that means for our country, I'm also mired in despair: California voters passed proposition 8 amending their constitution to ban gay marriage.

Arizona, Arkansas, and Florida also passed gay marriage bans, but when a state that already won't let me get married says, essentially, "and we mean it!", well, I just want to give them the finger.

But California is different. In California, it was legal for a brief, shining moment. And thousands -- tens of thousands -- of people who were married just yesterday woke up today not-married -- becauase bigots decided we can't play their reindeer games.

If you're married, if you're legally married, can you imagine what that must be like?

Today my heart is full and broken, both at the same time.

A New Day

I never blogged about politics, mostly because I'm sure all of you know without my having to say it who this queer girl was voting for, but also because if you were undecided, you wouldn't be looking to me to help you out.

But yesterday I woke up to a country that had never elected anyone but white men to our highest office, and I went to bed in a country that has a Black man as our President-Elect. I woke up today in a country where more people can see themselves reflected in the halls of power. I woke up today in a country that did more than pay lip service to the ideals of equality.

This will not, as some of my friends are saying, magically make everything else different. Partisan politics still abound, religious fundamentalism and racism and classism and sexism and ableism and all the other isms are still putting limits on what people can become, and we've still got to find ways to address the economy and the wars and many other things. But this is a step, a change, and whatever happens next, this happened. We were there. We remember when.

Sabbatical

I'm doing something radical: I decided on Friday to take a two-month sabbatical from my social life. I'm going to the things that are already planned (two dinners, an election-night hangout, two trips to GradSchoolTown to see the in-laws, and two holidays), but I'm making no new plans and not seeing anyone until 12th Night.

Instead, I'm clearing space for all of the things I want to have in my life but don't: deep thinking about and talking about race and adoption and ethics; manifested creativity; time with myself and my own brain and soul; puttering about my house. For once I want to be the center of my own life, my own first concern.

I realized that, when we moved here, we didn't just move into already-existing relationships; because of Ms. P's depression and R's divorce, I showed up here necessarily other-directed, and my life in this place unfolded from that beginning. I don't regret it; I'm glad I was able to be there for both of them. I'm glad we already had people here we knew and loved and wanted to spend time with. But now it's time to reclaim my own time as an invaluable resource.

I don't know if it's growing older or if it's the spiritual work I've been doing or if it's some planetary alignment, but I'm experiencing right now the preciousness of my time -- how little of it any of us really have in this life. I want to spend it wisely, I want to come out of it pleased with what I've made of my days.

Trying to carve out space hasn't worked. One of the blessings of our life here is that we have so many people who love us and want to spend time with us. But it's also like being pecked to death by ducks. Dinner here, dinner there, brunch here, coffee there -- and very little time for myself, in the end. And so the more radical version of things is where I've landed. I'm sure it won't be popular -- but I also know this is necessary to decouple myself from other people's expectations and desires. We'll all live through the experience.

There are so many layers here -- about growing up female and trained to judge my worth by how many other people wanted me, about prioritizing the internal over the external, about negotiating the kind of life I want to be living, about balancing the go-go-go of the city and of modern life with the dappled slowness of my soul. I'm looking forward to seeing them unfold.

The Art of Disappearing
by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

Book Review: The First R

I don't remember where I got the recommendation for The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, but I suspect it was Shannon at Peter's Cross Station. In any case, I sat down to read this with very few preconceptions, knowing very little, in fact, about how kids learn race and racism.

It's a fairly academic book, and the introduction is the densest part. The authors are positioning their research against theories of child development that argue that kids learn linearly and primarily cognitively. Theorists with these leanings had found that young kids didn't "see" or "understand" race because their seeing or understanding didn't show up on the question-and-answer type tests researchers gave them.

Instead, the authors used a least-adult research model to observe kids in their "natural setting," that is, with each other and away from other adults. One of the authors spent 11 months in a day-care/preschool center, carefully positioning herself as a non-authoritative adult and thus not an interruption to the children's free play -- even when they were doing and saying things they stopped in the presence of other adults.

And what she found was that they not only "saw" race (it was a very diverse center), but they "did race" -- that is, race was a concept they played with, tried on, and imposed upon each other. They used it to identify themselves, to identify others, and to reinforce and resist the hierarchies of identity that exist in the wider society.

She concluded, unsurprisingly, that children learn relationally -- they observe the world around them, draw conclusions, and experiment with those conclusions to see how well they hold up and work. In other words, they mimic the race relations they see around them -- even if the race relations they see are at odds with what they are explicitly told about difference.

She also observed that white adults -- both white parents and the white teachers who were committed to positive diversity -- assumed that kids don't see difference unless it's explicitly taught to them, despite evidence to the contrary. They held on to these assumptions quite dogmatically, in fact, and in the few instances they couldn't deny the children's knowledge (one little girl used the n-word to refer to another), they were more focused on denying responsibility for that learning than in either intervening in it or addressing its effects.

So, what does all of this mean for me as a white adult and potential parent? It means telling the truth about race and racism, even to very little kids when they ask. It means being rigorously honest with myself about how I engage race and learning how to undo the ways I participate in maintaining structures of power. It means paying attention not just to what people say, but to how they act and respond. It means that we all have a lot of work to do.

Weary

I try to cut people a lot of slack when it comes to staying stupid things about adoption. Most people don't know anything more than what they see on television or in the newspapers, and that means they only know the most extreme stories in any direction, the most sensationalized situations, and the most loudly publicized ideas.

But a little compassion, thoughtfulness, and critical thinking would go a long way.

Case in point: I found out on Friday that my sister is having twins. The friends I was visiting thought it was funny to repeatedly suggest that she should just give me one of them. Not once. Not even twice. Multiple times. Seriously?

People: add this to your list of Things Not to Say to Someone Who Really Wants a Baby and Doesn't Have One. It's not kind, it's not helpful, and it's not necessary.

Sheesh.

Synchronicity

Yesterday, Ms. P and I were all set to go to the Quaker meeting downtown. We'd spent Saturday afternoon at a required transracial adoption seminar, and one of the things we talked about on the drive home was how, well, WHITE our spiritual communities are. The pagan community we mostly participate in is pretty much all white, and the small Quaker meeting we've gone to sporadically has had, at most, two people of color attending. So we had decided to check out the downtown meeting, which has a monthly meeting just for people of color. That seemed like a good sign to us.

But, us being us, we were running late. More to the point, getting out of bed was cold, and breakfast was  not fast, and so we headed downtown to the farmer's market, knowing we would be much too late to go to meeting, but figuring we'd drive by so we knew where it was for next time.

And then we were driving down 16th Street, the strip of downtown that has representatives from all the world's great religions on it, and we saw that the big UU church, which we had talked about, had services starting in just ten minutes. And so we whipped into an only-legal-on-Sunday-morning parking spot and went in, baggy jeans and all.

Now, a commenter recently asked if we'd considered a UU chuch, and we mostly hadn't. We'd both separately attended the UU chuch in GradSchoolTown, and neither of us had found it all that fulfilling. It's membership was largely well-off, white, and University-affiliated, I couldn't stand that the service was wildy different week to week, and it tended to the secular humanist end of things. (The last straw for me was during Joys and Sorrows, when a classic 50's-era-scientist-looking man stood up and said he couldn't believe no one had yet shared the joy that we'd found life on Mars.) As Ms. P said of that congregation, we need a little more passion with our reason, and that one was more lecture series than spiritual community.

But we stopped. This is the church, after all, that brought Sweet Honey in the Rock together. So we went in and we took our seats and we started to cry when the processional was a joyful, rollicking sound that took much of its inspiration from African-American spirituals. Then during the greeting portion of things, we turned around to realize we were sharing our pew with our neighbors from across the street. The reading was a beautiful poem about learning to say yes to our lives, and the sermon was about how we can be grateful for our whole lives -- even the parts we don't like -- and about how we can make a gift of our whole selves to the world. And so we sat there feeling blessed.

It's not perfect -- what is? Parking is annoying, it's not that close to home, our weekends (like our weeks) are more chaotic than not, and there's still too much talking and not enough praying or singing for my tastes. But we looked around the sanctuary and saw diversity made real -- diversity in all different directions. We got excited about the choirs, the attempts at Evensong, the social justice activities, the seminar on white privilege. We could see ourselves in the community.

We thought about this specifically because, should we adopt a child of color, we want to make sure that he or she sees themselves in our communities. But diversity isn't just important to a kid we don't have yet -- it's important to and for us, to and for any child we have, whatever their heritage might be. And so it felt like a step, an important step, towards articulating and manifesting the kind of life we want to be living.

I doubt that a UU church will ever be our only spiritual community, but as one among others, it may well do just fine.

The Best I Can Do

Yesterday a blogfriend posted about limits: reaching them, resenting them, struggling with them, living within them. She wrote, "When your offering does not feel perfect, what is still the gift at hand?"

My offerings have not felt very perfect lately. My limits are sometimes quite large. I can't do hours of yardwork followed by hours of housework followed by a party -- my physical energy just can't meet that kind of goal, and so the outside is in sad need of some attention. I need large swathes of quiet solitude; howevermuch I love my friends, and I do, I can't spend a lot of time around people and keep my emotional center, especially right now, and so I'm hibernating. I can't lose sleep and function like a reasonable human being, so the grocery shopping gets sacrificed. I can't eat like crap and be at the top of my game, and so I'm slower than I'd like (see lack of grocery shopping). Even when I get enough sleep, eat well, and do the things I need to do to stay centered, I still can't do it all. And I was raised to do it all.

And so I've been frustrated and angered when I've tripped over my awkward attempts to fit in all the journaling and meditating and hanging out with my brain that I'm trying to fit in. I've been annoyed that it's taking us so long to get the adoption paperwork done, that we're still, years later, trying to make out and live within a budget, that the house, while much tidier than in days of yore, could really use a good power-washing (and I do mean the inside). I've been downright pissy about the struggle to balance the time I need with the relationships I value.

It's not just that I have limits. It's the feeling that I'm not doing the best that I could do -- that if I only muscled through the food stuff to eating at home, it would be okay, that if I only stayed up late one night to get the money stuff up-to-date, we'd get a handle on that, that if I only made enough lists and were disciplined enough, I'd have a really awesome spiritual life, that if I only put some effort in, the house would be pristine inside and out.

But what does "the best I could do" really mean? Could I force myself into doing these things, despite the toll they would take on my physical, emotional, and psychic energy, despite the way they would decenter me? Of course I could. But when I'm really honest with myself, I know that wouldn't be my best.

Right now, the best I can do involves really cozying up to my limits, getting to know them, figuring out how to write my life so that my limits and my ambitions are working in the same harness, instead of at cross-purposes. Right now the best I can do involves saying no a lot. Right now the best I can do involves not worrying too much about the carpet or the ductwork or even the vines taking over the back porch, because they are not what really matters.

My offering -- my Self -- is not perfect: it is slow and quiet and deliberate and it doesn't get everything on the to-do list done. My offering is not showy, or pretty, or even terribly civilized these days. And there is still a gift at hand: the many things I'm noticing about the world now that I'm slower, the gentle unfolding of things long-forgotten, the spaciousness at my center.

"Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

But, but, but

There's an old saw in pagan circles about not praying for patience -- because you'll wait a long time to learn that lesson.

Well, I think I must have prayed to learn how to take time for myself, because I've been pretty much immersed in a life that requires me to actually, actively take time for myself -- I'm not getting it by default. And it's not going so well.

One of the necessities of spiritual practice is time alone. It's not a glorification of the hermitage -- after all, as one of my paper teachers wrote, there's nothing like marriage and rubbing up against another personality every day for the rest of your life to show you exactly how your ego is working and thus what you need to work on. But in order to see how your ego is working, in order to observe yourself and how you are, in order to focus attention on the Divine, a little solitude is helpful.

In other times and places, taking time for myself has been a chore, something I needed to do like I need to take vitamins and brush my teeth -- unpleasant, sometimes uncomfortable, and not very appealing when there were options like watching the same old television series on DVD again or repeatedly hitting refresh in Google Reader to see if anyone had updated their blogs. I have thrown myself against the need to take time for myself in determination, in fear, in righteousness, in anger. I have manhandled myself, written lists, talked to myself sternly, made promises.

Somewhere in the last few months, at a point I can't find, something changed. Maybe it was the retreat I went to in June, maybe it was reading the latest Enneagram book, maybe it was just everything finally coalescing, but right now I'm craving time alone to meditate, to read my spiritual books, to journal. Sure, I'm currently resisting morning pages, and sure, candle gazing is requiring serious force of will, but I'm craving solitude the way I crave sunlight in February -- as though I just might curl up and die without it. I'm grouchy when I don't get it, I'm resentful and mean.

And so finally, my desire and my motivation are going the same direction, and finally I'm being able to at least look forward to it. My skills at setting aside time, however, are, frankly, for shit.

The things that get in the way amaze me. There are days when I'm so hung up on housework that I can't take time to meditate until the kitchen is clean. There are days when I come home tired and restless, and somehow that translates into watching television instead of meditating. There are times when I desperately, cravenly want solitude, so I read a book instead of meditating.

Of course, there are complications right now. Ms. P has sprained her ankle, so instead of taking the train in to work, at least part of which was by myself and so a kind of solitude, I'm driving us both to work and spending that time swearing at other drivers. We've had visitors. My thyroid meds seemed off for a little while, and so my energy was everywhere but here. I'm busy processing some things that have come up about my family, and so I'm feeling aversive to journaling.

The combination of deep desire and "everything getting in the way" is leading to a kind of towering frustration, a prickly grouchiness that is really (and for good reason) upsetting my darling wife.

But the truth is that there will always be complications. There will always be housework and television and visitors and friends who want to see us and emotional things to process and the exhaustion that comes from a good and productive day at work. All of those things will always be there, and then some.

Making the shift to truly, honestly prioritizing spiritual work ahead of everything except perhaps my marriage and my work, well, that's proving very difficult, deep desire and the best of intentions aside. My habits run deep and strong. Spiritual work is scary and threatening, even as I want nothing but. This culture is not set up to privilege the life of the spirit, and I want things to talk to my colleagues about.

I am struggling to be gentle with myself. As our spiritual director said to Ms. P, if I could do something differently right now, I would be. So I'm continuing to stretch into solitude, to push myself to the place where it hurts, gently, so I don't injure my stiff muscles.

But man am I tired of this struggle. I want it to be easy. I want to float into solitude as though it is my birthright, and I want to float out again serene and able to deal with the world without being ruffled in the least. I want the schedules of my life to mesh and never conflict, and I want spirituality to be everywhere, everywhen. I want infinite time, and I want to need less sleep. I want spiritual community so I feel less like Ms. P and I are alone in this struggle.

Do you think the Dalai Lama ever has tantrums like this?

She held on, too

This weekend, I wrote a letter to David Foster Wallace's wife.

His family is reporting that he had battled depression for decades (god, I hate the martial metaphors for illness, but at times like this, how else to describe it?), that recently the meds he was on started having significant side effects, that none of the other meds they tried worked, that the electro-convulsive therapy they tried didn't work.

His sister said in an interview, "Inevitably our thought was, if only he could have held on a little bit longer. And then we realized, he did. How many extra weeks had he hung in there when he just couldn't bear it? So we're not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him."

The articles and blog posts all mourn the literary world's loss. I am mourning his wife's.

I'm projecting here, of course, because I don't know her and I didn't know him and I certainly didn't know their marriage. But nothing is leading me to believe anything other than this: She was the one who was with him for the side effects, the new drugs, the treatments. The late nights worrying, the attempts to figure out what to do, what to try next. Balancing privacy with the need for help, warring between trying not to alarm people and grasping for whatever might help, however slim the chances. Trying to live your life, to keep things going, and yet trying to cover all the angles, all the bases, to keep your loved one safe.

I think about her coming home to find him, the complicated tangle of things that must be grief when your beloved has killed himself and you saw it coming.

She held on, too.

And so I wrote her a letter of condolence, one person partnered to someone with mental illness to another, because too few people understand. I can't say that I know what she's going through, but there were some very dark days when I could see it from here. And in those dark days, people who knew us and loved us didn't believe that the situation was all that dire. During those dark days, we were largely alone. And during those dark days, I was terrified all the time.

It's not there but for the grace of God -- it's there but for the grace of biochemistry and pharmacology and psychiatry and psychology. And we may yet return to that dark place one day.

The truth is that mental illness can be treated today in ways that science could only hope for even fifteen years ago. And it's also true that it doesn't always work. And when it doesn't, this is often how it ends.

When Ms. P was suicidal, I would have given a lot for a shoulder I could cry on, just for a few minutes. I would have given a lot for someone who understood without my having to explain or justify. I would have given a lot for someone to have helped me find a way through it all. And so, despite feeling more than a little silly, I'm sending that letter, just so she knows someone is thinking of her. Just so she knows she isn't alone.

Living with mental illness is Ms. P's story to tell. But partnering someone with mental illness is mine. And I don't want to feel alone in that anymore.