Thursday, June 11, 2020

Captain's Log, Day 19: A Rug Gets Pulled from Under My Feet


Date: June 11, 2020
Time of post: 2:20 AM
Quarantine Day: 78
Last Song I Listened To: “Better” by Ben Platt
Last Person I Communicated With: GroupMe chat! (Talking about The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta)
Last Thing I Ate: chips and quseo
Last Thing I Read: I read song lyrics, does that count?
Current Mood: sad, scared
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: helped Mikayla and Tyler move their new mattress out of my apartment (they had it shipped to me while they were out of town)
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: again, feel less sad (a common goal)
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: the world is a dumpster fire (x2)
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla and Dustin came over last night and we talked and watched Pitch Perfect 3 and Ben Platt’s Radio City Music Hall performance

Dear Apocalypsers,

(Trigger Warning: This post discusses transphobia and J.K. Rowling’s recent statements. Also, I use a few choice words, so please pardon any harsh language.)

I know that this isn’t the most important thing right now, but I’m kind of feeling like my life is unraveling because of J.K. Rowling’s recent statements. I do not recommend reading her full post/essay that’s on her website. It’s super hard to get through. It’s not an apology. She’s trying to define “womanhood” based on her own experiences, and I know the Internet used to joke that she was “the queen,” but she sure as hell isn’t God, so I don’t know why she thinks she has the definitive say on what makes a “real” woman.

As anyone who knows me knows, Harry Potter has been a huge factor in my life. It has, quite literally, shaped who I am as a person. I read the second book when I was 7 (approximately 2003), because the library didn’t have the first one, but I knew my mom had read them, and I wanted to, too.

The books and movies were foundational to my childhood; they helped me form my morals. They taught me that love is more powerful than hate; they taught me that discrimination should not be tolerated; they taught me about friendship and loyalty and doing what’s right even if it means breaking some rules; they taught me that even those in authority can be corrupt and fallible. Every book, especially fantasy books, that I tried to read after Harry Potter fell flat. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I finished another fantasy series. I read all of Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books (including the Bloodlines spinoff) that spring, and I read Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series and The Infernal Devices prequels that summer. (Side note: when my friend was trying to get me to read TMI and TID, she told me, “They’re my Harry Potter.” I’ve never forgotten that. In an instant, that explained how much those books meant to her.)

Harry Potter followed me into my academics. My senior year of high school, my AP Lit teacher told the class—but mostly me—that we only needed to write about works of “literary merit” on the AP exam, and Harry Potter wasn’t considered literary merit as of 2014. (To this day, I stand by my opinion that the third essay question was begging for me to write about Harry Potter. [Am I allowed to say what it was? They told us that it was a big “no-no” to talk about the essay question topics. Is there a statute of limitations on AP exam questions? You know what? Screw it. I’ll tell you. I already got a 5 on it and now have 2 college degrees in English. They can’t stop me.] The question basically said, “Write about a work where a character’s sacrifice shapes the narrative.” I could write a book on sacrifice in Harry Potter. Instead, I wrote about The Crucible, and kind of how John Proctor’s death [when he could have lived had he have just lied and confessed to witchcraft] was the culmination of themes in the play.) In undergrad, I didn’t have much opportunity to write about Harry Potter, but it made up a chunk of the paper that I used as my grad school writing sample. I was analyzing Shakespearean references in pop culture, and I talked about the parallels between the graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire and a scene in Macbeth. I wrote “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic” on my undergrad graduation cap, because that’s what I’ve lived by since 2011. (I know it’s a movie quote; don’t hate me.)
The rest of this quote is, "...capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it." I feel like Rowling has proved the former this week.
But grad school—yeah, I was kind of the Harry Potter girl. Everyone knew. My statement of intent opened with a riff off of the opening of Sorcerer’s Stone: “Miss Katie Cline, of Jacksonville, Alabama, was proud to say that she was perfectly abnormal, thank you very much. She was the first person you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or magical, because that was just the kind of “nonsense” she held to.” I wrote my Master’s Project on the gendered relationship between cats and women in the series. I took an entire Harry Potter class (where I ended up writing the paper that formed about a third of my Master’s project). I wrote two other major papers on the series, one in my Intro to Grad Studies class and one in my Illustrations seminar. Every single one of my conference presentations (that haven’t been cancelled by COVID) have been about Harry Potter.
Me (center) last April at the Harry Potter-themed re-opening at The Dusty Bookshelf. (You can support them here if you want!)
But the things Rowling said are terrible. Now, I by no means think the series itself is perfect. I’m able to critique it and complicate it, but to see the disgusting things that creator said about transgender people breaks my heart, and it’s unacceptable. How fucking dare she say those things? Does she not realize what her books have done for people in the LGBTQ+ community? (I am not a member of this community, but I’ve seen posts from people sharing how Potter helped them.) Does she not care? Did her millions of dollars make her feel safe or make her forget her humanity? Or, worse, does she honestly believe these things?

Honestly, I have no love for J.K. Rowling anymore. I can’t, in good conscience, support her. Not when she clearly doesn’t support her readers (and, like, people in general). I used to be the teen on the Internet who sang her praises. I thought she could do no wrong. But I’ve grown, and I’m not as naïve, and I know that she is far, far from perfect—and that she’s getting farther away from it with every tweet, it seems. Still, it hurt a little when I unfollowed her on Twitter and when I altered my bio and when I changed my Facebook profile picture to a graduation picture that didn’t include a Potter book. I thought those books would be a constant that carried me through every low in life for my whole life.

Now, I’m not sure. They may be just a memory.

(Every other sentence out of my mouth is a Harry Potter reference. I really wanted to write, “The things we lose have a way of coming back to us, if not always in the way we expect,” but it doesn’t feel right to use her words when she can’t even live by them. Did she ever mean them?)

I guess everyone has to rebuild their life from scratch at least once. For my parents, that moment was the tornado that destroyed my childhood home in 2018. They had lived there for 23 years, and we lost a lot in that storm. I feel like this moment might be my first (and hopefully last, but I’m not that optimistic) moment to rebuild mine—but in a different way.

My friend Dustin, who watched me try not to cry while I tried to explain all this, is a saint. Honestly, one of the best people I’ve ever met. We live in the same apartment complex, so he brought me a White Claw and when I said, “I thought this [Harry Potter scholarship] was one thing I had figured out in my life, but…now….” with my voice cracking and tears in my eyes, he said, “I know a lot of your academic work has been about Harry Potter, but you don’t have to decide right this second what you’re going to do about it. But, if anyone could find a way to still write about it in a way that matters, it’s you.”
One of my M.A. graduation pictures with my Master's Project...which I wrote on Harry Potter.

Like I said, Dustin is a saint. Because, I’m not sure if that’s true. I’m a cishet (cisgender-heterosexual) white woman. I don’t know if I’m the person who needs to write about Rowling anymore—and I cried as I typed that, because that’s been what I’ve wanted to do for about 10 years now. But I don’t know if I have the voice or the angle that the world needs to hear. I can’t speak to the series from a queer, Black, or POC perspective. And, frankly, there’s already been a lot of feminist scholarship on the series already. I’m afraid that I’ve come around too late. And I’ll eventually be okay with that—right now it just hurts like hell knowing that this dream has been derailed for a while, if not forever. 

 But I’ve loved reading these different perspectives so far. (I especially love Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ discussions of Black Hermione in her book The Dark Fantastic (2019)!) And can’t wait to see the scholarship that comes out in the next few years that takes an explicitly queer and/or trans approach. I just feel like I might need to step back and let those people write from their perspectives. (I say that like anyone ever recognized me in the field, anyway. It’s not really stepping back as much as deciding not to take up that space.)

Right now—in the middle of a pandemic, political unrest, the Black Lives Matter movement, and just about 2 days after Rowling’s latest tweets went out—I don’t think I have it in me to say goodbye to Harry Potter completely, and I hope anyone who reads this can respect that I’m grappling with a lot inside me right now. I wholeheartedly disagree with her tweets and their message. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary identities (and all identities) are valid, and no one is entitled to more respect or humanity than anyone else. The books are just so much a part of me, as I’ve tried to explain. In a statement with The Trevor Project, Daniel Radcliffe wrote this:

“To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you. I really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you. If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life — then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred. And in my opinion nobody can touch that. It means to you what it means to you and I hope that these comments will not taint that too much.”

For me, at least, I can separate the books from the author. I completely understand if that’s not possible for everyone. (Trust me, I feel a little guilty and dirty, like I have to keep one of my biggest passions a secret now, because I can’t give it up cold turkey.) But I’d be lying if I said the books didn’t change my life. I honestly believe they made me a better person, a good enough person to see that Rowling is wrong.

I don’t know exactly how I’m going to go on from here. I don’t know what my academic career will be about. I guess I need a new series to become immersed in. (I’m taking suggestions.) Again, I know that this is the most trivial thing to be concerned with right now, with so much else going on. I contemplated even writing this, but, like I’ve said in other posts, writing this blog has been a way for me to cope with everything that’s happening, and I can’t ignore this. I can't leave these thoughts to fester in my head for any longer. My heart hurts too much already thinking about how this one chapter of my life has ended so forcibly and suddenly and painfully.

I’ll try to end this on as positive a note as possible.

There have been a lot of responses to Rowling’s tweet that have challenged her and flat-out disagreed with her and encouraged trans fans that they are valid and loved within the Potter community. Besides Daniels Radcliffe’s statement, Eddie Redmayne has issued a statement, and I’ve seen tweets from Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright, Evanna Lynch, and Katie Leung (hers is pretty cheeky, and as one tweet I saw said, "the most Ravenclaw thing"), and I’m sure I’ve missed some and that more will come. Other prominent Potter people, like the scholar Melissa Anelli and the band Harry and the Potters have critiqued Rowling’s tweets, too.






It’s nice to see that there are people who read the same books I did, who developed the same guiding principles, who see the value of all life and the beauty that transgender people bring to the fandom and the world,

I don’t have a nice, succinct “global statement” (like the aforementioned AP Lit teacher taught us to end our essays with). I’m not sure I’ve processed this enough for that. I need to cry some more.

So, until then, may the odds be ever in our favor,
Katie

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Captain's Log, Day 18: What is Love?

Date: June 9, 2020

Time of post: 5:55 AM
Quarantine Day: 76
Last Song I Listened To: “Sit Still, Look Pretty" by Daya
Last Person I Communicated With: I sent a snapchat that no one has responded to yet, lol
Last Thing I Ate: sugar-free caramel candy
Last Thing I Read: fanfic…again
Current Mood: reflective
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: glued my “grow” wall hanging back together after it fell and broke
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: do my dishes
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: the world is a dumpster fire
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla and Tyler are coming back from Dallas this week!

Dear Apocalypsers,

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. I know, who thinks about love when the world is full of so much pain right now?

I think it’s a coping mechanism. Right now, when there is so much fear and uncertainty and hate and violence and injustice, finding a few minutes of love and happiness in a day feels like a big middle finger to a cruel universe that seems to want us to be miserable.

And, I really hate being told what to do, so my survival mode is now “happy out of spite.” It’s not a perfect defense. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up. It’s sometimes exhausting. But I’d hate to think what I’d become if I didn’t have it.

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” –Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers



I agree with Sam, but I’m always willing to recognize that we, as Americans and human beings, tend to romanticize “the struggle.” The American Revolution is painted as this miraculous “David vs. Goliath” story that led to our freedom from an oppressive government, but we don’t want to think about what that was actually like. The weeks or months without bathing, sweating and marching in suffocating summer heat, covered in blood, mud, wounds, and God-knows-what else; dying from frostbite in the winter because the militias didn’t have proper clothing or equipment; starvation and dehydration. And the World Wars? We love to make those sound like a sepia-colored romance. Sure, the soldier protagonist might watch his buddies die, but he always makes it home. He always gets the girl. And the U.S. always wins—because that’s history. We don’t like to think about the families of our protagonist’s friends who died. We don’t like to think about the families of the people he killed—and they weren’t all monsters, you know.

One of my favorite poems is “Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen. He wrote it about his experience as a soldier in WWI. I’ll give you fair warning, it’s hard to read, but it ends with the lines “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” (Those Latin lines translate to “It is sweet and fitting / to die for one’s country.)

I think about this poem a lot. Owen understood 100 years ago that we glorify war. We romanticize a lot of things. Especially history. The pessimistic reading of all this would be that humans are foolish and selfish and that winners write history, so why would they care what it took to win? The more realist reading might be that nationalist victory stories sell, and a sad patriotic film or book won’t be as successful as something with some kind of at least hopeful ending. The optimistic reading is that we want to believe everything will be happy in the end; we want all of the suffering to be worth it. I realize that I’m privileged enough to see the world through the third lens. Not everyone has been able to take that approach.

And I always wonder what that “good” is that Sam talks about. What makes humans willing to undergo that suffering? What do we fight for?

I’m probably over-generalizing here, but I think it’s some kind of intersection between love, hope, and happiness. That’s what I would fight for, anyway.

I’ve love love in all its forms. I say “in all its forms,” because I’ve never been in romantic love. Still, when I can’t fall asleep at night, I plan weddings to calm myself down. My Pinterest account is 80% themed weddings, 10% quotes, and 5% nurseries. If I had a do-over in life, I’d be a wedding planner or open a bridal shop. And I’ve always loved love. I still remember the first couple I ever “shipped” (long before Tumblr coined the phrase.) They were two 6th grade classmates who nervously held hands for a couple weeks and “broke up.” They’re now both married to other people, but at the time, I fully believed they would marry each other. I didn’t really understand love then.

Please enjoy my themed wedding boards. From L: engagement rings, a Broadway-themed wedding, a zoo wedding, a hipster wedding, a LOTR nursery, a Harry Potter Wedding, a Doctor Who wedding, and a LOTR wedding.


I guess you could say that I don’t really understand love now, either, if my notebooks full of crossed out “Mr. and Mrs. ____”/ “Mr. and Mr. _____” / “Mrs. and Mrs. _____” are any indication. I’d say that love disappoints me about 98% of the time, seeing as only two real-life couples that I’ve shipped have gotten married. (Shout out to Katelyn & Griffin and Hollie & Daniel!) And, as someone who hates unnecessary risk, I really should look at those numbers and accept that I shouldn’t be as invested in love as I am.


Me with the new Katelyn & Griffin McDaniels at their wedding on
October 27, 2018. (I was the Maid of Honor!!)
Me with the new Hollie and Daniel Mayes at their
wedding on October 12, 2019. #PowerCOMple
I’ve witnessed a lot of heartbreak between the ages of 12 and 24, and I’ve lost weeks’ worth of sleep staying up consoling friends. (I wouldn’t have it any other way, so don’t try to stop me.) I’ve perfected every way of saying, “You deserve better,” and “You have so much worth even if you don’t have them.” When I was first introduced to true heartbreak, I was in 8th grade. My best friend had just been dumped by her sophomore boyfriend the week of their 2-month anniversary. She cried in the cafeteria. At first, when faced with breakups, I’d ask my parents to drive me and my friend to the mall for ice cream and window shopping. By high school, we were old enough to drive ourselves. In undergrad, sometimes a text or phone call was all we could manage because of distance; or, if it was one of my friends from undergrad, we’d stay up late into the night, watching movies and crying and hashing it all out in my dorm. With every breakup, though, my heart broke a little, too. I always want my friends to be happy; I don’t want to see them heartbroken; I want them to have that “happily ever after” (even though I took a fairytales class last fall, and I know that the original fairytales didn’t have the happy ending connotations that we think of today). But despite all of the pain I’ve witnessed first-hand, I still shrieked when one of my friends told me that she was seeing a guy and she wanted me to meet him. I’m still planning the housewarming gifts for my other two friends who moving in with their boyfriends this summer. I can’t seem to give up on love. I have too much hope.



That isn’t to say that I don’t have my moments of cynicism. There was a period of four days during my first semester of grad school where I didn’t believe in love. It was a rough four days, ask anyone. I can’t even tell you what sparked that episode, but it honestly felt like a core part of my personality was taken away. All I remember is that we were reading Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) in class, and our professor asked us what we thought about the preteen protagonists’ declarations of love at the end of the book. And I said something to the effect of, “We might think it’s dramatic reading it as adults, but for a middle school audience, I think it’s fine. They’re still young and believe in love and that it can last.” Now, I don’t what it was—my words or my tone or my delivery—but the entire class laughed, and my professor (whom I have so so so much respect for as a person and a scholar) just blanched. Thankfully, a couple mornings later, I saw a couple holding hands on the sidewalk as I was driving to class, and I didn’t want to run them over with my car, so I knew I was “recovering.”

(Ignore the time stamp) This is me and some friends at my Sophomore Elite Night (Spring semi-formal) on May 12, 2012.
That was probably the worst I’ve ever been. I had periods in high school and undergrad when I felt down on myself for being single. (For instance, I’m still a little bitter that I was never asked to any high school dance. That really got to me. I always went with a group, and I had so much fun, but I was 14/15/16/17/18; I wanted to feel wanted. Then in undergrad, I kid you not, that, for three of my four years, there were 3 couples in our core group of 8 friends. I was 
literally always with at least one couple. [None of them are together anymore, by the way.]

Me with some very good friends at my Junior Elite Night on February 16, 2013.

(My dad used to tell me that boys were “intimidated by me.” Good. If they’re intimidated by me because I’m smart and opinionated and great at talking about my feelings, then they wouldn’t last a week with me anyway. I try not to think about how he and my mom stated dating my mom’s junior year of high school and how they were married by the time they were my age.)

Most of my core group of high school friends at my Senior Elite Night on February 22, 2014.

Then I got to grad school and I surrounded myself with more single people. They were my age and older, and they are some of the smartest, most talented and incredible people with incredible dreams and the work ethic to achieve them. I’ve gotten really comfortable being single these last two years, thanks to them. Because we took all the energy we would have put into a romantic relationship and we put it into each other, our schoolwork, and our friendship. We loved each other through the two most difficult years of my life to date. And, okay, we didn’t get a marriage out of our time together, but we got something that’s just as strong and will arguably last longer: friendship.

Dustin (one of the aforementioned smart, talented, hardworking, incredible, and single grad students) and I were talking about this the other day, how we, as a society, put so much pressure on romantic love. When you say, “I’m dating so-and-so,” everyone knows that there are only two ways that can end: marriage or a breakup. I’ve always thought of a romantic relationship as the beginning of something new and exciting, but, when you break it down like that, spending literally the rest of your life with someone or giving them the best of you and getting heartbroken are equally terrifying in different ways. I can see how thinking too much about that could mess with any relationship. When you make a new friend, though, there feel like so many more places that relationship could go. I guess if you get technical, it’s the same two possible endings: you’ll either be friends for the rest of your life, or you won’t be. But there feels like more ways that a friendship can end that aren’t as painful as most breakups. So many times, friends just grow apart because of time or distance, but that doesn’t even guarantee a definite end like a breakup implies. For instance, just recently, I reached out to a friend from high school who I had been really close to. I said something about Niall Horan’s Heartbreak Weather album, because I knew he was her favorite member of One Direction back in the day. And we started talking more than we have in years. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that we drifted apart—we went to different schools and moved to different cities and only saw each other in passing at church functions on holidays—but I wouldn’t say that we ever stopped being friends. Not like I would stop being someone’s girlfriend.

When you take pics like this, you'll probably be friends for a long time.

And I just want to know why.

Why do we expect so much out of romantic love?

I can’t lie. I want to fall in love so badly. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to fall in love and have a big winter wedding. (Remember all those Pinterest boards? Well, I also keep a running list of who I’d want my bridesmaids to be—you know, just in case that comes up.) I want to have 2-4 kids, whose names I’ve been thinking of since I was 12 and was convinced I’d be marrying Nick Jonas. (Cringey Katie moment: I was going to name our daughter Nicole Denise—Denise after his mom. A sweet sentiment, but such a boring name.) So, yes, “falling in love” is at the top of my bucket list. But, like I told a newly-single friend the other day, I’m not going to put my whole life on pause to wait for a boy to catch up with me. I have a lot of other things on my bucket list, too: get published in The Lion and the Unicorn and ChLA Quarterly, write a book, visit Europe, get a PhD, see a show on Broadway, go to a Taylor Swift concert (and probably more). When a man comes along who wants to do all that, too, then he’ll be welcomed into my life with open arms. To put it another way, I like YA fantasy, and in one of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books, Magnus Bane—the immortal warlock—comments about how mortals are like stars, burning bright for a short period of time. Whoever ends up with me better like sunshine, because I want to burn so bright.

Get you a group of friends who will form a Harry Potter trivia
team with you. (I love them even though we came in 2nd)
Clearly, I put just as much pressure on love as society tells me to. (I called it a "rebellion earlier; that's a pretty big deal.) I mean, as a teenager, I had “goals” of being married with kids by 25. At 15, those 10 years felt like plenty of time to “get my life together.” Now, writing this at 24, I’m laughing. Married with kids is not in the cards for me in the next 8 months. Sorry, Teenage Katie…but I think you’ll be pretty happy with what else you’ve accomplished.

Like I said, I’ve gotten comfortable with being single. If you asked me right now if I was happy, I’d say, “Yes. Very.” (Okay, maybe not right now, but, like, pre-quarantine. I was really happy the end of February/beginning of March.) I don’t want a relationship just to be in a relationship, and I don’t want a relationship with just anyone. When I do something, I put all my energy into it, and that, I’m sure, will include romantic love. (Just ask my friends how “extra” I am in our friendships.) And I want that reciprocated. I want to feel desired and wanted and loved and appreciated.

And I’ll get it. I know it. Because I see much love in all its forms every day. Sure, maybe only ~2% of couples I’ve known have gotten married, but the love I see in those 2% show me that I shouldn’t settle for anything less than that. I see love in my mom, who makes sure to call me at least once a day. I see it in my friends who are willing to move our weekly Zoom chat a day because I’m feeling shitty and depressed. I see it in the way my friend lights up when she’s just talking about her new boyfriend. I see the hope that the idea of love brings to everyone.

At the very beginning of this post, I asked what kind of person obsesses over love when there was so much pain and injustice in the world right now.

To answer my own question, a person who refuses to give up.

Maybe I’m naïve or unrealistic, but hope—and, specifically, a hope for more love—is what’s getting me to each tomorrow.

Hey, we all need something, don’t we?

May the odds be ever in our favor,
Katie

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Monday, June 8, 2020

Captain's Log, Day 17: Trying To Make Sense of It All and Faiing


Date: June 8, 2020
Time of post: 7: 24 PM
Quarantine Day: 75
Last Song I Listened To: “I Was Here” by Beyoncé
Last Person I Communicated With: Lexi Bedell
Last Thing I Ate: a burrito
Last Thing I Read: some fanfic
Current Mood: sad
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: ran an errand / picked up a package
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: being less sad would be nice
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: I don’t even have the energy to explain
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Group Zoom tonight

Dear Apocalypsers,

I’ve been trying to write this for days. Weeks even. I don’t have words for what’s happening in the world. For the sheer hate and bigotry that Black Americans are facing. For the way Trump has responded. When I started this blog for class, I thought I was writing as if the COVID-19 pandemic was the apocalypse. In the last few weeks, it’s dawned on me that I am living through more than one pandemic and apocalypse.

My words aren’t what the world needs right now. I honestly don’t feel like I can say anything better than the countless posts I’ve shared, so this post is for me. I’m trying to process what’s happening—to the world and to me.


I am white white white on both sides. I was raised in Alabama by college-educated, late Baby Boomer parents who moved to the South from Pennsylvania a few years before I was born. My parents taught me to treat everyone the same way and to treat them with respect and kindness. I like to think that my judgement of people has always been based on their behavior and not on factors like race, gender, socioeconomic class, religion, or sexuality—but I know I’m not perfect. I know I’ve made incorrect, harmful assumptions about people. I know that I’ve been silent when I should have spoken out. I know that I’ve used and misused my white privilege in hurtful ways, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes just ignoring the voice in the back of my head saying, “You should do something.”

I can blame my silence and complicity on being a woman from the South, where there’s still an unspoken rule about what being a “good girl” means (and what that means is “sweet, soft-spoken, and agreeable”).

But growing up, I was never a “good” Southern girl, at least not by traditional standards. I am loud. I like being in charge. I like being the center of attention and getting my way. I love kids, but I want to live out my dreams before settling down. My home has done and still does some things I don’t agree with, but I can’t blame it for my silence.

I can blame it on my own anxiety about being liked. I was never popular in school (like I secretly wanted to be), but I tried my damnedest to be liked by most people. If I ever “failed” at that, I cried. To this day, I can’t tell you exactly why; I just really wanted to be liked.

But if you know me now—and especially if you knew me while I was editor of my undergrad newspaper—you know that I care so much about protecting people. If someone in a position of power is abusing their power and hurting someone else, I hope you know I’ll stick up for them. (Another thing my parents taught me was to cheer for the underdog.) If I write an op-ed about how that person in power is a bully who doesn’t actually care about the people who work for them, it’s not about name-calling or making them mad; it’s putting the truth out there and letting the affected group know that there’s some lowly college newspaper editor on their side. The point is, I’ve never felt more alive than when I was pissing off my undergrad administration, because I knew they were in the wrong and that I was right. I didn’t care if they liked me.

So, clearly, I’m capable of pushing aside my desire to be liked.

So why have I not been louder on my social media and in my own actions? It’s something I’ve asked myself daily.

And there’s no excuse.

The truth is that I’m learning to recognize my privilege and change my behaviors and be more aware.
Please believe me when I say that I want to do whatever I can to help end racism. I don’t always know what that is, and I sometimes afraid to ask (but I’m trying to get better about that. And if you have the emotional energy to give suggestions or point me in the right direction, I’ll gladly take it.)
But I’m also afraid of being “that” white person who asks the Black community to educate me, when, in reality, that’s something that we each need to do for ourselves. We need to actively search out Black voices and listen to what has been being said for decades.


So I’m looking. I’m looking for a lot of things, but, right now, the two big ones are information and balance. I’m looking for resources on systemic racism. I’m looking for petitions to sign. I’m looking for Black-owned businesses to support and Black art to consume and share. I’m also looking for balance, between asking for help when I need it and not stepping on the Black community’s toes or out words in their mouth and checking on the people in my life who I know are more affected by this than I am. I’m finding that it’s a delicate balance.

(Here's just one of many lists available. This one is from NPR.)

I’m young, white, and privileged, but I’ve never experienced a time in my life when the world felt as fragile as it does right now. I’ve spent days in a depressive state. My nerves—already shot from months of isolation and trying not to catch a virus in my immunocompromised state—can’t really handle another large-scale crisis. But I force myself to read a little news every day. To share links on Twitter and Instagram. To sign another petition. To donate what little I can when I can. My heart hurts so much.


(Here's a website that lists bail funds from across the nation and other resources, like mental health resources and Black revolutionary and anti-racist texts.)

But this isn’t about me.

Several years ago, I remember thinking that maybe the reason I’d been given a relatively easy life was so that I could help other people. (I realize now that there are a whole lot of problematic things with that statement), and, at the time, I thought that just meant being as nice to people as I could be. Being nice has always come easily to me, so it made me feel good to think that I was doing what I was “supposed to” do by doing what was easy.

Now, I understand more fully that doing what’s right is often uncomfortable because it means recognizing your own shortcomings and actively bettering yourself. When it comes to human rights, the right thing sometimes requires a complete lifestyle change. And that takes work. I’m working on it.

I’m not sure I’ve said anything groundbreaking. I certainly don’t have all (or any) answers, but I will keep looking for them. I will keep learning, and I hope every other white person takes up that task, too. I want to be hopeful that this movement brings real change.

I know my generation will undoubtedly fail our children. We will fail them spectacularly in ways I can’t even imagine right now. I can only hope that we fail them in different ways than we have been failed. I hope they don’t fear being gunned down at school or at a concert or for who they love. I hope their skin color will not make them the target of police violence, that they will feel safe going out at night or going for a jog or birdwatching in a park or walking and playing in their neighborhood or sleeping in their own homes.


But I really don’t know.

The first half 2020 has brought out the worst in humanity. I hope the second half will show us the best.

No cheesy ending line this time. Because there many people for whom the odds aren’t in their favor. And that needs to change.

Katie

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