It goes almost without saying that there’s a particular response to marginalization and abuse that twists people up and boxes them in.
It comes partially from the fact that we take evidence in from our environment — so if you live in an environment that is biased, and which enacts that bias in ways that have substantive impacts, you will be absorbing a lot of evidence that you personally suck.
It also comes partially from the fact that we adapt to our environments — you have to live, but if the environment you live in is characterized by hostile design — if there’s really no space for you, and a lot of features (which includes the actions of other people) that you get cut up on, you’ll eventually end up taking some of that framework in via the actions you take to navigate that environment.
It also comes partially from the fact that even we — even if hated or abused, and even if we know why that abuse occurs and that it is unjust (which we don’t always know — the world really tries hard to legitimate its bullshit) — always have some kind of emotional interaction with the world. You can overlook hurt, but you can’t necessarily prevent hurt. And you’ll kind of find yourself impelled to love something in the world, or at least not hate everything about it and everyone in it.
This set of features creates kind of a nasty mix — you hurt, you want to stop hurting, people keep telling you its legitimate, good, or necessary for you to be hurt, people won’t leave you alone (because they think that messing with you is normal and natural), you can’t leave the world alone because you have to live in it, and you end up wanting, or valuing, or loving things but knowing that you might not get them, or that they may taken away because of what you are… that people might even want to destroy those things and possibly because you are what you are and you loved and wanted them.
The outcome of this, over time, is fear and shame. And not just fear and shame related to a given event or response you got — but fear and shame that hit when you are even thinking of doing something, before other people come on scene at all. You could say this is the internal endogenization and institutionalization of prejudice.
What it does is to make people hunker down inside themselves — and it cuts them off from deeper internal selves and the broader world around. If it gets really bad, you might find yourself hating the things that appeal to your deeper self and or which are attractive — personally, spiritually, metaphysically — in the broader world.
Those things activate the parts of yourself that want to reach out, but which have been broken, beaten, and burnt by the world around when you’ve done so in the past. Evidence of those things reminds you of how often these things have been denied you, the pain and cost of that denial, and the likelihood of its re-occurrence. It reminds you of all the times you have not been valued, and have, in fact, been told that you are of so little value — you are not even capable of valuing things, or creating something valuable.
So, for your own sake, to go and do and be what you are meant to be in the world, you have to combat those tendencies. You have to keep reaching and trying, even if it keeps hurting — and in fact is laying new wounds on top of partially healed ones. For your own sake, you have to not hate or fear or degrade what those kind of spiritually or metaphysically interesting aspects of the world — even if you have been told it is not for you, or you have punished for engaging with it, or you have been told that the only way to do it is via a modality that will (perhaps even is designed) to damage you — because continuing to value and engage with those things is crucial to your soul, and to your ability to value the humanity, such as it is, of others.
You end up sublimating your loss onto the thing that you lost, rather than the forces or actions that kept you from it.
Growing up, I saw a lot of people who made the choice to bunker down. Some of them did it for power, some for peace and security, some out of shame or for respectability, or because, in the end, they really did end up believing that their selves were a liability. Some of them just got tired.
And I also saw what happened to the people who didn’t do that—and saw them take all kinds of damage. The pain and the cost — the risk of reaching out like that when you are part of a marginalized group, when life is precarious — these are real.
But, if you don’t, the costs are worse. If you push yourself down too far, deny what is good or valuable or interesting out there, deny what you love, refuse to acknowledge the reality of these things— your self does not go away. The folks I knew who bunkered got twisted up inside, because they tried to cram their souls so far up into a space that did not fit.
The soul has a shape of its own, and a voice — and it is always there, no matter how unpleasant the circumstances — it never fades out. So, if you don’t give it space to move, it will not just fall silent — it will rage and grieve, and turn and twist, trying to get free or to alleviate the pain or at least express it. And this is not a quiet process, because usually, when someone gets twisted up like that—it influences what they do and think with regards to others. If they have damned the humanity in themselves, then they are likely to damn it externally as well. If they have gotten twisted up, they will deal with others in ways that resonate with or replicate the pain this has caused them.
So, there’s a whole lot of reasons to avoid that choice.
But it is hard. Out there — and people are going to hate you, and bad things are going to happen, and it’s going to get into you.
People are going to impose costs on you for existing, and they are going to impose costs on you for seeking to evade those costs. They’re going to hate you for your good cope (“how dare you ignore me when I say that you suck?!”) because you had the audacity to seek more than was allocated to you. And they will hate your bad cope (“yeah it’s not great, but the alternative was worse.”) because doesn’t that prove that you’re unviable? Prejudice is inexorable like this, sometimes.
You will lose things, and people. You will see sadism, and malice, and the bad side of good people, and you’ll see the dark side of concepts, and institutions, and structures that people think are good. You might be hungry sometimes, and you might have good reason to fear. People are going to do dumb things— and you’re going to wonder if still somehow you are responsible for the havoc caused by their stupidity, if the flaw is in you, because the dumb shit they did is in response you.
It’s true I think that most people who are marginalized have a lot of defense mechanisms and callus that they use to off-set some of the nastier parts of the environment they live in — but sometimes that callus is going to get worn down, and those defense mechanisms will get sprung. And everybody’s got their weak points, where if someone gets to you there, they can get to you at core.
So sometimes you’re going to get worn down, and it might make you small.
Then something is to come along — something worth liking, or a chance worth chasing — and it’s going to ruffle your soul.
And, ironically, that is going to hurt.
The things that will lift you up out of the dark confines, when you’re worn-down — they tug at parts of you that are already kind of battered, so they hurt.
It’s a bit like an itch, or a burn — or stretching muscles that have been cramped for a long time, or might even be kind of bruised up. You could also say it’s like the good pain that comes when you start moving around after an injury. Or it can be like a chilly gust of air, when you’re already cold — a bright light when you wanted to hang back in the shadows.
Still you’ve got to to reach out to that thing — and stretch out your mind, because if you reject it, you do harm to yourself at core, and you’re likely to reject or deny the same thing in others.
—
I remember one afternoon, about ten or fifteen years ago, where I was standing by the cabinets in the kitchen, in the big Victorian boarding house where I was living.
There were about twenty of us living there. It was dark and cramped — no windows, lit by a single yellowish light.
Outside, there was a thunderstorm brewing. That area is dry, but it does get some big storms in the early summer, when moisture coming in from the peninsula breaks on the mountains to the north.
I was still in college, and I had just discovered, a week or two earlier, that there were other people like me in the world — other trans-people.
It’s hard to remember, although I think the residue is still there, just what it felt like to be trans at that time. I’d known what I was since I was three or so, but I’d also assumed that I was a kind of a rare evolutionary aberration — and not a particularly good one, because of the massive inconvenience it caused everyone else, because of the way it made me kind of a fundamental challenge even to things that people tend to think are good.
I remember the accumulated impact of that feeling like a deep, dark, burning energy — acrid. You know: evolutionarily defunct, a fundamental crack in social community structures as generally organized, evil because of the anger and distaste that I provoked in other people, because of the inconvenience I presented to efficient social function, evil because I wanted things that someone like me could not or should not want, because things that are supposed to be good are bad for me and I can’t accept them, because the things that people want from me are things I cannot give them.
What individual has the right to ask so much of other people? What should an individual do when they are so external to the systems and structures that people rely on, that they love and sentimentalize, and invest so much physical and emotional energy in — that their mere existence wrecks things?
And if the whole world is one way, and organized around that, and you are another — aren’t you a sin, some kind of violation of natural law? No matter how you act, no matter what you try to do?
So, I was kind of leaning forward on the cabinet door, and the air was getting thick and heavy — like muggy, like just before a storm breaks — and wrestling with that deep, dark thing, and I could feel it dragging me under, getting into me.
It got darker and darker, and the air got heavier and heavier, and I was kind of gripping the cabinet door, shaking and panting.
And then there was a flash of light, inside my head — and it felt like it might’ve come from somewhere else.
It felt metaphysical — but different than what I was used to, because previously any foray into metaphysics had felt kind of felt dark and seedy, guilt-ridden and anxious, punitive and angry — like the basement of an old church.
This felt like a lightning bolt — arcing across my mind, but it didn’t burn.
The thought that went along with it was — this is the shape of your soul, this is what you are. You can be that and do good as yourself, or you can deny it. But if you deny it, you will not be able to do good. Denial will twist you up and you will always be in pain — and you will be unable to do anything or interact with anyone without it getting twisted up by that pain.
So, if you want to be a good person, or at least a viable one — you must acknowledge this part of yourself — and live as yourself, no matter what people tell you about it, no matter how much they complain.
It’s the only one to respect what is sacred in yourself, and so, respect what’s sacred in other people — and therefore, serve and facilitate what is sacred in general.
At some point, the storm broke.
Then there was this kind of… wash of relief, that was part liberation… and I staggered over to the counter, and leaned over it for awhile, smelling the rain.
—
So, life is hard and life is long.
Just because you have some kind of key insight doesn’t mean you’re insulated from other people’s damages or desires —their ambition, their hunger, their ignorance.
This kind of thing can set you free, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to come out unscathed, as you’re moving through the world.
You get hurt, you get tired, you wonder if maybe you deserved it all along — the things that cause the prejudice are complex and unruly, and they touch down everywhere — and the process of social change is long.
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering what I knew then.
I get too banged up, and my soul creaks, and I wonder what I’m supposed to do and where I’m supposed to go when it seems like there’s no way forward and nothing good to go for — and I lose hope.
And then I go deep down in the dark, and it’s fighting the same battle over again — but older and wearier this time — until I go deep enough.
Then I hang out there, right at the edge of the pit for awhile, teetering.
What brings me back is never duty, or reason, or theory, or compassion, or connection, or practice — it’s when something yanks at the back of my soul, and makes me want to reach out towards it.
When there’s something good enough, or bright enough, or worthwhile enough that’s it’s worth reaching out to, no matter how fundamentally dirty I am — and, by extension, makes me want to preserve and liberate the self that can reach out.
Which is another way of saying, it’s love, of a kind, that does this. And not love as ownership, or love as affection, or love as self-regard —definitely not love that is easy — something more unconditional than that.
The world is going to be a dark place for a long time — it’s going to be deeply imperfect for all of our lifetimes.
So, what is needed is some way to navigate the dark, to live in it knowing that it won’t pass quickly.
For me, at least, I think something like this is the answer that stays when all the other answers fail.
