LUCKY PRIVILEGE

Welp. I’m writing a blog post. You know what that means…LET’S TALK ABOUT GUNS!

JUST KIDDING.

(but I do want to say props to New Jersey for banning bump stocks yesterday, proud of you)

I’m not a person who when asked “who I am” would be able to eloquently answer that question. I mean, if I had to, like gun to the head (THIS ISN’T ABOUT GUNS) I’d like to think I’d say something along the lines of “hmm, I think I’m a relatively creative person with horrible impulse control and a knack for being awkward in most social situations.” Those are the things I can definitively say I am at this moment in my life.

Some people feel fulfilled by being married, or having kids, or social interactions or being right on top of that QED report. I truly feel the most fulfilled when I think of something creative and it comes to fruition. My problem though is when something serious weighs on my mind it stops any inkling of creativity to flow because I haven’t been able to figure out how to not make the serious issues in my mind and the creativity in my mind mutually exclusive. I’m not sure if it’s me just not having that skill or a matter of me just subconsciously holding back.

When there’s something on my mind all other things in my life fall flat. My tweets aren’t funny, I say the wrong things in conversations with my friends, I lay on my couch rewatching TV shows on Netflix… my sexy Instagram photos only get like 2,000 likes. It’s not something that I can just work out in my head or talk to another person with and feel satisfied after. So good thing I’ve got this little spot on the internet to throw this all out there.

Kristen Tea of motherwise.org. wrote this last year. I just came across it this weekend when severely stalking a person that I shall not name (because I honestly don’t remember who it was) on Instagram. I read this and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.

It made me go back to who I was as a person in my early 20s (barely a person). Not someone who was so much sick of politics as much as just having a complete apathy towards them. They didn’t affect me and I wore my apathy like a badge of honor. Of course I didn’t see this as privilege because I was self-absorbed and felt invincible and entitled. Somewhere along the line in the last decade of my life though, my brain finally fully formed. I've kind of learned to have a balance of shallowness and deepness and I learned to have opinions of my own and not just the same ones my mom or people around me have. It’s still a work in progress expressing them, but they are there. I've learned to make pasta al dente without timing it and I've also learned I am privileged.

I feel like I grew up a lucky kid. I wasn't the kid that got whatever I wanted, like the Nokia cell phone at 14, but I got one at 16 or the Jeep Wrangler at 16, but I got a used Ford Escort. I always had little part time jobs not because I needed to but just to have some extra spending money on top of what my mom would give me. The feeling wasn't lucky at the time though, the feeling was that I was entitled to it all. It wasn’t till YEARS later I had gotten the idea in my head that I was privileged and the idea that I was lucky. Reading the above blurb a few days ago did something and welded those two ideas together in my brain. And I said out loud to no one, while drinking a blue raspberry Slush Puppy, 

“How do I reconcile my privilege with just the luck of my draw?”

How do I speak on how I think our President is racist when I’ve been privileged to never have been pulled over because I’m black, to never have been denied a job because I’m black, or never have been called the n-word to my face? How do I tweet Trump is a racist or throw up a Martin Luther King Jr. quote about oppression, or write Black Lives Matter? I know there will be people, maybe even people I know saying things like “why would she write that, she’s never gone through that” or even “she’s not ‘black’” (which might be a post for another day). And they would be right, about the former, not the latter. And that's just some weird guilt issue I have and maybe a major reason I never talk about race (which will probably be a bullet point during that other day post).

As I finished up the last of my sloosh pup and had my final brain freeze, I realized that those things I mentioned that never happened to me? That’s actually not privilege. I’m not immune to that happening, I’m just lucky it has never happened. And I’m only lucky because of where I was born and raised and came from and that the people in my life and the majority of those around me were taught or had the belief that I’m just a person like them (there may have been other factors, but that’s for that other day post). So just because I’m lucky I shouldn’t use my voice to say something that could maybe help others be lucky one day too because someone around them to heard something I had said?

I don’t think your privileged luck should be realized just for things that could actually happen to you. Being born with all your mental capacities, being born in America and not coming over when you were 2 years old because your parents wanted a better life, being a kid and not worrying if your parents were going to be able to put food on the table every night, being born white. It’s such a good thing to think about how lucky you are and how essentially, we were all just the smallest measurement away from having an entirely different existence. Liken it to a time in your car when you missed a car accident by an inch.

I get the whole “don’t speak about things you don’t know about” but I don’t believe that holds true on an empathetic level. To be able to step out of yourself and imagine your life as someone less privileged or less lucky than you is one of the greatest assets to have. I can tell you that sometimes it’s the hardest thing to do though. It's very easy for me to think of how I would feel if I was brought over to the U.S., undocumented at 2 years old by my parents, I grow up to have my own family, I work hard and I get deported. It's harder for me to imagine having a family member murdered by an illegal immigrant and believing the only way to stop that from happening is to build a wall, deport every single illegal immigrant and not allow or want any people from certain countries to come here. There are times I encounter people where I try to get into their brain and figure out where they are coming from but with the way that they think and the beliefs they hold it’s apparent our two brains function differently. Their brain is the antonym to my brain. 

Self-awareness is so important. Realize your privilege isn't rights, you're not entitled to it, you're just lucky. 

P.S. I spelled privilege wrong 532 times during the typing of this. Even the one after 'I spelled' in this P.S.