Allocation

Last week my counselor observed I have a problem with "allocating time."

I snatched at that phrase with both hands and curled myself around it.  It felt like a key.

Today I walked in and asked her for scrap paper.  She brought me cardstock.  I tore the sheets in quarters and began filling them with words.  

Allocation. Triage. Priorities. Resources. Flexibility. Values. Boundaries. Structure. Commitment. Block.

The quote from the guy in group who said "I'm tired of sharpening my ax."  Tired of sharpening my ax and never getting any cutting done.  And what does that mean, when one keeps having to come back to the whetstone because the cutting is just no good?  

Maybe we have the wrong ax.

For a couple years now, this counselor (mental health professional #21) and I have been working on this level of not enough resources and daily triage and the constant flexibility required to deal with the constant instability.  The Situation I Am In.

When she said the word "allocation", I felt like we broke through to the underlying layer, to an issue I will carry into any situation I am in.  

As I've held the word through the week, it has occurred to me that "allocation" is deeply related to "boundaries"-- as though we have boundaries between people, and allocations within ourselves.

And we started to talk about boundaries.  She tested my statement that I grew up in a family where boundaries weren't allowed: was it really that boundaries were not allowed, or that boundaries were not respected?  

She kept time with me for three minutes while I just went back in my head and stream-of-conscious listed everything I could remember about growing up and boundaries. 

After she'd listened so carefully to me, I asked her to describe what she had heard, not allowed, or not respected, and she firmly agreed that my experience was of "not allowed."  

I want to hold on to that, both to being willing to revisit my description and to open it up to someone else's interpretation, and also to the sense of being witnessed.

She had a whole new list of words for me after listening to me.  Words like Personal Space. Freedom. Intimacy.  Writing the word "Intimacy" on its card nauseated me, I doubled over, then allowed myself to get down on the floor and rock myself.

The cards lined up in patterns, it looked almost like a tarot reading.  Allocation was on one side, Values crosswise underneath it, and Block coming out from under it. Priorities formed a bridge from that central grouping to the line up of Resources, Triage, Flexibility on one side.  On the other side, Boundaries, Commitment, Stability, and all the words from my childhood.

And thrown off in a corner, under a chair, the word that I now know is the center of the *next* layer down.

Power.

We're not there yet.  We are closer than we were.  This is the farthest in therapy I have ever gotten.

===  

I realized that I'd led the way to this breakthrough by wanting to focus on mental blocks recently-- not on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to get through a particular block, which we've tried to do time and again and which mostly hasn't worked at all-- but on the whole big issue of mental blocks and the role they play in my life.  The chaplain's mantra: lean into the pain.  Lean into the place of resistance.  It is always the way forward.

Post-march.

So there was this march day, and for a whole lot of people, it was a massive, landmark, newborn experience of feeling solidarity.

And then those people came home and read these heart-rending blogs of what marginalized people went through that same day in those same marches.

And now there is a whole lot of listening and talking going on, from people who are kind of new to all this. Awesome.

I have good news and bad news. I myself have been working seriously on intersectional feminism from a position of privilege for over twenty years. I suck at it. You will too. And that's okay. You have to get to the point where you are okay with working hard at this while sucking at it. It is the only way forward.

Part of institutionalized oppression-- unconscious, daily, deeply institutionalized oppression-- is the unspoken idea that systems of oppression don't affect the centered population. For instance, the idea that racism doesn't really affect white people. It isn't that you don't care about what's happening to marginalized people, it's that it's happening over there-- on the margins.

Then you get hit by the realization that a massive part of "who" you are really is a socially constructed "what" that has been all but totally invisible to you because you've been living in a centered echo chamber where it is taken for granted.

You are not mostly an individual who gets to be anybody you want to be with magic powers of good intentions that whisk away whatever damage your oh-so-individual words and actions might accidentally cause.

In fact, everything that went into getting you to thinking of yourself as the special snowflake autonomous author of your life actually helped keep you functioning as one more active cog in the systems of power and prejudice, which turns out to have been running over here, in the centered, the whole time. You're a tool.

When you "get" this, it is a shock.

It doesn't just change your understanding of the world we all live in.

It changes your understanding of you.

After you get this, someone calling you on your own unconscious prejudices isn't as personal anymore, because you aren't thinking of yourself as a free-floating "who" being accused of something abnormal. But the prejudices themselves are a lot more personal, because you have realized they really are a part of you and you really are part of them, and you still cry, but you cry because you realize all the angry messenger was saying, for the umpteenth time, is, "You are being normal and that is so toxic, take look at your 'what'ness and how it is working here."

Oh, yes, and you realize you are going to suck at this forever.

You realize are not going to be the uplifted savior who shows the new way. You realize you are not going to flip a couple internal switches and get to say, "Hooray, I've done the work and now I really am the prejudice-free individual I once thought I was."

**You realize you are going to need to spend the rest of your entire life actively listening to marginalized people and consciously following their guidance.**

You also realize that your initial sense of resistance to the idea that marginalized people are the people you need to listen to most was actually your own internal prejudice trying to maintain the status quo.

That was the good news.

The bad news is white feminism. There is an incredible amount of newborn confusion and beefy intellectual introductions to white feminism floating around right now. Let me put it in a nutshell.

White feminism seeks to buy into the existing systems of power and prejudice, not to dismantle them.

White feminism isn't all about race; it is all about cluelessness.

White feminism comes from a place of taking most of the status quo for granted. This is a place of an obsession with how hard it is for a woman to win the rat race that comes at the cost of awareness of the human beings the rat race is running on top of. This is a place of speaking about helping marginalized peoples the way Rudyard Kipling spoke about helping our little brown brother.

Textbook example: When my lesbian classmate crowed about how new reproductive technologies were increasing women's options all the time-- without thinking about how those reproductive technologies are almost exclusively developed through testing on isolated low income non-English speaking immigrants who are the most vulnerable women in our society-- that's textbook white feminism.

Race isn't the singular spotlight issue there-- the issue there is complete obliviousness to all the instersections of privilege and lack of privilege happening there.

Because classism is a system of oppressing women. Transphobia is a system of oppressing women. Anti-semitism is a system of oppressing women. Euro-centrism is a system of oppressing women. BECAUSE WOMEN ARE PEOPLE.

White feminism fails to recognize all women are people, and that isn't feminism at all.

Remember:

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." -- Audre Lorde