Daily Life

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the systems of oppression that I perceive in my environment versus the systems of oppression that are actually intact.

For example, during my preparations for the Irene Ryan acting scholarship auditions, I perceived that I existed in an environment in which my acting partner would have to work particularly hard to convincingly be in love with me--with my body--with a body that lies outside beauty norms. I wore makeup to all of my rehearsals and perfumed myself with apologies for my form. I did everything I could think of to make my body somehow easier (from my projections onto him) to love.

At one point, right before performing in Rhynsburger, I was reading him something I'd written from my character's point of view--saying things like, "I know you hate me secretly, I know you hate my body, hate my booming voice, hate the noise I make when I stomp around, hate my heaviness, hate my gracelessness." My acting partner took my phone (which I was reading off of) out of my hands and put his arms around me and let me cry on his chest. That was when I understood that by apologizing for myself in all of those subtle ways, I'd been hurting us both. How hurtful I was to him! To assume that he was shallow enough to lack the capacity to love me--to access that part of his self and act through it. How callous to assume that he couldn't do his job well enough so I had to cover myself in makeup and perfume and move in ways that I perceived to be "sexy" through the lens of the beauty industry.

Currently, I'm perceiving in my environment a system that holds me to the standards of high academia. My mind and heart know that the last year has been intense. That I've learned some of how to be an academic and how to be taken seriously. I will continue to learn through this year, but I feel like I'm being stretched in ways and places of my mind that aren't stretchy yet--that haven't stretched in a very long time and might break under the tension. How do you say, "Nevermind," after everything you've promised your family and your self? How do you admit to not being ready for something so fundamentally a part of the world you want to belong to?

I'm wondering, I suppose, whether I'm perceiving things accurately within the department or whether I'm perceiving them through fear. Fear acts like a funhouse mirror and distorts perceptions of opinions and positions and power. I wonder how we can really know if we're perceiving things accurately or through fear.