On claiming an identity and exploring arrogance
So, Alexandra said something interesting the other day, and then again on a recent post of mine.
I was talking about how I feel really embarrassed and inadequate sometimes because I didn't choose to pursue math, engineering, the sciences. I am a feminist; I am supposed to be breaking boundaries and proving girls can do all kinds of manly things too. So, I often feel I ought to be awesome at mechanics, cars, carpentry, street fighting, physics, and computers, and never have to call a man to fix the water heater. Instead, what do I do? I do girly things. I do language (god, please, don't send me an article about how women's brains are designed for language and men's brains are designed for logical thinking). I do literature, art, I do knitting, social sciences.
I am not doing the valuable or hard things. Obviously, though, the things that I do are valuable, and not everyone is good at them. I have internalized the value system that says, fields with more women in them are silly and easy, and fields with more men in them are important. So when I hang out with this engineer, even though he has not implied any kind of judgment at all I feel this anxiety about finding a way to prove I am smart and do worthwhile things and that I am not just 'another' silly girl just because I don't understand his work. I am a human being worth taking seriously.
Anyway, when I was talking about this anxiety with Alexandra, she said:
I think you should to play up your accomplishments a little when in one of these conversations when you're not feeling valuable, because you know the guys are doing it.
And I thought, you know what, why the hell not? I should.
My modus operandi, when mentioning something I do, is to try and portray it as not a big deal, and as a function of luck and circumstance or something that anyone who was interested could do. Honestly, what I'm then counting on is that the other person will see the value of things I do through my smokescreen of appropriate humbleness--that they will be interested or a bit impressed without me having to try to impress them.
Partially I downplay what I do this way because it is very important to me to be aware of my privilege and the role it has played in my life--my successes are not all because of my skills. But I also do this because, subconsciously, it is more important to me to show that I am a Nice, Humble, Good person than it is to show that I have accomplished things and am an interesting person. On my conscious level I'm not sure I agree with those priorities.
After all, it's probably not even a very effective method: if you aren't telling someone what your accomplishments are worth, then they aren't going to know you're being humble, they'll just think that you actually haven't accomplished much. Plus, if I don't value what I've done, how is anyone else going to know to value them?
I also realized that there's a bit of an assumption that proving myself to be a humble person will also show that I am nice and kind and good, which are the actual valuable traits there--humility can be nice, but it is not nearly as useful as kindness. So asserting the value of my accomplishments would not mean I am choosing that over being a Nice, Good person--those things are compatible. It would be choosing only to value my accomplishments over humility, which doesn't really have much moral value in such a conversation.
So, then, I wondered, what ARE my accomplishments? What is it that I do that's just as worthwhile as math and science careers, anyway? What should I be bragging about? So I sat down and made a list. Then I expanded it to include all the things that are just interesting and round me out as a person, so that next time I'm talking to someone feeling like I don't know how to prove that I'm valuable, I'll remember all the things that I myself am an expert in, and how there are tons of interesting things for me to share with someone. I really suggest you do this, by the way!
In listing my accomplishments, I encountered some trouble with talking about my accomplishments as a writer.
I have long had a policy of saying I DO something, rather than I AM something.
I write, but I won't call myself writer.
I write poems, but I won't call myself poet.
I used to play the cello; I didn't use to be a cellist.
I use French; I am not a French-speaker.
I always figured--if I made the cello central to my life, I'd be a cellist. If I was still writing poems in 15 years and had proven my devotion to and knowledge of the craft, I could be called a poet. Especially since so many young people dabble in these things, especially since every other person I've ever met has written a poem at some point, I don't just get to claim the title poet so easily.
In writing my list, I especially hesitated to put down that I am a writer because I have written very little in college. There are maybe two poems that I have really tried to work on in the last two years. But somehow I still felt like it was not really accurate to try and list the things that make me who I am without talking about writing.
So I thought about it. I have written articles used by an embassy and one of the biggest international charities in the US, I am essentially ghostwriting parts of a professor's book right now, I still know poetry the way that I know my hometown, I can still edit literature or academic or news writing really damn well. I am not working very well on my own creative output right now, but I am still working on my foreign languages and in general towards preparing for an MFA in translation and creative writing.
And you know what? Maybe even if I am not producing much right now--maybe I do get to call myself a writer. Because when I say to myself, well, you're not a writer, you probably just have to discipline yourself in the way Jesse tells you to in order to even say that you write, and right now you're focusing on work and school instead--then I feel like I'm cheating myself out of a whole part of myself, and I feel a little bit despairing.
This might be a little bit of an aggravating post, because I'm admitting that right now I am writing virtually nothing and I still want to get to call myself a writer. That's pretty damn annoying.
But you know? I've never let myself call myself a writer, not even when I was filling notebooks every month and a half. And why shouldn't I?
I didn't go to undergrad for creative writing because I wanted to explore subjects themselves, rather than the way to write about subjects. And now, if I really think about it, I am in fact developing as writer not just immersed in literature, but as a writer that writes, in many different ways, in the context of justice and democracy and all kinds of political and social problems that matter to me. In the end, I have come back to working on the way that I want to be a writer, by writing my thesis on connections between art and justice. Perhaps I am taking a different path to being a writer that involves a lot more of my life than I ever recognizes was part of being a writer. Because I don't think I'd be in the place I am right now without the context/influence/force of thinking about writing.
So maybe I should value, audibly, the things that matter to my life and what I do. Maybe I should, for the first time in my life even though I've worked with language forever, call myself a writer.
I was talking about how I feel really embarrassed and inadequate sometimes because I didn't choose to pursue math, engineering, the sciences. I am a feminist; I am supposed to be breaking boundaries and proving girls can do all kinds of manly things too. So, I often feel I ought to be awesome at mechanics, cars, carpentry, street fighting, physics, and computers, and never have to call a man to fix the water heater. Instead, what do I do? I do girly things. I do language (god, please, don't send me an article about how women's brains are designed for language and men's brains are designed for logical thinking). I do literature, art, I do knitting, social sciences.
I am not doing the valuable or hard things. Obviously, though, the things that I do are valuable, and not everyone is good at them. I have internalized the value system that says, fields with more women in them are silly and easy, and fields with more men in them are important. So when I hang out with this engineer, even though he has not implied any kind of judgment at all I feel this anxiety about finding a way to prove I am smart and do worthwhile things and that I am not just 'another' silly girl just because I don't understand his work. I am a human being worth taking seriously.
Anyway, when I was talking about this anxiety with Alexandra, she said:
I think you should to play up your accomplishments a little when in one of these conversations when you're not feeling valuable, because you know the guys are doing it.
And I thought, you know what, why the hell not? I should.
My modus operandi, when mentioning something I do, is to try and portray it as not a big deal, and as a function of luck and circumstance or something that anyone who was interested could do. Honestly, what I'm then counting on is that the other person will see the value of things I do through my smokescreen of appropriate humbleness--that they will be interested or a bit impressed without me having to try to impress them.
Partially I downplay what I do this way because it is very important to me to be aware of my privilege and the role it has played in my life--my successes are not all because of my skills. But I also do this because, subconsciously, it is more important to me to show that I am a Nice, Humble, Good person than it is to show that I have accomplished things and am an interesting person. On my conscious level I'm not sure I agree with those priorities.
After all, it's probably not even a very effective method: if you aren't telling someone what your accomplishments are worth, then they aren't going to know you're being humble, they'll just think that you actually haven't accomplished much. Plus, if I don't value what I've done, how is anyone else going to know to value them?
I also realized that there's a bit of an assumption that proving myself to be a humble person will also show that I am nice and kind and good, which are the actual valuable traits there--humility can be nice, but it is not nearly as useful as kindness. So asserting the value of my accomplishments would not mean I am choosing that over being a Nice, Good person--those things are compatible. It would be choosing only to value my accomplishments over humility, which doesn't really have much moral value in such a conversation.
So, then, I wondered, what ARE my accomplishments? What is it that I do that's just as worthwhile as math and science careers, anyway? What should I be bragging about? So I sat down and made a list. Then I expanded it to include all the things that are just interesting and round me out as a person, so that next time I'm talking to someone feeling like I don't know how to prove that I'm valuable, I'll remember all the things that I myself am an expert in, and how there are tons of interesting things for me to share with someone. I really suggest you do this, by the way!
In listing my accomplishments, I encountered some trouble with talking about my accomplishments as a writer.
I have long had a policy of saying I DO something, rather than I AM something.
I write, but I won't call myself writer.
I write poems, but I won't call myself poet.
I used to play the cello; I didn't use to be a cellist.
I use French; I am not a French-speaker.
I always figured--if I made the cello central to my life, I'd be a cellist. If I was still writing poems in 15 years and had proven my devotion to and knowledge of the craft, I could be called a poet. Especially since so many young people dabble in these things, especially since every other person I've ever met has written a poem at some point, I don't just get to claim the title poet so easily.
In writing my list, I especially hesitated to put down that I am a writer because I have written very little in college. There are maybe two poems that I have really tried to work on in the last two years. But somehow I still felt like it was not really accurate to try and list the things that make me who I am without talking about writing.
So I thought about it. I have written articles used by an embassy and one of the biggest international charities in the US, I am essentially ghostwriting parts of a professor's book right now, I still know poetry the way that I know my hometown, I can still edit literature or academic or news writing really damn well. I am not working very well on my own creative output right now, but I am still working on my foreign languages and in general towards preparing for an MFA in translation and creative writing.
And you know what? Maybe even if I am not producing much right now--maybe I do get to call myself a writer. Because when I say to myself, well, you're not a writer, you probably just have to discipline yourself in the way Jesse tells you to in order to even say that you write, and right now you're focusing on work and school instead--then I feel like I'm cheating myself out of a whole part of myself, and I feel a little bit despairing.
This might be a little bit of an aggravating post, because I'm admitting that right now I am writing virtually nothing and I still want to get to call myself a writer. That's pretty damn annoying.
But you know? I've never let myself call myself a writer, not even when I was filling notebooks every month and a half. And why shouldn't I?
I didn't go to undergrad for creative writing because I wanted to explore subjects themselves, rather than the way to write about subjects. And now, if I really think about it, I am in fact developing as writer not just immersed in literature, but as a writer that writes, in many different ways, in the context of justice and democracy and all kinds of political and social problems that matter to me. In the end, I have come back to working on the way that I want to be a writer, by writing my thesis on connections between art and justice. Perhaps I am taking a different path to being a writer that involves a lot more of my life than I ever recognizes was part of being a writer. Because I don't think I'd be in the place I am right now without the context/influence/force of thinking about writing.
So maybe I should value, audibly, the things that matter to my life and what I do. Maybe I should, for the first time in my life even though I've worked with language forever, call myself a writer.