Coming Together

“If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,’ because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.”  (Pat Parker’s “Movement in Black.")

I'm a privileged, straight, white girl.  Protestant.  From an educated family.  Our family has silver, each piece engraved with our family crest, goes back to George.  Yes, I grew up eating with Georgian silver (and I love it). I was surprised when I saw Follies that that was a mark of privilege.  My grandmother had wealth growing up, but married out of it.  (And married late.  She was lucky she didn't end up an old made.)  But her sister married into the unbelievable privilege of her family.  We often had the aspirations, but not the wealth.  

But we were still well off.  Not 99%, but probably 97% (although I, myself, am only 67%, according to the Wall Street Journal). 

So why do I have this deep, deep, deep sense of not belonging?  Part of it was the bullying.  My parents lived on a hippie commune and made me go to school with a bunch of fucking red necks.  The bullying was horrible, consistent and incessant.  Not that I had my arm broken every day, but I was probably physically assaulted once a week.   The fact that my parents had advanced degrees and their parents probably dropped out of high school didn't mean anything to me.  What mattered to me was that there were 30 of them, not one of whom would give me a covert smile, and most of them were older (It was a 1-room school house, grades 1-6, and I was in the 1st grade).  I know the bully was a huge part of it.  Another part of it was that I was too smart for my own good.  "A lady always laughs at a gentleman's jokes."  But I couldn't play that game.  

My parents didn't protect me that much.  They didn't view that as their job.  I think that is quite common among parents of the Me-generation.  And so I learned to be stronger than I would have been on my own.    Probably stronger than was healthy for me.  Which, all-in-all, probably made me even less datable.  Few men want to date women who are strong, who also know their way around a pneumatic nail gun.  I remember the first time I had a D/s scene, the guy wanted me to struggle.  He told me to.  It was fun.  I struggled away from him.  He lost interest.

And, on top of it, I was fat.  I'm still plump, but now in the 'normal' range, whatever that means.  But growing up, I was fat, before kids could even get plus-size clothes.  

I usually had a couple of good friends, but I didn't make friends easily.  I think I'm prickly when I first meet people, but once I make a friend, I have that person for life.  I have 4 women in my life that think of me as their most important, closest friend.  While I love them all, I think of one of them as my closest friend. So I know that people who love me think I'm pretty extraordinary.  

But most people don't take the time to get to know me.

The parts of me are my intellect, my commitment to making the world a better place, my kink, my soul-searching and my little-kid-who-wants-to-play-on-the-swings.  

I know that I have been the beneficiary of incredibly societal privilege, but all I really feel is the shame that society levels on those that do  not live up to the paradigms that keep the hierarchy in place.  There are the few places where I feel accepted, but I would wonder, when I was at church, what they'd think if they knew about my kink.  And when I was at a munch, I'd wonder what they'd think of me going to church.  I segregate these different parts of myself, because it seems so hard to find a place to welcome them all together.  And so, I just want one person to cherish all of them.