I was thinking about my short-but-not-sweet post yesterday as I was falling asleep, and it occurred to me that a little more explanation might be worth putting to screen. So allow me to expand on the previous thought. I think I know why so many of the people in my life early on faded away in spite of my efforts to keep them around.
I’m poor. I mean… I guess I’m not still poor (we are doing okay– we balance on a pinhead between being in trouble and not, but we’re doing okay), but I grew up poor. There was a misconception among the young people at my high school. They thought that honors meant “rich.” And they were all rich and white, so the also thought that honors meant “Republican” and that it meant “devout Christian.” I tried the latter two; I think my spirituality aligns well with Christianity but not the sort that is espoused in small town America, and likewise I’m not a small town America Republican. And you don’t get to try “rich.”
But therein sits the problem. All those people I knew in high school didn’t understand that I couldn’t afford expensive colleges without scholarship money. They didn’t understand that when I didn’t go directly to college because I chose to stay home and take care of a family member I had to work the same retail and factory jobs that I worked during the summer. Working class life wasn’t something I dabbled in to build character; it was social climbing. They thought I made a bad choice because I wasn’t rich, all the while they were doing what they were doing on the strength of their family’s money.
And so none of them ever understood my decisions. Or worse, they thought things that weren’t decisions were.
Why would I not go away to college and stay home to take care of a relative? Why would I then choose to transfer what work I had done to the regional campus of IU and finish my degree there? Why would I want to stay in the academy? Why would I volunteer for Clinton, or for Gore, or for Howard Dean?
One of my closest friends said to me once “I guess we can’t hang out anymore. I’m getting married, and my wife doesn’t like childish stuff like games and super hero movies.”
We were in our 20s. I now teach people to make video games and super hero movies for a living.
I know all of that might look like an accusation that my friends did me wrong. That’s not what I’m saying, though. I’m actually fascinated, because when I was young, I couldn’t see it. I really couldn’t. I always thought that I was, as they thought, a miserable failure. Why couldn’t I go away to college? Why was I “wasting” my time trying to build liberal grassroots political action in an obviously not just red but bleeding red community?
This spirit followed me. In a graduate course, during my MA, two literature PhD students were arguing a Stan Fish vs. Harold Bloom view of rap music. I timidly interrupted– Cherokee don’t interrupt– and started my sentence with “He might not be a lit theorist, but Chuck D said..” then offered Chuck D’s position on what had happened to rap. One of them accused me of being “racist” because I put a qualifier on my statement that Chuck D wasn’t a lit theorist. And they plowed on. I learned to stay quiet in that class.
Later in my grad career, I met some other Indigenous scholars. They claimed to have grown up poor, to have struggled and fought to get where they were. But they were familiar– they acted like the people I went to high school with. They drove expensive cars and obsessed over their fashion items. They participated in Slacktivist activities. They let things people said that were racist go. They “played ball.” They believed the only way to succeed was to out-do the white establishment at what it did, seemingly oblivious to the points at which being that person violated the identity we shared.
I guess the money should have changed him? I guess I should have forgot where I came from.
Again… these probably look like judgmental observations. And on some level, I won’t lie, I am judging behavior. Not the people though. Just their actions. Their ill-informed actions.
Which brings me to the revelation I had, the epiphany…
I don’t begrudge my old friends their desire to write me out of their lives. And I don’t begrudge the hipster lit students their moment of arguing over what white guys think of rap. I don’t even begrudge the Indigenous scholars who seem to have lost all sense of what it meant to be indigenous.
They did what they understood. They looked at me in their world and I didn’t make sense, and because of that, they couldn’t deal with me. When I wouldn’t help them work it out, they had to assume there was something wrong with me in order for me to make sense.
I have to respect that and honor it, because I have started numerous misunderstandings through my own desire to understand people and decisions and behaviors.
At 40, I demand the right to my worldview. I outright demand it. I get legitimately pissed off at people who tell me to act white or to let things go that I don’t think should be let go. I had an argument with an editor for a journal because one of the reviewers made a racist comment in response to a piece I think they were going to accept for publication. Because it was the right thing to do. Because that’s who *I* am.
I don’t think the “friends” I had early in my life were actually friends. I think they were acquaintances that existed with me in what James Gee calls “affinity groups.” We were in the same place doing the same thing, so we adhered for a time. But they didn’t know me. And I guess even though I did know them, I didn’t think that could be them, so I tried to find out who they really were. And my need to know them better revealed just how much they didn’t know me.
I see no reason to be angry. I wouldn’t change for them. Why would they have changed for me? I wouldn’t have even ASKED them to.
A similar situation happened to me when I was in my early 20s. I met a girl, and we hit things off really well. I cared so much about her and we got along so well that we’d planned to get a place together and I was going to move to go back to school.
She came to visit me and told me she had some serious news. She’d brought her roommate from college. Cool, I thought. Good to meet her friend. It turned out that she’d realized she was gay and her roommate was also her lover. She thought that weeks before moving she should tell me that. They went on to live together for years (and I would imagine they married). She, like so many others in my world, didn’t keep in touch. She got angry with me when I didn’t move far from home, now alone, to finish school and chose instead to stay where I was to finish my undergrad. She came from money. I didn’t realize that when we first met or I might have realized something would come between us. Of course she wouldn’t have understood that I couldn’t afford to live alone in a strange city.
I was never mad at her. My friends at the time asked why I wasn’t fuming mad. I was sad– really, really sad– but I wasn’t angry. She’d realized who she was. What she needed in life wasn’t someone like me. It’s not like she left me for another guy. I had that happen once, too, and that felt significantly different. Things just weren’t meant to be.
It’s the same with my lost friends. From the gaggle of high school friends that are all just gone to the friends from undergrad who couldn’t understand why I walked away from going to law school. From the early-days-of-the-internet friends who had their own weird axes to grind to the PhD cohorts who embraced a differing philosophy. I don’t begrudge any of them their happinesses. They needed what they needed. I needed something else.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I know reflecting on this has to read as depressing and accusatory, but it’s not at all. I got what I wanted out of life, more or less. I have a job that will support me and my small family. I have a loving wife who is my best friend. I have cool co-workers. I’m still poor and I still want social justice. I teach at a place where a number of the students don’t realize or can’t “get” that. But that’s cool, too. I get to be their moment of realizing that poor people can be smart and can care about things and can work hard. They get to be my constant reminder that not everyone who votes on the other side of issues is evil or cruel or manipulative and that money, by itself, doesn’t make you evil.
What I’m really driving at here is that I think as Americans we all spend too much time trying to be what we think we should be and not being what we are. I was so weird my whole life, so different from everyone else, so frequently insulted or pushed to the edge, that I had no choice but to figure out who I was or give in to all the people asking me to be something else.
I never gave in to that. I never started acting like the thing I wasn’t. And look at me– I still got to a career that shouldn’t have been possible for the son of a father who had to get his GED in his 30s, raised by his single mother living-to-survive. I’m a professor at an extremely well respected college, and I do my job well. I’m good at it.
And I’m unapologetically me. If you like that, stay close to me. I do me type stuff all the time.
If you don’t like that, I understand. I really do. But don’t offer to help me change. That ship sailed the first time I was tossed out of a social group, the first time I was told that people like me (finish the sentence however you’d like).
To quote one of my favorite people, Zack de la Rocha: “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
As long as you’re cool with that being the message in my head should you suggest something that I don’t like, we’re going to get along really, really well.
And if not…Fuck you. I won’t do what you tell me.
And I will accept all the consequences of that.
Because that’s who I am.