Not gonna lie, feeling kinda stabby: Part I

Alrighty, folks, bear with me. Hell, no one reads this, so I'm gonna go ahead.

If there's one thing I've grown to detest, it's smug-ass privilege. Now, I didn't know much about this concept until recent years. I had ignorantly assumed that most everyone grew up like me--working class, ungated communities, family members on the wrong side of the law, and a general sense of just getting by. I'm not complaining, I had a great childhood and had no sense that we were all squished into a tiny house and had never been on a plane-vacation. Our house had a familiar and worn in revolving door, and I actually loved it. My cousin lived with us, my uncle, my grandma for a while, then more cousins came after I moved out, then me again for a while, and so on. The furthest we went on vacation was Santa Cruz, and we stayed at a Motel 6 and ate breakfast cereal in styrofoam bowls in the Safeway parking lot to save money--actual restaurants were for special occasions. Yet there is magic in those memories. And the resilience that I earned from such a life--paying my own way through college, always having to work full time while going to school, having a million roommates just to make rent, etc.--money can't buy those lessons. This I have learned. Money can't buy resilience, or empathy, or compassion. Oftentimes, it even gets in the way.

Fast forward. So I've encountered privilege, which has a rather aggressive, superior, superficial, whiney, smug, judgy quality about it that makes me so glad I didn't taste that bitter fruit until adulthood. But DAMN. I do not like coming up against it, or to be more precise, it coming at me. And this judgmental shit has been coming at me for years. It came at me as I tried to plan my wedding, it came at me mercilessly after my mom died, it came at me in the form of talking shit behind our back about what we named our firstborn (yeah I read that forwarded email, bitch), it came at me in the form of bizarre jealousy over the gender of my babies, it came at me at the worst possible times and circumstances. 

 

Why? I have no clue. I've had to deal with some serious life shit, the fuck you got to complain about?? It's a mystery to me why this hostility has been ever-present, and even more of a mystery that it's all done without eye contact, without direct dialogue, in the guise of derisive humor, without owning it. Lot of talk, but too damn scared to have a sit down. Uh huh.

It's already been a hard four months of Covid quarantine, and hell if I'm gonna have one more situation on my hands with this someone comin at me sideways with their bullshit yet again when they've had fuckall happen to them in their life. If quarantine is the worst thing to ever happen to you, gratitude should be your attitude--but you don't get to bring your own choice to have a shitty attitude to my literal doorstep. Not after what I've been through in my life, of which you know hardly anything because of your inability to hold up your end of an actual in-depth conversation. Hell to the naw, pal. If you show up just to bitch and complain and tell me all kinds of non-substantiated shit that you think you know about me, it's time for you to step the fuck back up.

Now, I do have some amount of patience for weak ass folks, in that I have created a capacity over the years for diplomacy and polite non-entanglement. However. At this point, in this particular situation, with this particular years-long toxicity, the gig is up. I'm done with the one-way verbal stream of nonsense and passive aggressive insults. Especially not from folks who have never had to deal with any kind of hardship or have had to do anything on their own without mommy and daddy's help. In other words, before you start pointing fingers at me, you better make sure you're on my level.

Very few times in my life have I felt that rage come on up out of me, and it was close, my friends. I'll put it like this--if you ever hear me start a sentence with "Check it out..." shits about to get real. And someone's been pushing those buttons with impunity lately--once in front of me and a whole lot behind my back, and time's about up. 👌 I'm out of survival mode and ready to play.