Eggshells

I have been drawing every day this year.  I am not good at it (yet) and I know it.  Most of the time, that is all right, but sometimes I have to talk myself down.  I am intimidated by my tools—what if I wreck the paper?  What if the pencils report me to the Art Police for excessive violation of all rules of taste and style or even for general incompetence?  I also know that I am learning in my own weird way.  I’m sure I would get better faster if I took a class, or read more, or even practiced with a sharper focus on improvement.  In a lot of ways, getting better at drawing is not the point.  It is learning to adopt a growth mindset and to increase my mindfulness around how I learn and grow.

 

Against that background, I have been seeing various threads on social media and I’ve been having conversations with people about how our cultural backgrounds influence our communication styles and how those backgrounds and styles interact with power structures.  People of color get called out as “aggressive” when they want to get down to the real issues that white people want papered over.  White women get tasked with smoothing things over at all costs.  People without tools don’t know what to do.  And, disturbingly, what I am seeing, from here, from this place in my development, is a refusal to adopt a growth mindset from the people in power.

 

It’s disturbing, but not surprising.  I mean, one of the privileges embedded in the whole idea of privileged people is the privilege of not worrying about some things.  Some of those things are practical:  where the next meal is coming from, how to pay the bills.  Some of it is more abstract—the privilege of not having to pay attention to other people’s needs.

 

I am a person of privilege.  And yet, for most of my life, I have been called “too sensitive.”  I personally hate the phrase “walking on eggshells.”  What I hear when I hear I am too sensitive, that someone has to walk on eggshells around me, is that they don’t want to learn how to avoid hurting me.  They are not willing to explore how I like to be treated.  They don’t want to undergo the sometimes painful process of trying things and screwing up and learning better.  I can only imagine the crushing disrespect involved for people who do not have the kind of privilege I do.

 

So I am starting with me, because really, I am the only one I can change.  I am going to focus a lot less on what I meant and a lot more on what someone understood me to say.  And I am going to practice and apologize and practice some more until I get better.