I recently realized I’ve been trying to make myself smaller for many years, I’ve been struggling hard to take up more space in my own life. Being an activist gave me work to hide behind - I could be a public speaker but only for a cause I believed in. I’ve written a bit about even struggling to start my newsletter and blog. What I haven’t shared much writing about are the messier things, the things that I feel ashamed of, the things I should stay quiet about, the things that implicate others, the things that make me feel more vulnerable.
This won’t be all of that, but here’s a vulnerable thing - making myself small is a childhood survival tool that still feels real/reinforced for me today. After having a fairly public career in advocacy, I’ve tried to stay out of the public eye for a few reasons, including preserving my soul as an openly trans person and many years of cyberstalking by my estranged father. In addition, I’ve also tried to step into fewer and fewer public roles because I was convinced that someone else should be in the spotlight instead. Over the last handful of years, I’ve withdrawn from most social media in part because it deeply affects my mental health and perception of the world.
An example I still feel shame around: Years ago, I was a vocal trans advocate and usually volunteered with various trans-related Pride events. After I perceived one of events becoming a trendy stop for cis folks on the Pride-month social tour, I had a conversation with an organizer and wrote a post on the event page asking cis people to consider not attending if they weren't actually joining a trans friend/family/lover there. This ignited what felt like a firestorm of debate where a few angry trans people came for me as if I was bullying cis people and excluding their cis partners. It felt like my years of trans advocacy were erased by my words being misunderstood. In retrospect, it wasn’t all that dramatic or all that many people, but I experienced it as such and fell into a deep mental health spiral. Eight years later, I feel mostly better about it all, but I don’t think I’ve attended the event since.
Lately I’m trying (very hard and mostly failing) to channel my self-reflection and let it make me more compassionate towards myself and others. Why was deep trauma activated for me with that event? Why did my fellow trans folks defend so voraciously the right of cis people to be in a trans-centered space? Why do white people sometimes react to the descriptor “white” like it’s an accusation? Why are cis men telling me they feel canceled even when they’ve lost nothing materially? I hope that maybe finding more of a compassion/accountability balance for myself may help me show up better for others as well.
The NW Network’s incredible Healthy Relationships curriculum introduced me to an activity I still love. It’s called “find your 6.” The idea is that we can place ourselves on an accountability spectrum, say from 1 being the lowest to 10 being the highest. This means that we’re implicitly asked to identify whether we lean toward under-accountability or over-accountability. Finding our own 6 is being a bit more accountable than the median. Not so unaccountable that we blame others and deflect any responsibility, but also not so over-accountable that through magical thinking we make everything solely our fault and stretch the scale from 10 to 1000. (I’m excellent at the latter, though I’m sure I do both.)
In being sometimes over-accountable as a white person perceived as male and non-disabled, I’ve become quieter with a fear of dominating spaces. But to be too quiet is to be complicit, and in overcorrecting, my silence creates distance. Like finding my 6, I’m aiming for a little more space than I’m currently comfortable with.
Perhaps I can begin to believe that most of us are simply doing our best, even if it looks like shit in any given moment. Perhaps this all adds up to something and generations to come live better than we do now.