Drag Yo' Cross

Darin asked me to say something about the Christian metaphor, and then I didn’t do it and now Darin has a sinus headache. Will teach me to quit being lazy? Maybe.

Just kidding. Our actions cannot cause the sinus headaches of others.

But before I really get into how my Jesus is different from Darin’s Jesus, I want to say I just realized how much god and Jesus is on this blog and it disturbs me greatly. I want you to know that I am not unaware. Probably actual Christians don’t even go on about god and Jesus this much, for chrissake.

OK.

So Darin said that his gospel told HIM that “by constant christlike love and sacrifice, one may have some small impact on individual lives.”

Whoo. That stresses me out just to read it. It also sounds like  a good way to avoid one’s calling. One of Jesus’ central qualities is his willingness. He knows his job, and he does it. And his job isn’t to act like god. It is human-ness. From his first act of bloody humble human birth to his mob death his job is to be a person.

That is your job, too.

The truly christlike sacrifice is to sacrifice the safe position of being god, and be a person.

The Christian story is about a god who lives as a human, dies and yet still lives. So if this your model or your metaphor, step one is living as a person. The hardest, the ickiest, the most embarassing, the boringest and most trite the most frustrating and humiliating work; the only work that is actually worth doing, the work that all other work depends on.

Oh but we don’t want to do that. Like a student in the beginner class who says he ‘knows this already’ and wants to be moved to advanced, we want to skip this boring ass person stuff and be a god. A savior. A martyr. To be good. Jesus never tried to be good. He kept at just being him. Sometimes that was transcendent (sermon on the mount) and sometimes it was shitty (Caananite woman.) Christlike means human.

And because we don’t want to do it, life just keeps trying to murder us. With illness and pain and emptiness. With nastiness that seems somehow especially designed just to be what we can not handle. With depression, and divorce and addiction and helplessness. Life will keep banging our fucking heads against the wall until we are so broke down that we start being christlike.

Jesus’ story is this story. God’s head made corporeal so that life could bang it against the fucking wall.

Jesus suffers. He suffers on the cross, sure,  but more importantly he suffers all the indignities of being a person. He loses his temper. People don’t get him. The people he loves turn on him. He disobeys his parents. He’s never sure he’s doing his job totally right. He has an imposter complex. He’s lonely. He has anger problems. He gets itchy. His feet hurt. This is what we call christlike suffering.

The call is to feel it. Not to escape into some kind of godliness and ignore all that angry itchy humanness. To be present, as he was.

Jesus dies. The ultimate surrender. Jesus gives up control. He carries his cross to the place of his torture. Jesus hits rock fucking bottom.

And then he rises again. Because when you are human, that is what you do. Life finally hits you so hard that you surrender, and then you rise again. And you can not believe you got through that. And it is not over, because you will die again. But you’re going to die better next time because you’re going to live better-- live more human-- in the meantime.

The more christlike, that is, the more really uncomfortably human you allow yourself to be as you drag your cross towards some new death, the more often and readily you rise.

It’s a good story. 

And that is how the impact on lives and the world happens. You do your job, and god can do gods. If you get christlike and live your portion of life down in the dirt where people belong and get out of god's business in the heavens, god can set you about the work of helping others and making things better. 

Jesus could not have done his work without being human, without itching. Neither can you.

Someday I'll Find My Audience

Chris’ chat window stays open on my desk pretty much all day at work, and we type back and forth throughout the day. I like having his window there because I like him, and even as a little white square, he’s good company. That isn't really because of the conversation, but because I know from knowing him that he’s hilarious and goodhearted and seeking in a precise and inimitable way. Now that I think about it, I like being friends with Chris the same way that I like his chat window’s being open on my screen. I like that he exists.

Chris’ brain goes too fast for the speed of life, which is really bad luck because the speed of his life  where he works is punishingly slow. Sometimes it feels like he has to reach to the far ends of all human knowing just to keep himself from...I don’t know what. I’m not sure what knowing keeps him from. Sometimes I feel a desperation as he pushes at the capacity of ideas like a claustrophobic gnat in a big balloon. Sometimes his chat window is many many many lines of some theory he's poking at. 

Often, I will come back to my computer, and it will say something like: “Cara, I am trying to develop a theory of languages that presupposes the inevitable influence of hierarchy.” or “Cara, I think the way that we think of zombies as a symbol for bodily alienation is played out.”

My favorite part of these sentences is “Cara,” I'm not very fussed about what comes after it, some of which is interesting and some of which is not, because I like that the person it comes from is looking to engage me.

I quit speaking with another friend last week and it is pretty crappy. If you think that you graduate middle school and girlfriend breakups are over, you are wrong, assumed female reader. Of course, it’s a little easier when one person is clearly right, and in this breakup, she was. I just overall didn’t do this friendship very well. In fact, when she called me out, I didn’t apologize and try to fix it because I didn’t want to not do the friendship anymore.

I want to say that most of my part the friendship was listening, except I wasn’t listening, a lot of the time. I was stewing while she talked.

At my job, I listen a lot to people who are struggling to express themselves. I understand that this is not a conversation, that my listening serves a very distinct purpose. They need their English to be heard by a native speaker to see if it’s working. Their part is to try to get the meaning out, and my part is to gauge how successfully they’re communicating. I almost never speak, but I’m also never bored. I understand my role in this exchange, and it’s value. They are trying to form the word “marco!” When they get it right I call “polo!” And we both know where we are.

And then in other conversations, like the ones that were most common in this late friendship, I feel that I am serving a very different purpose. Like my animated human presence is a necessary prop in the ritual of talking. In some ways, I’m doing something that only a person can do, but in other ways, a basket of laundry would suffice. Lonely and bored, at first I would hear potential “marco!”s and start to “po-” only to be run over by the bullet train of my friend’s prepared remarks. After a time, I just limited the time we’d be together- the time of my inert audienceship.

Look, I know how friendship works. If that is the situation, I have to tell her. But I pussed out and now we’re not friends. I have not a few relationships where I behave this way, and not a few friends who “jukebox” rather than converse, pulling record after record from their vast collection of prepared statements and dropping them down into the shared space. And I understand that this is their marco, because it used to be mine. My cowardly presence is a kind of bereft recognition.

But I don’t want to polo that shit.

Because I see you, and I see that authentic real-time connection is scary and I empathize with that and I know that this is your tactic for avoiding that scariness but I can’t really orient myself by it. And if I don’t know where I am, I can’t truly tell you where you are. And we’re both just kind of lost.

Chris’ window had like 60 lines worth of ideas about something that I honestly don’t remember what it was and I was not really responding- it wasn’t really required. With no engagement, he was getting frustrated.

Chris: Ugh.

Chris: Someday I’ll find my audience.

me: yeah. me, too.

Class Time

Right now I am trying to codify everything that I have to say about teaching English in one big document for work, that is kind of like a self-help book and kind of like an instruction manual. 

Probably home team will figure out what I’m doing and claim that it is their intellectual property and then all will be for naught, but for now, I’m just getting it out. Half to help the new teachers, and half to get it all out. My wisdom about teaching might not be classy, but it is hard earned, and if I get hit by a big black sedan tomorrow, I’d hate to see it lost.

What’s been great about the way I’ve learned to teach, is that it’s fully intuitive. Having never been trained, I’ve been forced to follow the path that experience supports, and let experience teach me when I’ve gone astray.

And what fascinates me about it is that the way I’ve learned to teach is the way that life teaches me.

When I started teaching English, I already knew English. By the time I was old enough to realize I was alive and a person, I already had the language. So when I had to teach it to people, I hadn’t even had the experience of learning it, so all I really knew how to do was tell students when they were making mistakes.

Student: I very like dance.

Me: You should say “I like to dance very much.”

Student: OK. “I like to dance very much.”

Me: Do you like to sing?

Student: I very like sing.

Me: You should say “I like to sing very much.”

Student: OK

This was not very productive, but it was pretty frustrating.

This is also how life felt until about my early thirties.

Me: (Dates a mean boy.)

Life: You shouldn’t do that.

Me: OK. (Dates a different mean boy.)

Life: You shouldn’t do that, either.

Me: OK

As I became more frustrated with the ineffectiveness of my teaching, I began to really crave a structure that introduced English from the beginning to the end- a straight line starting with nothing and ending with perfect fluency. I started to really study the language, it’s structures and patterns. 

This helped a little, but it remained pretty frustrating, because ultimately there is no first step and no last step to mastering a language. Instead, you go in a spiral, the first few times around you’re going “I very like sing” and if someone points out to you that “very” belongs before an adverb like much and not after the subject, and if you practice a bunch your fifth or fiftieth time around you’ll say “I like sing very much” At this point you are many spirals away from “I like to sing very much,” let alone “I totally love singing.” And on each spiral, you’re picking up all kinds of junk, new vocabulary and better pronunciation and all that. You’re just wandering around and around, coming closer and closer to what people will hear as fluent English.

My attempts to improve myself in a straight and cumulative line are similarly useless. Instead, I get a little better at some things about the thousandth time I do them wrong, and pick up new things to be bad at along the circle path. Next time around I skip the mean boy but pick a really nice addict.

The structure I teach teachers to teach with (I see when I step back) is the one I’ve learned to learn from. So if you would like to teach things the way life teaches them, here is the deal.

Step One: Introduce

Expose the students to the thing that you want them to learn. Just let them experience it. Don’t correct mistakes, don’t answer questions. Just let them sit with it. Try to get them to focus on the thing you’re trying to teach, and not all the other distractions in the activity.

Step Two: Instruct

Explicitly teach the lesson. Give new information that the student didn’t have before. Make sure you start by explaining the structure behind what they’re learning, then explain what it means, and finally show them how to use it. Expect resistance. Expect confusion. Try to get them to write it down.

Step Three: Targeted Practice

Let the student practice with the new information. Do not expect success. Expect disaster. This is the practice activity that helps you know how well you did at teaching, and lets you know what your student missed. This is stuff you will have to re-instruct. But you don’t re-instruct now. They’ll have to catch it next semester when it comes up again.

Step Four: Open Ended Practice

This is where the student has to use what they learned on their own. This isn’t a fill in the blank-- they have to produce something using what they learned. Do not expect success. Expect disaster. This is much harder than anything they’ve had to do before. They might not really get it this time around.

Step Five: Application

This is when the student has to use what they’ve learned in the real world. It’s time for a field trip. They have to go out and do what they’ve learned to do. You should still expect disaster, but this is a higher stakes disaster. This will be witnessed. This has emotional consequences. Prepare yourself and your students for emotional consequences. Do not attempt to shield your student from emotional consequences, even though you really, really really want to. Even though you feel like their parent and their bodyguard and an unwilling conscripted torturer all at once. Don’t do it.

The thing about the way we teach lessons at my school is, when this process ends, it begins again. Our students enter the school, and they go through each lesson as many times as they have to before they can level up. And so do you.

As teachers, we have to learn to accept the many steps that have disaster in them, with the knowledge that the whole lesson will be back again in a number of weeks. This is how God, in his wisdom, constructed our universe as well. It’s got rolling admissions. You drop in, and you go around and around until you graduate at as high a level as you can achieve. And I’ve led enough Application activities to know that God does not enjoy your suffering. I love my students even more fiercely when I lead them out to humiliate themselves in the early circles of learning than I do when they finally nail it in the late ones. I’m a brutal kind of teacher, and so, I think is God.

And I’m not a brutal teacher because I learned that this is right or think it is. I am because I know it is they way they learn. Because I know it from experience, I am also a really compassionate teacher. And for the same reason, I’m a really faithful learner, stumbling around my dumb circles, trusting I'm getting better. 

Baby, New Year.

OK, everyone, it’s the Western New Year, time to sweep out the temple! But how shall we sweep it? With a handmade stick broom which is romantic, but does not actually make the temple floor less dirty?

Probably.

It’s Western New Year, but it is actually impossible to sweep the temple in an all-American mop-n-glo way. The temple is not such. You can’t swiffer the temple.  All you can do here is the best you can.

On this, the cusp of 2015, I am feeling pretty good about last year’s sweep. Last year’s theme was “Breathe, next stair.” Over time, I have learned to set the bar a little lower on January first, and mop-n-glo themes like “Achieve saintlike discipline and benevolent dispassion” have kind of given way to the stick broom. And that is a tool that you have to use to get better at.

But I did OK in 2014. I built my church, in a way, and I wrestled Satan and her armies too. The devil won some and I won a few, too. I’m overall less sick. I’m overall more peaceful. These lovely new fences mostly keep joy in.

Looking forward it’s hard to say other than “keep sweeping.”

What do you want me to do?

The shittiest thing you can say to me, about, is “what do you want me to do?”

Not the one that really wants to know, like “teacher I’m pathologically incapable of reading the directions so please tell me what they are” or “I’m not sure what you’re trying to do in this scene,” or “I’m sorry how can I let you know I love you right now?”

You know the one. The one that actually means “you are burdening me with criticism and I want you to know just how irritating and unfounded it is.”

Sometimes it’s got a “well” on it. “Well, what do you want me to do?”

Yesterday at church the minister preached a well intentioned sermon on the body, on how culture makes us feel alienated from our bodies. You know all of us. This silly culture of our sure does objectify all our human bodies. He even gave some examples. The NFL. Medications that make it seem that our bodies shouldn’t age. Yup. That about sums up that universal human experience of being objectified.

Is it just me? Is that incredibly tone deaf? Like, sorry you feel tangentially moved by the fact that the NFL objectifies players. That must be an interesting intellectual track for you to meditate on. Excuse me while I don’t fall down in spasms of empathy before I walk back out into a world of invisible systematic dehumanization. Please don’t feel compelled to mention it. After all. Objectification is something we can all relate to.

Listen, folks, you do not have to tell me that I might be having too sensitive a reaction to a good and in many ways empowering sermon. I come pre-equipped with ladysystems, so I am programmed to doubt my feelings EVEN AS I AM HAVING THEM. I am that good.

So it wasn’t as the bitchy feminist caricature that I am known to be that I went to talk to the minister after church. I told him that I was upset, and that I wanted him to know that I felt alienated by his implication that the experience of objectification of the body is the same for all of us. That his failure to mention the difference was an omission that really hurt.

“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry that you feel that way. But it didn’t bother any of the other women.”

Woo! Patriarchy Supermove #1. ‘You are the only one.’ I countered deftly with Start Crying.

I hit him with my awesome catalogue of lady moves. I said something empathetic. I said something flattering. 'Oh, it must be hard for you having to talk to such a varied audience.' 'You can’t please everyone all the time.' Doing a great, sniffling job of undermining my own complaint.

“Let’s just say, he said, "that my sermon wasn’t hurtful in general, but that it hurt you.”

Something in the way those words made me feel small when I had gotten the courage to go over and say I felt small made me break protocol.

“Actually,” I said, inarticulately through my snot, playing with the ripped velour cover on the lectern, “that’s not good enough. Please acknowledge that this is a thing. That thinking about objectification is a luxury for you and an everyday reality for women.”

He said that I was making him feel terrible. BOOM Supermove # 2 Reversal!

He said that most people found his sermons to be liberating. Supermove # 3 Crazify!

I countered with some hard core sniveling and backpedaling. I am the Clarence Darrow of self doubt. At one point I said that it was my fault for not realizing that he isn’t immune to criticism, and that I should learn to consider that.

The video game voiceover in Patriarchy Smackdown came over the PA and was like FINISH HER!

So he said “What do you want me to do?”

I stood there for a while, and I said “I’m so embarrassed now. And I don’t know what to do. And he said, with real compassion in his voice “I’m going to give you an out. Let’s say this conversation is over.” And it was.

And it’s not. Now my safe space is all fucked up. Now I’m embarrassed to see this guy.

I’m ashamed of what HE thinks of ME. I’m thinking about my commitment to dance and sing at church unselfconsciously and how much harder it is going to be to carry that out. My body feels gross. I feel gross.

And here’s the shitty part. It’s on me. I get to do the work. I get to try to find a way to get myself to keep dancing and praying with abandon, I get to push myself through it. I get to hold two realities in my head, like women do. The one that feels true and the one that is constantly reinforced as true. I get to try to not feel stupid. I get to wonder if I should ever have said something in the first place. If I was acting out of line. If I should be embarrassed of myself.

I get to be horrified that this person who I really admire and whose work and advocacy are vital can speak with voice that knocks me down every day. I get to hold my admiration against my feeling and wonder if my feeling is wrong.

I get to fold myself like a taco and protect my vital organs. Smaller and smaller.

What do you want me to do?

I want you to know.

I want you to think of it, even though you don’t have to because your job is to minister.

A minister takes on care and knowledge that it is his privilege not to have. He knows about the hungry, the poor, the abused and the dead. And you have to know about me.

And if you don’t, when I say that I’m here, you have to accept it.

That’s the life you chose.

I never even have to ask ‘what do you want me to do.’ People tell me all day. WEAR that dress, honey. Smile. Shut up. Bolster my ego. Sit down. Make me a sandwich. Suck my cock. Lighten up. Calm down. Make me feel better. Don’t make me angry. Don’t embarrass me. Shave your armpits. Take a joke. Get out of my way. Stop talking. Get over it.

There are people who don’t do “what do you want me to do?” There are people who know. I want you to affirm my experience. And when they don’t know, they can sit with you in your reality and just be sad that you’re sad, which gets the job done. They aren’t threatened by what they don’t know. They aren't more defensive than they are kind. There are people for whom the fact that you are hurt is enough. I want my spiritual leaders to belong to this group.

That’s what I want you to do.

My Name is Everybody

We were learning about Mickey Mantle last week, and I don’t know why, but that course of study always makes me really emotional. I don’t know why the story of people in recovery is so close to my heart, but it just is.

Mickey Mantle said "I put everything into my
swing, even my teeth."

Part of it is that the recovery story is a story about transformation as it really is. It’s not some luck and pluck and spunk and whatAlger BS. It’s the story about how the real things are real work, and what the real rewards are.

Part of it is that he truth of the 12 steps and the wisdom of the Serenity Prayer represent this kind of home-grown, nicotine fingers buddhism that is the most vital spirituality I know.

The very first step is to see things as they really are. To tell the truth. All faiths ask us to do that, to bear witness, not to bear false witness. Integrity is the I in the Quaker spice. Buddhism and Daoism, at their core are a minute by minute attempt not to cloud what is. And it is to accept that as things really are, you are not the most powerful thing in the universe. 

‘We accepted that we were powerless over our addiction.”

Submission is at the core of my faith. I love the poses in yoga that are about putting your head on the floor, just as Muslims pray. I learned to do this in China, where I would ke tou (literally knock my head on the floor) in front of giant statues of Guan Yin. Although I was raised Catholic, this posture of submission feels so right, and so much like coming home. I love the feeling of releasing all my weight into the floor. One time when we visited a Chinese temple a secular Jewish friend that I was traveling said ‘I could never do that- my people don’t submit like that.”

I think this is a common American response to postures of submission. We are so obsessively mindful about not submitting to the wrong thing, which is a wonderful part of our character, in ideal if not always in execution.

And of course, it’s easy for people who act like middle managers in corporation god to take advantage of this idea.

You probably shouldn’t ever submit to people.

But as buddha and Bill Wilson well knew, some things are not in your control. To believe anything else is not just a delusion, but a destructive one.

If you believe that, our theologies are pretty much in line. I am really not fussed about what does control those things that you do not control. A sentient creator? I doubt it, but maybe. A mechanical universe? That’s a good partial answer. I don’t know. And I don’t care. X is the variable force, but you don’t need to solve for X to respond to it appropriately.

Knowing this truth is the point. And know it you can respond in two ways- you can reject it, you can work to wrest control from X, or you can accept it. To accept it is to submit. That sounds easy, but it is not. Wrestling with the illusion of control occupies a good part of my day, and it has occupied a good part of my life. The only relief from that struggle is in submission, and when I can achieve true willful submission what I feel is peace. Peace knowing that I’m responding to the truth regardless of how much I like it.

What a perfect, visible allegory for the struggle of being alive recovery is. Addicts, predisposed from their family lines, shoved by trauma or shame or anxious depression enshrine another reality. Not out of weakness and not out of the true pleasure of being high, but because the truth of what is is unbearable.

For most of human history there was no help for addicts. Just, as Jossy from Philly Fight says “prison, institutions or death.”

And Bill Wilson was just a drunk. Only a drunk could have come up with the realizations that he did.

Bill Wilson

That alcoholics would never be ‘cured.’ No American Makeover Miracles here. Alcoholism never goes away, it can only be managed. Those with 30 years of sobriety still say “I’m Bill and I’m an alcoholic.”  That submission, that humility, is key to keeping them real.

That only a drunk can talk to another drunk about drinking. AA has no outsiders, no professionals. People who get it talk about it, and people who get it listen. A network. A listening community that doesn’t prescribe advice.

These ideas are a counter cultural American spirituality. And although they reject our rags to riches and altar call ideas of transformation, they really are American. Because they’re practical. Because they’re suspicious of human power.  Because they’re conscious of human limitation. Because it’s a user-made innovation rooted in experience.  

I really hate it when I hear people piss on AA because it requires a relinquishment of one’s struggle to a ‘higher power’ or to ‘god as we understand god.’

Bill Wilson was right. There’s no peace without submission. As long as we believe that we are responsible for what we actually do not control, the only result is that patented American anxiety that comes with that false belief. The anxiety of rape victims who are told they could have made choices to avoid their rape, of people with mental illness who are supposed to grab their bootstraps and heal, of cancer patients who are told that they can save themselves with ‘positivity,’

‘Higher Power’ isn’t some metaphysical tyranny. It’s straight up common sense reality. Something is more powerful than you. It just is.

Watching the way that every little boy and grown up man in America, starting with his own father put the burden of perfection on Mickey Mantle, how he played through crippling injury and drank through the pain of carrying around everyone’s dreams on his little boy shoulders, and then watching how he came out of Betty Ford a breathing human- finally at peace even though he was sick and dying-- that’s the story I want America to love. It would do us good. All his talent and fame were ornament the true treasure of the person. And we’re all people.

Hoes in the Pews

I’m not right these days. Living your life with depression, like I did for most of mine, is like living on the perimeter of a big fucking hole. Getting better, therapy, taking your medication is learning to stop hanging around on the hole’s edge, and to stop every once and a while being like “I’m gonna jump in there.” But you are never not living near a big hole.

As I try to figure out what the F, I have signed up for a course in Pastoral Care and Recovery at the Community College of Philadelphia. The class, as an academic experience, is pretty crappy. No structure, no lesson plan, a lot of the teacher, who is also a minister, holding forth on a random trail of subjects. The textbook, which reads like an essay from a student (half nonsense half plagiarism) is totally useless. But I decided that I would take it for the experience it was, and not the one I had hoped it would be.

And that was good in ways. There were lots of new experiences to be had. Being in a majority Christian environment. Being in a majority black environment. Sitting in a class without taking observation notes on the teacher.

And then there was last week. Last week, I don’t know how it started, but the teacher was talking about a book called “Pimps in the Pulpit.” It was about ministers who take advantage of women in their congregations who come to them for counseling. And my teacher, in the middle of her lengthy description of the book and it’s contents, said that we need to understand that “if there’s pimps in the pulpit, then there’s hos in the pews.”

And everyone laughed. Not like ‘clever turn of phrase’ laughed, like knowingly.

“That’s a fucked up statement,” I said loudly, which was out of character for the quiet, wide-eyed white girl persona I’d been working on.

“What you’ve got to understand,” my teacher who, in addition to being a minister is also a psychologist, said “is that if you’re going to be in that role you need to protect yourself from women who want to take advantage.”

“Some women,” she further illuminated “need to understand that they’re hoes. That’s what they are.”

Look, gentle reader, I’m not gonna spend a  lot of typing on your knowing that that is fucked up.

I had some back and forth with my teacher about how I didn’t want to hear women referred to as hoes, and the other white girl in the class also objected, but the teacher stuck to her  “hoes got to face that they are hoes” guns so I just shut up.

That is a cool strategy I have developed for when I feel small.

After class, I pulled my homework out of the pile on her desk. I didn’t feel like handing in my homework. And then I bolted. Then I stood outside of CCP crying. My female classmates were talking to me, trying to console me by explaining that I didn’t understand the word. It has a cultural use, they said. Like you would call a man a dog, they said.

So yeah, I don’t understand the word, no lie. I only know it as an alien. Like sometimes I have to explain “faggot,” to my students and they get the idea but they don’t.

So I don’t fucking know. Maybe it is not my word to hate.

But that doesn’t really feel right.

Is it patronizing that I don’t want anyone calling black women hoes, either?

Am I a crybaby because I don’t want to go back to class ever?

I’m pretty depressed that at some point, some broken woman might go to this professional and to this religious leader and say “I went to Pastor John for help, and he invited me back to my place and got me drunk and…” and that my teacher will gently let her know that she is a ho.

We are so fragile. We’re so fragile.

It’s so hard to ask for help.

It’s such a hard fight even in the hands of generous spiritual leaders and mental health professionals.

It’s so hard when you have the privilege of whiteness and safety and money.

It’s fucking hard enough.

This whole idea has sent me curling my toes over the edge of that deep-assed hole that I haven’t seen in quite some time.

She’s the TEACHER.

What’s the point in even trying?

I wrote my teacher an email that said this:

Dear Professor,

I wanted to write to you because I am still feeling upset from our discussion in class last night.

I feel very embarrassed because I made myself vulnerable in previous classes and was feeling like it was a safe space.

But it don't feel safe in a place where the word 'ho' is used.

You've been talking to us these last three weeks about how we should never call someone anything other than what they want to be called. If Karen wants to be called Karima, we call her that. If a transgender person wants to be called "her," we call her that.

I don't think anyone wants to be called a ho.

I am particularly scared by the idea that a woman might be called a ho because she is in a relationship with a man who has power, like a pastor.

I understand that 'ho' is a cultural word, and maybe it's not a word I can totally understand. I promise to spend this week reading abut the history of that word and what it means to black people.

I hope you can understand how that word makes me feel, when it is said about any woman.

Respectfully,

C

My teacher responded thusly:

Good Afternoon Cara:

First let me begin by saying how much I admire you and know that you are in the right place every time I see you on Tuesday.

As you recall, I was repeating a comment that was made by another individual who attended the workshop with  Ms. Shannon Bellamy. You may want to look up her book  "Pimps in the Pulpit."  I truly understand how certain words can affect others.  I certainly want you to understand that it was not meant to be offensive.  I was just sharing information.  Just allow me to shed some light when you responded by saying,  "That's Fucked Up" as a minister, how do you think that made me feel?  However, I did not take it personal nor was I offended.  We must allow ourselves to be open in this field.  I hear that word everyday at the college by students.  It is not as uncommon as you may believe.  I agree, however, that it is not pretty either.

I want you to know that you are definitely in a safe space, and I do believe that when you are in the room with us you are definitely SAFE.  

So. Yeah.

I don’t feel better.

I feel shitty.

I feel really shitty.