as small as a world and as large as alone, fierceawakening: The other thing about that...

9:53pm July 28, 2014

The other thing about that whole “Say you’re a feminist or I will cuss at you” phenomenon is that… most of Tumblr seems to skew young.

And not to dis young people at all — many people find their passions very early in adolescence, and they shape the person for the rest of their life. My own impassioned involvement in disability rights happened that way. I couldn’t run from the things that happened to me when I was young, and I wanted very much to fight.

But at the same time… for a lot of people, older adolescence is a time when you really, really get invested in something. You jump in with both feet. It becomes the most important thing to you, and you’ve discovered something that matters so much, and you don’t understand why everyone else around you isn’t as on fire for it.

You’ve woken up. Why haven’t they?

But having lived for thirty-five years and not eighteen, the thing is… sometimes you get too big for those communities.

Sometimes you start to see around the edges. Sometimes people hurt other people in the name of being more devoted to the cause.

Sometimes people get excluded. Sometimes people feel excluded, even though you know you’ve bent over backwards to include them, and you just don’t understand, you make sure to mention them once every couple of lectures, how could…?

Sometimes people see all this and get energized to fix it. Maybe you are SuperAlly, running around carefully listening to women of color, to trans women, to women with disabilities. Maybe you understand why some women find solidarity with marginalized men really important, even though you went to a women’s college and wish you could be more separatist more of the time.

But sometimes people don’t. Sometimes “fix it from the inside” seems less like a solution and more like that “master’s tools” thing a lot of people say, and misuse, and forget where it comes from.

And sometimes the older you get, the more cracks you see.

I don’t have time to go find them now, but I promise you I have seen posts that say “If you left social justice movements and feel like you’re ‘out of that phase’ now, you haven’t grown up, you’ve gone backwards.”

Think about that. Think of how being young means being invested.

Think of what you might be saying to people who’ve had another decade to think about these things and come to a different conclusion.

Don’t assume we’re lazy. Don’t assume we started off as freedom fighters and somewhere along the way we put on suits and now we make the world you hate, with glazed and glassy eyes.

Don’t call us names. Don’t curse and mock.

Just ask us why we left.

Thank you so much for this. I’ve noticed age differences sometimes in terms of movements I’ve been in, and been unaware of how to bring them up or describe them, or the way they play out, without sounding condescending or something. But I do feel like having had more time to look at and think about these things changes a lot of how I think about them, and that it would be huge mistake to force myself to stay stagnantly in the same mode I was in at age 21, just because that mode is far more popular hereabouts. And while there are people who stay in that mode their whole lives, and while that’s not always a bad thing, for a lot of people to stay the same would be to stagnate and avoid growth, and sometimes growth means growing away from the most popular sentiments within the most vocal segments of your marginalized community. It means seeing what goes wrong. It means having thoughts that you couldn’t have without a decade or more of experience under your belt. And that’s completely legitimate and I wish more people listened when older activists (by which I mean people out of their teens and twenties, maybe starting late twenties, depending) gave our views that sometimes clash with younger activists. Because sometimes experience means we’ve seen something over and over again and had a chance to see exactly how it doesn’t work.