family

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for her

6 months ago we started dating. my second ever queer relationship and i knew it would have to be my last. somewhere along those 6 months i fell hard for you. you took my fragile heart gently and cupped it in your hands tightly.

last night you told me that your dad found out that you were dating a girl, and had given you an ultimatum. you have two years to decide- live the way you are living and move out of my house or start living righteously. (who told him? who saw us together? were we just holding hands?) i didn’t think that we would be found out so soon. it had only been 6 months.

when i held hands with you, when i reached out to hold your hand, and you held it, we put our bodies under the knife edge of power. you put yourself under the knife edge when you said yes to me asking you to be my girlfriend in may.

i guess im trying to be grateful for the time we had but the truth is im scared and guilty and angry. (fuck! fuck the church and fuck your dad and fuck it all oh my god!!!) i feel a future me looking back at my young twenties and seeing myself living a vibrant queer life in baltimore. i know there’s an alternative universe me where that is my reality.

We should go out and dance like we used to dance
We should go out and hold hands like lovers hold hands
And I can’t tell you who’s gonna last
Well, maybe that’s a question and answer I don’t have

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Stigma on Mental Illness

In my freshman year of high school when I was either 14 or 15 years old, my mom found out I had depression. Long story short it was through a situation that happened at school and they had to inform my mom about it. Let’s just say that things didn’t go the best. But for a backstory, I grew up in an Ethiopian household which included my mom, sister, and aunt. It is pretty common for most Ethiopian households to be religious, as religion is deeply rooted in the Ethiopian culture. Although my mom and family have always included me in our religious practices and have taken me to church since I was a kid. I have always felt conflicted when it came to our religion (but that’s a whole other story). But going back to high school, when my mom found out I had depression the school had recommended I get a therapist, which I did. The only thing is that since the second I had gotten the therapist, my mom was against the idea. She kept on telling me that therapy would not help me and would say something along the lines of “Just pray and you will feel better” or “Jesus will help you”. This honestly made me feel more of a burden and I felt that something was wrong with me and that I was causing my mom stress and suffering. So after a while of doing therapy and my mom’s persistence, I finally gave up on therapy.

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Twintuition

Growing up with a twin brother taught me more than I would like to know about emotional labor. From my first memories of us growing up together, I knew that the expectations I was held to were quite different from those that my brother was held to. I was expected to be the picture of emotional maturity. Conflict resolution, good communication, and empathy was something that was supposed to be built in. My brother was merely expected to be a boy. The worst part about the expectation of performing emotional labor is that it goes largely unnoticed and unvalued.

When I was a child, maybe 7 or 8, my twin brother and I would fight relentlessly. I would come to hang out with him and his friends, and the argument would usually start of by him declaring that he did not want me there because I was a girl. I would defend myself and my ability to hang with the boys, and eventually he would give in. This was not the end of the emotional torment. Once it was decided that I was allowed to stay, my brother would do anything he could to belittle me, whether that was emotionally or physically, many times both. Sometimes I would ignore and play nice, and sometimes I would snap back. Snapping back never worked. The fight would escalate with my attempts to defend myself. It always came down to the fact that he was bigger than me or meaner than me.

When I had finally had enough and went to my parents for help, I got the same answer most of the time: “Don’t take it personally, boys will be boys. Either don’t hang out with them or suck it up and go back in.” Here is where the imbalance lied. I was always expected to do one of two things. My first option was to go back into the room and diffuse the situation, either by apologizing or by pretending like nothing happened. My second option was to stop hanging out with my brother and spend the rest of the day alone, thinking about what had just occurred. Either way, I was expected to perform emotional labor while no emotional labor was ever expected of my brother.

You would think that being expected to perform emotional labor since childhood would make one better at communicating in emotionally charged situations. For me at least, it did the opposite. I have spent so long prioritizing the diffusion of social situations that I seem to have forgotten how to advocate for myself. Instead of assertively communicating when someone has hurt me or I want something different than someone else, I freeze or avoid, which ultimately makes the situation worlds worse than if I just stood up for myself. Emotional labor is something that should be taught with equity and highly valued, not something that is expected of someone because of who they are. When emotional labor is expected rather than taught and respected, it can quickly become a source of massive trauma.

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(in)visible labor

Okay, so, no judging, but my suite hasn’t been properly cleaned in weeks. My roommates and I have a schedule that we usually stick to, but this semester has been rough (and that’s an understatement), so things just haven’t been cleaned up as well as they could be.

To give you one idea: our trashcan has been full for a good while. To give you more ideas in way more detail than you’re probably okay with: the couch cover is all scrunched up, stray hair everywhere, there’s leaves and mud that have been tracked in from the outside on our floor, our poor little coffee table has crumbs and juice and tea stains on it- please don’t even get me started on our fridge. Half the time we even forget to turn off the living room lamp at night because we’re so tired… hey! I said no judging.

Today, I got up at 12:30pm and had a good, hard look at our suite and couldn’t stand it anymore. So for two hours I wiped down all the surfaces, took out the trash, cleaned our bathroom, cleaned the microwave, cleaned the sink, vacuumed, watered my roommates’ plants, and all in all just made our living space look more neat. So. Freaking. Tiring. By the end I was ready for a nap, but I knew I couldn’t because I had assignments due at midnight. I kept thinking, no wonder we share the chores; one person doing this all is too much, especially on top of all the homework and projects and midterms we all need to study for.

It reminded me of my mom. My mother juggles so many things at home: doing the laundry, wondering what to cook for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, sweeping the floor, cleaning three bathrooms, the list goes on and on- all while also having a full-time job at work and a full-time job as a mother. So in the end, she has three full-time jobs, one being invisible or reproductive labor around the household. Invisible labor is I think the worst labor someone could be tasked with, because usually we aren’t even tasked with it directly; it’s simply expected of us. And because of that, no one really talks about how taxing this is on our bodies, or how we should be able to take breaks because of this work.

It’s sad and frustrating. I would argue that yes, knowing how to do basic tasks like washing the dishes and doing your laundry is necessary to living, but its such a different story when you’re doing it for more people than yourself. You take on the labor of other people, and it absolutely sucks when those people don’t even acknowledge it. My father is one of them. He expects my mother and I to do things for him, because that’s our “job” in the family hierarchy- and therefore never says please or thank you. I feel like whenever I do the dishes for him, or fold his laundry, he just sees right through me. Pretty annoying, if you ask me.

I’m lucky to live with people who are appreciative of each other’s contributions to our little makeshift household for the year. My roommates thanked me profusely and it felt good to be validated in that sense. I’m also lucky to be able to have a mother so great as my mom, who does so many things all at once. I express my gratitude via words, gifts, and physical affection, and when I’m home (which is rare nowadays, unfortunately), I do my best to help her in whatever way possible to alleviate her stress. Most importantly, I let her know that her labor is visible to me. Visibility is all some people are asking for, after all.

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Feisty Little Bitch: an inside look at embodiment and anger management

[tw: description of tense family relationship, intense anger, and family fights]

If I had to pick one thing to resent my parents for, it would be the inherited anger issues. Well, that and leaving me the responsibility of being the only member of the family to actually work on those issues. 

For those who didn’t know me before college, I’d been known to have a short fuse, one hell of a temper, a mean streak, and a distinct lack of filter once I got going. In short, I had a reputation as a feisty little bitch. (And worse behind my back, I’m sure– this one is tame, almost fun.) At college, I’m a lot calmer. It’s an environment removed from my parents and brother where I can actually practice anger management techniques without someone doing their damnedest to escalate anyway, away from the three people on Earth who know how to get under my skin better than anything else. 

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The World Around Your Body May Not Be Made For Your Body

img_0849  Growing up within a world that was constructed through the naturalized standards of body movements, I noticed my brother’s body stood out. As he stayed wheelchair bound and I walked beside him as my mother lifted him upstairs I felt this desire to want the world to be more accessible to my brother. With small inconveniences becoming the reason my brother’s nurses refuse to take him out his room, I saw that my brother’s impairment in which he did not cause nor create was what caused the world to seem unfair to him.  Being diagnosed with something as debilitating as cerebral palsy and having infrastructure built off the assumption that you are an able bodied person creates   disability.  Tom Shakesphere, an English sociologist sees disability to be “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a social organization which takes little to no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.” This depiction of disability seems to be fairly accurate as places such as college campuses do the bare minimum to ensure that people’s impairments don’t stop from being productivity. For example, on my college campus they provide ramps on extremely steep hills reflecting a lack of thought of those who have to wheel themselves up and down these structures. With non-disabled people creating the structures and tools for those who are disabled it continues the cycle of ignorance. It is easy to understand why disabled people have created Continue reading →

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Why this Election Matters to Me?

Like many others, I am writing about the United States 2016 President Elect and how this event has impacted me and those around me.

On Tuesday morning, November 8th, 2016, I woke up for my 10:00am class feeling confident and proud that that day would be the day that the United States of America would have their first woman President.

I had no doubt in my mind that my country would vote for the candidate that is not a racist, sexist, misogynistic, and perverted asshole. Excuse my language, but to be very honest, I can not think of any other “appropriate” word to describe the man who is now our President Elect. Continue reading →

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Diff’rent Smokes

I remember it was a cold, dark night. I was back at my house in Columbia, and I believe I was in elementary school at the time. Back then, my dad was barely ever home, and this particular night happened to be one of those rare occasions where my mom was not home either. Fortunately, my sister was home to babysit me (sidenote: she is 12 years older than me), but at the time, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her around the house for a good 30 minutes (sidenote: I was kind of needy). So I searched around the house, and finally I thought to look out the little windows to the side of the front door. I could just barely make out a dark figure at the door, with puffs of smoke slowly seeping out the figure’s mouth. The glow of a lit cigarette was also evident. A couple minutes later, after I ran far away from the front door, my sister came back inside. I told her I saw someone (“or something“) smoking right outside our front door. She seemed kind of panicky at this point, but then she replied, “Oh, it was just our neighbors, the Silvermans!”

Nice try, but why blame our nice Jewish neighbors?

Fast forward to the present, and my sister is still smoking. Note that she was just a small girl at a pretty shitty high school at the time of the incident described above; now, she’s a high-powered account executive in her early 30s. She has tried quitting on several different occasions, and just recently, she went about a month without lighting up. But she succumbed to the temptation this past week, blaming it on work stress, and that I could “never understand” how hard it is to really kick the habit. And honestly, I probably never will. From what I can tell, based on her addiction, as well as that of my father and my significant other, the lure of nicotine is terribly strong. It does not matter that the scent of tobacco stains everything she wears. It does not matter how many times my mom has tried to scare my sister with all the ailments and potential disabilities she could develop from a smoking habit. It does not matter that she knows all of this, because that is how true addiction works I guess.

I want to be as supportive as I can, but it’s admittedly becoming tougher by the day. She herself talks about how life was really hard for her, and that our mom was barely ever around when she was growing up. She sometimes gets annoyed with me, saying that she could have been working towards a medical degree too if only my mom was around to encourage her academic growth (she’s doing just fine work-wise though…I mean she’s making more money than most doctors ever will).

She mentioned that she started smoking due to peer pressure (which is weird to me, because I’ve always seen her as such a tough, intimidating person…), and she figured no one around the house would try to stop her. I was fortunate enough, in hindsight, to constantly have my mom there to supervise me and my development into the (arguably) healthy, neurotic asshole that I am today. I was lucky that our family’s financial situation was a million times better, just as I popped out into the world. I did not have to go to the high school my sister graduated from – instead, I ended up attending a much more competitive, high-ranking school (not to mention, most of the students I knew there were more interested in sabotaging my class rank than trying to get me to smoke). But it makes me wonder how much more susceptible I could have been to peer pressure and the lure of cigarettes, alcohol, or other types of drugs if my privileges were not available to me.