New Year, Same (Unacceptable) Me
On Embracing the Margins with Gusto
Maybe you’re like me: you’ll never be deeply accepted. Maybe the factual and political identities you claim for yourself (in my case, fat, Black, female), will always lodge you a bit outside the warm, non-threatening norm. The norm that refuses to budge, or admit newcomers, or examine its insistence on exclusion. Maybe you’ll always be a little bit strange, distanced from the high pile of goodies reserved for (you know who I’m about to mention) the thin, the white, the mostly-male folks, bonus if they’re able-bodied and cis and neurotypical and have a little money in their pockets. Maybe, to borrow from the late bell hooks, you’re attached to the body politic/the social body but you don’t live at its center, in the hearty heartwood, in the belly. You’re more…tangential, estranged, ancillary. You are at the margins.
Maybe you’ve spent most of your life bothered by that marginality, and questing relentlessly for the middle. Maybe you’ve spent most of your life hanging on by your fingernails to whatever normative treasure you found. (How much life is that? Ten years? Thirty years? Forty? Seventy?)
Here’s what my quest has looked like: I’ve used the machete of my intellect, and the sweet caramel of my charm, and the steely, stubborn force of my will to carve myself into acceptable shapes and to carve a…
