I was raised to be a good white woman in New England.

There is a lot to unpack there.  However, I didn’t fully understand that until several years ago.

Let’s go backward.  

New England is still fairly uptight and puritanical compared to much of the rest of the US.  It’s also fairly liberal, so I thought I was open, accepting, and understanding.  And I was, to the degree that someone with very little exposure to humans of other racial identities, ethnicities, and cultures can be!

The socialization of the “woman” is also a thing, which you may know intimately.  Certainly implicitly lesser than the white man.  In ways that are so ingrained and covert that I was unaware.  The # MeToo movement hit me pretty hard, opening my eyes in uncomfortable ways.

I have come to understand a little more about what my whiteness means.  Unconscious privilege, opening doors that I assumed were open to everyone.  A sense of security that I hadn’t realized wasn’t universal.

And the assumption of gender identity and sexuality.  When I grew up, this was an “absolutely of course”.  I knew I liked queer folks, but it was kind of never a question that I was cishet. 

Of course, ableism is in there pretty hard, too.  But I have a more universal feeling.

One of the things that training in Somatic Experiencing did for me, before anything else, was to open my eyes to more.  I still trained in New England, in an overwhelmingly white cohort.  But there was still more diversity of experience than I had known.

Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the disparities around COVID galvanized me. 

And in this new way of thinking, which is all about curiosity, non-judgment, and never assuming you understand someone’s experience, I chose to open myself to more.

First, I got myself a tutor. 

I traded SE sessions for social justice lessons/discussions.  The human I worked with holds an intersectional identity, which made them helpful to me in myriad ways.  I attempted to absorb information and the diversity of experiences surrounding race, LGBTQIA+, feminism, and ableism.  Of course, lastly, I have battled myself for years, but it was helpful to fold that into the concept of marginalization.

I have also spent some time reading about colonial/colonizer themes, as well as indigenous perspectives.

I won’t pretend that I know my shit, now!

Instead, I will suggest that my eyes are open to what I didn’t see, and I am more ready and able to work and interact with the humans around me.

I have also found a root that runs all the way back and can be carefully dug up.

As Westernized/Industrialized humans (truthfully, I’m not sure where to place the threshold), we perhaps began by viewing this planet as “ours”.  The ownership of land and resources placed us above.  This is a theme that is near and dear to me, hence my climate change/collapse groups and work.  But I will save teasing out that thread for another day… it becomes quite an emotionally activating rant (on my end).