The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  Sometimes weirdos on the Internet say they want to rap you and it takes a second to realize they forgot the e.

  Sometimes weirdos on the Internet write very long letters that they send to the e-mail addresses on your personal website and the college where you teach and the college where you used to teach and the theater company where you work and your various social media accounts including Google+, which you hadn’t checked in years and you’re like: Holy shit, dude, how do you have time to go through all of those directories? I didn’t have five minutes this morning to finish a bagel.

  Sometimes weirdos on the Internet show up at the UPS store around the corner that your husband listed as the mailing address for his art blog back when he ran it out of your apartment. They sit there, on the curb, waiting. They want to show him their work. They want him to write about their work. They want him to sell their work, and you wonder, what if they knew where you lived?

  What if is a dangerous game.

  To be clear: the vitriol I receive is minor compared to that of other women writers, mostly women of color and queer and trans women whose work challenges me and moves me.

  Still: bullshit is bullshit.

  Here’s a story:

  A few years ago, my building caught on fire, those precious few moments in the chaos to get your family out alive.

  I wrote about it for the New York Times, my first publication on so wide a platform.

  After I filed the rewrite, my editor asked if I had any thoughts about Chicago’s upcoming mayoral election.

  My first reaction?

  Fear.

  Not excitement that he wanted my work.

  Not gratitude for the opportunity to serve my city.

  Not relief at the paycheck because hi, we needed it.

  Fear.

  I tried to talk myself out of it.

  I write stories, not essays.

  I write personal essays, not political commentary.

  I write political commentary to perform, not publish.

  While I engaged in this self-sabotage, my fire essay went live, both print and online. Within hours, there were hundreds of comments and messages and e-mails.

  How I was stupid.

  How I was fat.

  How I’d put my child in danger.

  My favorite: that’s the wrong way to save your life!!!

  Three exclamation points.

  There were supportive responses, too.

  Thank you for those.

  Note to self: lift up the good stuff.

  I called my mother and made her promise not to read the comments.

  (Idea: “The Blogger’s Mother-in-Law.” It’s about the mother of a woman who’s married to a blogger and if someone leaves a shitty comment on one of his posts she somehow finds their mother and sets up a parent-teacher conference and the three of them talk about how to say and do kind things.)

  There is a liquor store across the street from my apartment. I bought a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I bought fancy bitters and sugar cubes and an orange. I called my friend Amanda and she talked me through making old-fashioneds the way that she makes old-fashioneds.

  She makes the best old-fashioneds.

  I drank one very fast and a second one very slow.

  Then I had—

  Let’s call it an epiphany.

  It doesn’t matter if the work is personal or political.

  It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or an essay.

  Some people will come after us no matter what we say.

  We might as well say things that matter.

  Audre Lorde: “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid.”

  I wrote my editor at the Times and said, Yes, I do have thoughts about my city’s mayoral election. The next day I chose a thousand careful words to say that Rahm Emanuel is dangerous and why are we voting for him, Chicago?

  We still voted for him, Chicago.

  We can do better, Chicago.

  We can imagine the city we want to live in.

  We can imagine this whole goddamn world.

  Recently I was on a panel at a writing conference about the essay in the age of the Internet. In the Q&A that followed, a woman asked me and the other two female-identified panelists if we feared for our lives. She mentioned a local public radio host, also female, who took a leave of absence because of ongoing threats of violence.

  Another conference, another panel, this time about writing essays in the hopes of changing the world. A woman from the audience came up to me afterward and asked how I protect my child. She has children, too, she told me. She was afraid that publishing her work would put them at risk.

  I am asked these questions all of the time.

  Like it’s normal.

  How do you take your coffee?

  White wine or red?

  Do you fear for your life?

  If you find that surprising, I invite you to sit very quiet and still and ask yourself why that is.

  Every day I see women pushing back, in stories and movies and real life, online and off, on the news, in the streets, boardrooms, and pages against words, fists and Photoshop, in public and private forums from schoolgirls to legislators to performers. I’m not talking about criticism or disagreement or intellectual debate, all of which I think is good. I’m talking harassment: bitch and cunt and threats of violence, threats against our children, our bodies, our livelihoods.

  Yes, I am afraid.

  The truth of that makes me want to set the walls on fire.

  Let’s set the walls on fire.

  In 2015, the music critic Jessica Hopper asked women and people from other marginalized communities to share their “first brush with the idea that they didn’t count.” There were thousands of replies, throwing a bright light on sexism in music including people who’d left the industry altogether for their own physical or emotional safety. “What songs or albums could we hear if people weren’t being told they aren’t supposed to be here?” Hopper told the Guardian.

  What songs or albums—

  What technological innovations or scientific discoveries—

  What policy advancements or philanthropic endeavors—

  What artistic or athletic achievements—

  What stories or essays—

  Is this a story or an essay?

  It doesn’t matter. Here’s what I want it to say:

  You are supposed to be here.

  You are needed.

  We need you.

  We’re imagining the world.

  What if you’re the one who saves us? The one who finds the cure? Deactivates the bomb or gets us to Mars or unites us as one? You’re an Ultimate Fighter. You’re Ronda Rousey and Judit Polgár and your genius is off the charts. You design the tech to protect us from bullshit and the drugs for pediatric cancer and a moon-size magnet that sucks metal into space. You play Symphony no. 9 in D Minor and we remember the beauty in the world. You read aloud from “The Girl in the Cabinet” by Melissa Chadburn: “There is a child somewhere — a girl — and maybe she will pick up a book or peruse the internet and she will find your words. And in your words she will discover a world of the possible and she will climb out of the cabinet and she will put down the razor.” You read us poetry, like this from Joy Harjo: “But come here, fear/ I am alive and you are so afraid/ of dying.”

  What Belongs to Us

  “When do you think about your own privilege?” Dia asks over the phone.

  I wish we could have this conversation sitting across from each other. I wish we could have every conversation sitting across from each other, but she lives in Oakland and I’m in Chicago. Your best friend on the other side of the country is your body without any breath.

  We talk every week, usually stuck in traffic; me headed south on Lake Shore Drive, her headed east on the Bay Bridge. We talk about our sons, our partners, our mothers. Should I get bangs—yes. Buy those shoes—yes. Stay in higher ed—hmm. We talk about Chance the Rapper and Broad City. We talk about th
at dumb thing on Facebook and that awesome thing on Pinterest. We talk about restorative justice and radical pedagogy and our kids’ elementary schools and the respective cysts on our respective ovaries. She is the person I cry with; sometimes, when I hear her voice, I start sobbing, which is both inexplicable and exactly right. When we lived together in our twenties, she made me do yoga every morning. She got me out of the house, away from the computer. She taught me the word intersectional and gave me books on feminism and racial justice.

  This is not a one-time conversation.

  We’ve been having it for years.

  * * *

  I tell her I’m writing an essay for white people about privilege and responsibility. “Can I invite black readers to sit this one out?” I ask. “Like, put their feet up? Relax?”

  “Oh my god, please,” she says. “Make sure you tell us to pour ourselves some wine.”

  * * *

  “When do you think about your own privilege?” she asks. Granted, the question can run in many directions—my privilege in being cisgender, heterosexual, middle class, American, able-bodied (“temporarily abled,” says my friend Maria), with access to education, housing, and job opportunities and the multiple intersections therein—but I don’t need her to specify. I know what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whiteness.

  Dia is the education director at a nonprofit that helps people learn about unconscious bias and racial inequity. She facilitates workshops around the country, mostly for white audiences, teaching the history many of us never learned in school and, for the most part, haven’t tried to seek out on our own. I’ve sat in her classrooms, fifty, a hundred, five hundred people, listening as she outlines the accumulated advantages and disadvantages that contribute to systemic racism in the United States. Some examples: The 1830 Indian Removal Act. The Naturalization Act of 1790. The Social Security Act of 1935. The National Labor Relations Act. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act. Jim Crow. She connects the dots between past and present—the current systems of white supremacy that many of us, like me, benefit from every day. The courtroom. The classroom. The boardroom. In the media. Housing. Health care. Transportation. Criminal justice.

  It’s a lot of information. It gets uncomfortable: blame, shame, fear.

  Dia is also a yoga teacher; she shows people how to breathe.

  * * *

  If this information is new to you, don’t worry. It was to me, too.

  This is why Jesus gave us Google.

  * * *

  “When do you think about your own privilege?” she asks, and I tell her about a class I took in college with the storyteller Emily Hooper Lansana. She took us century by century through the history of the oral tradition: video, audio, and live performance. She got us out of the classroom and into the city. She made us stand up and try, and she built a space where we felt safe to crash-land. She was so smart. She was so cool. At first, I wanted to impress her; but soon I forgot about that and tried to make good work. I loved telling stories. I loved listening to stories. I saw how they could change the world. That’s part of being a good teacher, I think: inspiring people to work their asses off not for you or the class or the grade, but to be better.

  Near the end of the semester, Emily showed us a video of Anna Deavere Smith performing Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, embodying different people involved in the Los Angeles riots in monologues based on oral interviews. I remembered reading about Rodney King in the news in high school, but this was different. This wasn’t statistics or politics or op eds. This was real people, real stories, a world I’d never seen. “Why didn’t I know about this?” I said, incredulous, not yet understanding that it was my responsibility to look.

  “Come with me,” Emily said. We walked from our building on Wabash, around the corner, a block down Balbo, around another corner to Michigan Avenue, and into the school library. I’d been there a hundred times—assignments from teachers and research for advisers and books for class—but this felt different. It felt like when I was a kid: the library as a place of discovery, to follow my own curiosity, to crack open the world.

  Emily gave me back the library.

  The student work aide that day was taking a class on critical race theory. When I asked her for help, she literally rolled up her sleeves and said, “Let’s do this.”

  W. E. B. Du Bois. Assata: An Autobiography. Angela Davis. bell hooks. Octavia Butler. Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. Sister Outsider. This Bridge Called My Back. Black Boy.

  I took the books home, sat on the couch, and did what Emily taught me.

  I listened.

  * * *

  At some point, our education no longer belongs to our teachers.

  It belongs to us.

  * * *

  “When do you think about your privilege?” she asks, and I tell her about sitting in the audience at a literary conference, watching yet another panel discussion with all male participants and feeling that frustrating tangle of fury and boredom. Then, the very next day, I sat on a panel with all white participants.

  My hypocrisy was a lightning bolt.

  I interrogated my memory: readings I’d been a part of with all-white lineups; panels, anthologies, commissions; theater companies I’d supported, publishers I’d supported, magazines I subscribed to. I looked at my bookshelf. I looked at the lists of assigned readings on my syllabi. I looked at who I follow on social media, where I get my news, where I give my money.

  It’s easy to see the truth when we do the work of looking.

  A friend gave me a template, which I now cut and paste from a file on my desktop:

  “Hey, thanks for thinking of me! I’m committed to events that prioritize diversity as an active practice as opposed to a talking point and would love to ask about the other collaborators insofar as race, gender, sexual orientation, background, etc.”

  I wonder how things would be different if everyone who’s part of a privileged identity group asked that same question when they’re invited to perform or publish or present, to join a company or faculty or board.

  I wonder how things would be different if we paid attention to what was truly in our power. Example: A white man is convicted of rape and the media shares his senior photo and college swimming scores, as opposed to his mug shot and prior substance abuse. A thirty-two-year-old white Olympian pisses on walls and lies to international authorities and people say “boys will be boys,” while a black child gunned down by the police is “menacing . . . a 12-year-old in an adult body.”

  I teach writers. It’s on me to show them the weight of words, how they can perpetuate or elevate.

  Privilege isn’t blame or shame or fear.

  It’s responsibility.

  * * *

  Let’s try an experiment: jump on the computer, log into Google and type in racism in _________________, and then include your job or aspects of your life. For example, I’d write racism in literature or racism in higher education. For my husband: racism in visual art or racism in technology. Our son: racism in karate or racism in Pokémon or how to talk to your seven-year-old about racism.

  What about your city?

  Racism in Chicago.

  What about the systems you use every day?

  Racism in housing, transportation, education, food.

  What about the art and media you consume?

  Racism in Hollywood, in reporting the news, in the music industry.

  What do you notice?

  And now—what can you do?

  * * *

  “When do you think about your privilege?” she asks.

  We were at your house for Thanksgiving. The boys wanted to play in the front yard with plastic swords and squirt guns. My son didn’t understand why your son wasn’t allowed to be outside with a toy gun. They looked at you. You looked at me. You and I had a conversation that didn’t involve speaking, and my son and I went for a walk. I told him about Tamir Rice. About Tyre King. I grabbed the air for words to explain, knowing that my heartbreak is
a puddle compared to the ocean you swim every day.

  * * *

  I’m not saying anything new. Black women have been asking this of us for generations.

  * * *

  “When do you think about your privilege?” Dia asks. Traffic is still crawling, south on Lake Shore, east on the Bay Bridge. We talk about our sons. Our partners. Our mothers. Should I go to Jamaica—yes. Write that essay—yes. Cover the gray—who cares. We talk about 13th and Eula Biss. We talk about the awesome thing on Rent the Runway and whether or not to engage on Twitter. We talk about segregation and decolonizing yoga and our kids’ elementary schools and the new curriculum she’s writing for parents and caregivers of white children interested in age-appropriate discussions of racial inequity. She wants to know how I feel as a mother, as an academic. She searches my stories for questions, ones to bring back to her white audiences. She’s making our country better for her kid and my kid and everybody’s kids, and she wants us to join her in that work.

  It’s not a one-time conversation.

  I’ll be having it for the rest of my life.

  forty, or Optimist

  31

  I told the Realtor that I was scared of Realtors—of buying property, owning property, credit checks, debt of any kind, furnaces that explode a week after the warranty expires, buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets and markets in general and niche vocabulary like equity and escrow and signing lots of documents that I don’t understand but am bound to, like cell phone contracts or gym contracts, and if I’m nervous about contracts that involve, like, a hundred bucks, then why would I dick around with not only my entire life savings but also tons of money that I don’t even have? “It’s like when my Isuzu died,” I told him. “I went to the dealership and I was like, look: I only have X amount of money so don’t tell me later that I have to pay a zillion dollars in state tax and warranty and what all, just give me a car that has decent mileage and won’t fall apart when all these crazy Chicago drivers bang into it parallel parking, you know what I mean?”

  He did.