Hey everyone,
It happened when my son was five years old, on holiday with friends. Their little girl, four at the time, was playing with her dolls and he was joining in. The girl doll was having a wedding apparently, and my son volunteered another girl doll for the ceremony. His friend looked up at him and pushed aside his doll. She said, “No, we need a boy. She can’t marry a girl!”
My son didn’t even blink before saying, “She can in this country!”
My son is baffled when people automatically assume he’s going to marry a girl (or marry at all). In India, where we lived last year, middle-aged aunties he’d never met before liked nothing more than to talk about marriage, even with a seven-year-old kid who had no interest in discussing his future with them. They’d say something like, “Oh, you’re such a handsome boy, the girls will just fall all over you.”
“Or boys,” he would respond.
They’d say, “When you grow up and have a wife—”
And he’d cut them off with, “Or husband. Or maybe I won’t get married at all. I haven’t decided yet.”
They were so shocked, they usually had no response.
What I found interesting was that my son is never offended by what people say to him (he barely knows the meaning of the word), but he is baffled and amused by it. He is so clear about expressing his beliefs and options around his own life that he doesn’t even notice that people are surprised by them. (Also: He’s 8.) Still, he’s very forthright when it comes to holding his point of view and comfortable with letting people hold theirs.
I didn’t grow up in the open, expressive environment my son has both at home and in the schools he’s attended and so this ability to hold my truth whilst not being triggered and defensive about someone else’s has been, for a while, somewhat of a challenge for me, especially with these daily emails and on social media. I’m very solid in what I believe and what I stand for, but when I get hate mail or am challenged with bigoted comments, my immediate response is not amusement or bafflement but red hot anger.
Given the state of how we talk to each other, especially on social media, I suspect it’s the same for most of you. And it’s especially essential for us to notice, as writers, because we’ll often write and share the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, only to get racist, sexist or homophobic comments that often only just prove the point. Anger seems like a just and reasonable response.
But let’s talk about when that anger festers for a period of time, when the comments you get are non-stop and incessant, and how the arguments continue, never end, no one’s mind is ever changed, and what all of that, cumulatively over a number of years does to your mental health, your family, and your quality of life.
It is important to engage, and sometimes even to argue.
But I have realized that as writers, our anger is best directed, not at the racists, misogynists, and nationalists we encounter on Facebook, but through our novels, our essays, our work. When I channel my anger through social media, I feel small, depleted, and powerless. But when I do it through my writing, I feel expansive and empowered.
Or as the late author, our beloved Toni Morrison, put it, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the thing that weighs you down.”
It is advice that I have taken to heart.
Lately, I’ve been learning to deal with internalized anger that has come as a result of a lifetime of abuse and misogyny and that was reignited when I returned to India last year. I have a lot to say about my country of birth and the way it treats its vulnerable.
So I stopped arguing on social media.
And got to work on my third novel.
Cheers,
Natasha