I think this year of being inside snapped my connection between the pixels on the screen and physical reality. The news no longer feels like the world I am a part of. It's hard to physically feel the fear when the violence happens on the outside, while I sit inside, typing into my stupid little computer, sending my stupid little emails, pushing the stupid little JIRA tickets back and forth. Violence is real - my life is merely pixels. How do I know that Anti-Asian violence affects me, that anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh and anti-brown violence affects me, how it could happen to me, yet it's hard to conjure the fear? The cocoon of privilege is best summarized as a sense of security, however false.
But I am also plugging in - the anger, the trauma, it's like an IV drip. These two dimensional pixels do not capture the prism of pain I am inheriting just by getting older, the falsehoods I am unlearning, the history I recognize I take forward. My history did not start in 1998 - my history as a person of color, especially a privileged person of color, is intimately connected with those who weren't fortunate, who continue to be murdered today, the people of color whose oppression I've benefitted from, for centuries before my parents came to this country. This entanglement, these nuances, this discomfort, they should be discussed.
The existential fear I needed no history lesson on is sexual violence. The fear of men who are obsessed, who blame their failures on women instead of their own actions. Who maul and murder and throw acid and attack massage parlors and rape women when they walk home from a friend's place. Worse than that possibility of it happening to me, it's to have it happen to a friend, to lose someone I love, to have them forever lose their sense of an inviolable self, to hold them in my arms and know there is nothing I could do to bring it back.
It's not a matter of if - it's a matter of when. Every woman knows this. We wait in fear for the day we'll get that call. That is a panic-inducing inability to protect those we love. That is why we ask you to text us when you get home.
As I further understand my identity as a woman, a person of color, a person of class privilege, and the intersection of these, my emotional world and physical world seem to have no connection - my innocence, my security, my sense of control, to simply walk outside in the dark or go to get my nails done without flashes of visions of what if i get unlucky today - these are free falling below my emotional feet. Physically, I have two locks on my door, and I stand on solid ground, at this stupid little standing desk, sending this stupid little email.
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