So, in 2018 I went on this Launching Young Leaders course at the Tavistock Institute. I hadn’t looked up reviews on the organisation beforehand, so I had no idea about its nefarious history. Although, for the purposes of this blog it is besides the point.
What I distinctly remember though is that there was an exercise where people had to decide to follow somebody else in the room, without the person you were following realising you were. We did this for 15 minutes or so, could have even been shorter, but it felt that long.
After the exercise, we had to point out who we were following and who we thought was following us.
And the strangest set of events happened after.
Most people had picked me to follow, which made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Also, I didn’t think anybody had picked me to follow!
Then one of the managers at the institute chaired an eod discussion and they, a Black cis appearing guy, pointed me out and asked me why I attended the programme. I said it was because I wanted to learn how to be a better leader and because I found leadership positions uncomfortable, but always seemed to find myself being called to take on these positions.
They looked me dead in the eye, in front of the whole room and told me that it’s because I take up a lot of space. They said my presence was overwhelming and that I needed to be more aware of it. They said it wasn’t anything I said. It’s just how I said things. When I say that my life force drained from the top of my head right through to the base of my feet, it can not possibly capture how physically visceral that felt. One lady, bless her, erupted in defence of me and said that she’s noticed how they bullied me and how dare they single me out in that way. I’m realising now, in hindsight, that that was another time where I went mute. I couldn’t find anything to say. I completely disassociated. Plus, an older Black appearing cisman essentially telling me to shrink was traumatising and reminiscent of my own dad.
While this lady was defending me and complaining to another member of staff – this person came up to me after and said that they have trained management at some of the biggest banks in the world and that I won’t understand now, but what they told me will help me.
I remembered this last night and searched my inbox, and found an email they sent a few weeks later after that. I never responded to it.
“I hope this email finds you well and that work and life are stimulating and enjoyable.
I have been thinking about you and am still open to having a follow up conversation whenever you are ready.
Hope the. sun is shining where you are!”
You might find this strange and let me tell you something lol – this is NOT strange to me at all. Not because the event in itself isn’t objectively weird, but because people react in this intense way towards me all the time. They were just the first stranger to frame it as a warning and in such a direct way.
The reason why I found this so upsetting, is because throughout my life I’ve come into contact with people who find my mere presence extremely overwhelming. Yet, they also actively ignore me.
When all those people pointed at me, that I was the one they chose to follow, it was deeply unsettling to me. It was unsettling, because none of them spoke to me during breaks. Aside from one lady, the one who defended me and walked to the station with me after to make sure I was okay. Every single one of those people ignored me, so i didn’t expect any of them to be so aware of my presence.
It’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life though. And it’s a danger sign for me now.
People who I sense are paying attention to me, yet masking it, have always made me uncomfortable.
I hate attention for this reason. I don’t enjoy the eerie focus or intensity. It’s almost like they see me as some interesting object they can possess and for somebody who doesn’t find themselves particularly striking at all – it just makes me feel like a weirdo. It’s not as if the focus / attention translates into enjoyable popularity and it’s not something I care for at all. If anything, it just means MORE shit comes your way, because it’s impossible for me not to be noticed.
Now that was in 2018.
It’s now 2022 and I’m older and a few more violent traumas wise lol. Not wisdom I wish on anybody though. That’s a practical learning experience I do NOT believe should be a rite of passage.
When I speak, and I don’t do so often, but when I do. I come across very very sure. And this is what people have told me, it’s not even what I necessarily feel all the time nor what I say! Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a chronic sorrier lol. But also, I caveat everything I say, unless I KNOW definitively and it’s something particularly binary, where there is a clear right / wrong answer. Otherwise, almost everything I say is prefaced with “in my opinion” or “from my perspective” or “in my experience”. It’s not even something I’ve consciously trained myself to do, it’s just the truth. I can’t speak for everybody but myself. For me, this is a clear acknowledgment that what I think isn’t what everybody else does / should / could think. However, I’m realising now, that having a clear view that’s my own and sharing it, fundamentally projects a sense of security in myself that can intimidate people.
I’m not smart enough to understand why it intimidates people to be honest.
I’ve just been told directly so many times by people that they find my clarity of mind intimidating.
“You’re so sure”
“You have so much confidence!”
“You speak so well”
Some people may find this complimentary, but I sincerely don’t. For me, these comments on me always strike me as backhanded.
For me, there’s something missing from each of them.
“You’re so sure…Why?”
“You have so much confidence…Considering..”
“You speak so well…For somebody like you”
Sometimes people just straight up say this, but other times it shows through their comments on my background.
I have no idea why people feel it’s appropriate to do this, maybe it’s because I write / blog openly, but people seem to revel in commenting on how surprising they find me.
As if anything I do isn’t natural to come from somebody like me.
I used to put it down to racism / sexism, it may even be transphobic too, now that I am understanding my identity more.
The common theme is though, people just don’t expect somebody like me to achieve things.
It reminded me of how somebody I went to school with said they don’t understand why *I* got an internship at a particular bulge bracket and they didn’t. They were genuinely confused. You could see their disdain at the idea. Like how could this bank possibly think I was worth it? I’m sure they’ve gone on to feel better about themselves, you know the type to always compare themselves in relation to others, but it always stayed with me.
They are no longer my friend, of course, because when I fell on hard times they revelled in it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? Of course, things were never bound to work out for me, being so strange. Great things happen to normal people like them! After all, they do everything right and I do everything wrong. And this is not projecting a dialogue on them, this is the kindest way to frame what they thought was okay to tell me to my face lol.
I’ve had a lifetime of people underestimating me. Sometimes I even play into it, I mean, it gets tiring dealing with that mental warfare. You expect me to not speak well, well okay fine, I’m not going to play your respectability game. If I’m not in the mood for some Received Pronunciation, then I’m simply not going to engage in it. If I’m not in the mood to dress up, then I’m simply not going to. I also don’t need to continually talk about what I’m doing / not or where I’ve worked / not, because it actually does NOT matter. It’s just not what defines me.
It only becomes something to note, if it’s relevant. Otherwise, feel very free socially devaluing me, I just don’t have the energy to constantly prove my worth to people.
Even at school teachers would visibly be shocked at my grades. They would hand me my work almost with disgust.
“You’re smart, but you need to tuck your shirt in, and if I see your shirt out again you’re getting a detention”
“You’re smart, but you’re unbecoming of a lady” – this was actually in my school report lol.
There was one time that another student set off the alarm and every teacher assumed it was me, even to the point I got interviewed by the headteacher. In assembly, in front of the entire school, I turned round to try and see where my friend was and my form tutor shouted at me that I should take it seriously and that I was hardly in a position to treat it like a joke. Implicating me and I genuinely had no idea why – I wasn’t even talking! Mind you, NOBODY apologised to me when it turned out to be somebody else. They even checked CCTV footage to see where *I* was at that time, assuming that it could have been me. Until today, I can’t believe how many adults thought it was okay to openly mock how I spoke and where I came from, shame me and my low-income background in front of other students and flagrantly ignore me when I had my hand up to ask something.
With that being said, the people I’ve faced the most disgust from / been looked down on the most, are African people. I remember my math teacher, a Ghanaian man, saying that he didn’t expect me to do well in a math challenge exam. He was shocked when I did. I actually got a certificate and was one out of a handful who did. I even went back to the school to find the certificate and he told me he couldn’t remember me getting it. I was so sad when he didn’t find it, believing him. Only to get home and find it myself. It didn’t make me happy though. It made me sad. Why was it so hard for him to believe in me?
I’ve always associated being overlooked with the fact that growing up I didn’t say much. I spent a lot of time like a recluse. I was used to being socially excluded. People have always found me odd or strange. I was bullied throughout school. I had awful anxiety, so I was always somewhere on the playground off by myself or with my head in a book. I never really fit in with feminine girls, because i was always “tomboyish”. I never really got attention from guys, because I wasn’t girlish enough.
The only attention I did get, was extremely intense and bordering on obsessive.
I didn’t know this until I was older, but the man who sexually abused me when I was young, kept loads of photos of me. He also told my parents he was going to keep me, essentially trying to abduct me, and my mum called the police on him.
I was 5/6 years old lol.
What could I have possibly been doing then? What space could I have possibly been taking up?
One of my dear mentors, when he gave me money to work on building a think-tank group, he specifically said to me that he was giving it to me, not other people, because there was something special about me. That I shouldn’t shirk leadership. That no good leader has felt they are best placed. That that humility is what means I’ll good be at leading. At the time, it did give me a lot of confidence. I thought wow, here is an older Nigerian man who SEES me and isn’t a predator! He just genuinely wants to see me do well. I also resonated with him, because as strikingly smart and excellent as he was, he was a bit of a social pariah too. Often misunderstood. I was in awe of him when he spoke! I just knew he was somebody I could learn from. I remember calling him crying one time and he said to me he felt sorry for me, because “nobody told me I was meant to climb Mount Everest”. I’ve never forgotten this. It’s something I always return to.
I don’t know if this experience is common / not. I also don’t know if it has any particular meaning.
What I do know though, is that it is a battle every single day to choose not to shrink and collapse in on myself.
That speaking up, for me, is telling my inner child that it’s actually okay for me to take up space. It’s okay if I’m strange. It’s okay if people don’t like me. That I am allowed to speak.
There are a lot of self-help books out there trying to teach people this. Unfortunately, what they miss, is what that looks like when you occupy a body that society has marginalised.
Taking up space, in a world where your existence makes them uncomfortable, is so much more than dealing with your insecurities and working on your confidence. It’s SO much more than saying yes to opportunities or applying for that job anyway. It’s so much more than just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s all that and KNOWING that you taking up more space, is going to make people MORE uncomfortable. It’s going to mean more scrutiny, more focus, more reactions (both bad, good and all manners in between), more pushback, more disagreements, much much more pain and rejection too, despite how much you work.
I swear, if I could write a book called “the discount rate of being marginalised”. And I tell you, that internal rate of return to make all those future cash flows 0, is NOT high, bro lol. That’s a lot of work to just break-even lol. The payback period is LONG and low. The ROI is LOW. The sink costs are extremely high. And when they account for people like me, it’s always LIFO. Last in, first out.
That’s the truth of it, I’d be lying if I said otherwise.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder if I’m playing a chumps game. In that, existing at intersections is hard, but there is a matter of choice involved.
I can’t change being queer, Black, trans, disabled, low-income background, who I was born to, where I was born, my looks, my voice etc. I mean lol, I was in denial of most of it for most of my life! I had a lot of shame around it all!
I can CHOOSE to not be open about it. I can choose to shrink myself in these ways, so that I don’t make people uncomfortable. I can choose to not share my opinion at all. I can choose to stay quiet. These are all choices, honestly.
How I show up in the world, is a choice.
The reason why I throw caution to the wind or at least have done so the older I’ve gotten, is because I’m more and more aware of how much I didn’t have the ability / understood I was making a choice when I was younger and I STILL had to deal with some of the most uniquely cruel forms of trauma. Genuinely, even me I marvel at it, like wow. There’s evil and then there’s just the utterly bizarre!
So, knowingly pretending / denying who I am doesn’t manifest much differently from not being aware of how society is reading me.
Because, fundamentally, who I am is strange to society. Queer is a reclaimed word, because it’s proudly owned by the people who are, but it started off and still can be used as a pejorative. It’s because people find people like us strange that we were ever called it.
We are really on the edge of that normal curve. Right on those fringes. And I think as we get louder and more vocal and prouder, to people wedded to the middle of that bell curve, we are much much too noisy considering we are on the fringes. We should stay relegated on that tail, why are we trying to get attention beyond our position? How dare we? I guess.
*Sigh*
I read a book called “The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving the human evolution, domesticating our species and making us smarter” by Joseph Heinrich. It’s a book that on the face of it feels very click baity, but Joseph is actually a prolific academic scientist and professor of evolutionary biology who teaches at Harvard. He was also a professor in economics and he studied anthropology. My main conclusion from it, was that it’s the fringe / “freak” happenings and how the rest of society shifts to accommodate it, that drives culture. I mean, we see it in a contemporary way. The Black queer trans ballroom drag scene that birthed vogueing, that Madonna co-opted and suddenly made gender-bending cool and mainstream, for example. Often, what is deemed “strange” does not stay considered that way, unless it stays confined to its origin. If enough other groups co-opt that “strange” behaviour, it becomes subsumed into the normal. In other words, queer people may stay marginalised, but queer-ness is constantly influencing and shaping what wider society considers normal. It means, that bell curve, it’s actually a belly curve. That motherfucker wobbles around and redistributes all the time. It’s not static at all, it’s dynamic. So, of course there’s friction. It means aspects of what is seen as “normal” can become fringe. It can be usurped by aspects of what was once considered “abnormal”. It’s threatening. Maybe even intimidating. Definitely uncomfortable.
I don’t think my experience is unique at all. I think i just happen to be that wayward integer that flits about and no mathematical equation can really make sense of, but always needs to be accommodated for to make the formula work and to give an answer that is closest to reality. It’s that something something higgi hagga that is frustrating for any mathematician, which is why we invented imaginary numbers lol. I mean, we don’t really *get* them, but they are necessary to make things works lol. Now we can finally derive it to infinity! Also 0 is both nothing and something, so we need to reflect that aha. The absence of anything must be valued! How else will things work *yells in Hero of Alexandria*!
Anyway, in my opening monologue of my podcast I talk about the liberty of stepping out the boxes societies puts you in. I failed to mention that liberty comes at a price. Although Baldwin does a good job of elaborating on this in his speech about “the artists struggle of integrity”. To be authentic, to be genuine, to be honest, to be complex, to be misunderstood, to be imaginative, is to be the most human you can be. And, interestingly, the more human you are and the more you own that, the more you exist at the fringes, but also the more important or key you are to human development, but also the more vulnerable you are to being wiped out entirely.
And so, you have to decide. It is a decision. You have to decide what’s more important to you. To be yourself and to be yourself boundlessly or to be yourself with boundaries.
Where on that curve do you want to exist? How normal would you like to feel? How important is it to you to fit in?
If it’s to feel safe, well, have I got news for you lol. That’s not possible. Existing isn’t safe, that’s why we have a survival instinct!
If it’s to feel welcomed, then yes, moving across that curve helps with that.
If it’s to stand out / not, then yes, moving across that curve helps with that.
Truly, life is dynamic and there’s always some element of choice. Even if it exists as an idea to help us make sense of being alive. Free will has always been an important philosophical concept. I think it’s too often associated with destiny etc, but I have empathy for that. However, if you don’t recognise that yes you do have a choice, then you leave yourself entirely at the whims of anarchy. And that’s not to say that’s a bad thing either, it’s just to say that that’s still a choice. It’s just choosing to not be in control at all. I have no moral reading on that btw, nor do I think there’s a right / wrong way to go about figuring where you stand on that.
I am definitely spending a lot of time trying to understand what would truly make me happy. Not what I feel called to. People always say “you’re just called”. Well, okay, but how I answer is still my decision. I can accept the idea of a “calling” exists, but then if people insist that it is directional towards me, then I believe I have the freedom to also reject it, tell it to fuck off, or interrogate where exactly it’s trying to call me to. Even if I decide to follow my calling, it doesn’t mean I need to do so with no trepidation and also, it certainly isn’t true that that calling is clear, just because it’s present.
And to come right back round, for me, I think I’m okay with taking up space. However, if there’s any calling at all, I believe that it’s to build spaces that I’m comfortable in.
And I don’t know if that’s so much a calling or a yelling out into the ether from my side lol. Or maybe a calling is just an echo of my own voice anyway. We just need to own that it always came from us, otherwise we will always hear a manipulated version back at us.
Okay I’m falling into a metaphorical pit aha lol but, honestly, coming out the other side of a hard few years…I think it’s time for me to decide what I want again, but it’s hard to do so in a truly unencumbered way and whether or not that makes sense is what is troubling my mind.
How do I carry my past with me, stay truly present, while also trying to determine my future? That’s surely only the advent of “Gods”? Omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.
Or maybe each state is one in the same anyway, and that’s where the concept of the trinity comes from.
The skill is just in making sure I don’t get stuck / wedded to any one of those states. Maybe.
All I know, is that I feel like I’m shifting again and that I choose not to shrink. I choose to be as true to myself as possible. However, I also choose joy. So. We got maybe a few years before Petty Putin loses his entire toupee, and if for nothing else, i think it’s time for some clarity in my purpose. To return to making decisions about where I want to go and how I want to get there. And to not compromise at all.
Because, for me, and maybe this is what’s annoyingly audacious about me….I just refuse to believe that my truth can’t exist joyfully.
And, as my sister rightly pointed out, the importance of being earnest is soooo obviously clearly queer and what could be more queer in 2022, than being Black too.
OX
