BY: JAKE KIVANC
If you flip on the TV, the radio, scroll down a social media feed, you’ll see it: riots, protests, campaigns against inequality. What kind of inequality? Racial, sexual, gender-based inequality. Some of us have something to say, but a lot of us just watch until our eyes glaze over and we get back to what we were doing. I sure as hell did—what person in my position wouldn’t?
I grew up with little to complain about: I was white, straight, healthy—generally a normal kid all around. Aside from coming from a lower-middle class family with a dad in construction and my mom working restaurant jobs, I didn’t have a real reason to kick stones. No one attacked my race, my gender, my intelligence or anything that I had been bound to since birth. Sure, kids might have picked on me for being socially-awkward or not being good at any sports, but that’s just the nature of childhood bullying in general. Shithead kids will be shithead kids. Besides, it’s not like I was above such type of behaviour from time to time.
But facing discrimination? Full-on oppression from others? That’s something entirely different.
I was at my rheumatologist’s office when he assembled all of the evidence he had gathered on me over the past week to deliver the news. And I was probably going to have to live with it. Forever.
Last August, I suffered an abdominal injury while training for a weightlifting competition. After having an intense session at the gym, I went out shopping for groceries and, while climbing in the car, felt an incredibly sharp pain shoot from the very depths of my abdomen down into my leg. It would not be revealed until months later that I had severely strained my psoas—a muscle responsible for the upward flexion of the hip joint—and that, on top of all this, I had been most likely suffering from a disease for many years.
It’s a condition that now defines my life.
Even after losing a lot of weight due to starting the gym at 16, I never was able to gain very much muscle. When telling people I did, indeed, actually lift, they would laugh and ask if I played with 10lb dumbbells for fun. In reality, I was training with great intensity five to six days a week since I was 17. I tracked my calories in a diary and slept well. I built my life around lifting, thus I could never understand why I was unable to put on muscle.
There were other things that stuck out, too. Why was I always cold? How come my skin got so dry? Why were there entire months where my libido would be non-existent? How come my muscles always felt tight and achy despite a consistent stretching and yoga routine?
Flash forward to November of last year—I was at my rheumatologist’s office when he assembled all of the evidence he had gathered on me over the past week to deliver the news. Based upon the fact that my mom’s side had a history of similar illnesses and on what my test results turned back, he rendered a conclusion: I was most likely the sufferer of an autoimmune disorder called polymyositis, and I was probably going to have to live with it. Forever.
For some context, autoimmune disorders are a wide variety of diseases ranging from multiple sclerosis to lupus, all of which involve different aspects of the body being attacked or fucked with by its own immune system. In my case, it meant things like fatigue, muscle weakness and pain, as well as a myriad of other issues that I had been experiencing not just since the injury, but for most of my life.
Like a ton of bricks, it hit me.
For all these years, lurking beneath the depths of my impeccable privilege, I had my own form of adversity, and it was only when I became aware of this reality that I got my first taste of what true insult is like.
It starts simple. People joke at you for limping or being slow in a line. They call you lazy for using the automatic door button because opening heavy doors feels like your shoulder joint is going to rip in half. Taking an elevator a single floor makes it seem like you don’t respect other people’s time and as you exit the sliding doors, grumbles of curse words and loud sighs erupt behind you. You give your spiel to people and they apologize, but after doing this a few times a day, it becomes tiring, so you start to take the punches.
And the pressure builds. People begin to ask why you don’t just “man up.” They tell you to quit school or your job and to go back home, live on painkillers and leave the rest of society alone. They will say hateful things both in your vicinity and directly to you, and while your anger will build, you will start to make quiet admissions to your own guilt.
“Maybe I am just being a wimp,” you think. After a while, no matter how much evidence is laid before you, how much pain you suffer or how many impasses are unfairly slammed into your life, the push from society will start to convince you that you are the wrongdoer. Perhaps you never deserved equal treatment? The rest of society gets on with their issues, why can’t you? Eventually, the only solace you can find is in the presence of others who face oppression. You start to connect better with minorities, with women, with the ill and the disadvantaged. You understand their issues better and they begin to understand your own.
This level of society has become a warm pocket for me in a cold world, yet I feel dirty despite it. There’s an impurity to my disadvantage and it lies in a confession that ties my past to that of the same people who now murmur hate under their breath. Like a fist in my chest, there is a statement that has me caught between one world and the other.
“I was like that.”
At some point in my life, I must have dropped every hateful word and made every assumption imaginable, all out of sheer nonchalance. I made fun of people I didn’t understand and complained about people who I thought I did. It was not out of calculated intention; I was never a hateful person but I was ignorant. I said and did things out of an instilled sense of freedom and the general thought of “whatever.”
Most interesting about all of this is that I recognized the idea of right and wrong before all of this happened to me, I just wasn’t particularly passionate about the issues they pertained to. I knew racism was wrong, that women faced gender issues, that sexism, homophobia, transphobia were bad, that disabled people need understanding and to not be talked down to. These were problems that deserved justice in my mind, and while I would always argue for them from a liberal, white, this-is-my-job perspective, I didn’t actually care. No fire burned in my chest, not like now.
It took a transition to the other side of the spectrum; I am now the person that people crack jokes about and prejudge. Lo and behold, it fucking sucks. Is it really worth losing something only to learn about what others have not had for so long? Trust me when I say that, while it’s not a comfortable question, it is one I wish I had asked myself sooner.
While it can be difficult and annoying to unlearn using a word or terminology, they are just that: words and phrases. The barbs of prejudice are buried beneath the decades and generations past. Our parents’ ideas of right and wrong, our ideas of right and wrong, and the societal perpetuation of these concepts keep most of us snuggly comfortable while the rest writhe at the subtle disregard.
Truly, the only reason these ideas have power is because conversations about changing our perspective are not being had in those elevators or rush hour lines. Instead, we tuck them away in the corners of blog posts, hushed chats among friends and the hum over our own minds.
At the end of the day, what matters is this: there are people who were born with privilege, those who weren’t, and those who lost it. Without talking to each other, we will never be able to distinguish between the three, and at one point, you may just cross the floor without realizing it.
Sources: telegraph.co.uk, wordpress.com, twimg.com