i am under-grounded

I am not strong.

People tell me all the time that I am strong. Mostly, when people say this, they are referring to me in relationship to the things I have survived. But I have never understood the way we praise strength, especially when, what I know about strength, is that it’s simply what’s left over after we have been knocked down seven times and gotten up eight. Is it luck, or instinct? Could it have easily have gone another way? Is the eighth knock-down about to happen and it’s impossible to tell if any one of us will get up a ninth time? If that is so, strength is just a crap shoot, depending on which part of your life gets scrutinized. If you’ve just gotten up from a knock-down, you are strong. If you just got knocked down, you are wallowing in weakness.

It feels important to say this: My life has been my life from the very beginning. I had to learn to be shocked by the things that happened to me–I never knew anything else. But before I learned to be shocked, I just lived. That meant I got up and walked out of countless rooms full of danger and darkness, into the sunshine, not because I had strength but because I was no longer welcome inside and there was no place else to go. If I had strength of spirit, it’s because I was lucky enough to come into this life with it already installed. If it seems like it takes courage and strength for me to speak out about abuse and trauma now, consider that I grew up in this world a white girl in an upper-middle class family with access to health care and all the education I could handle, and because of that, with small exceptions for my gender and the times I have been visibly queer, I was taught from the first day of my life, by everyone except most members of my family, that my voice is valuable and deserves to be heard. Given that, I’m not sure that my talking about my abuse now quite fits the definition of brave, or that my willingness to stand up and be counted constitutes strength. The whole world has told me that I count, over and over again. 

This whole construction, that some people are strong and some people are not, is just another mechanism of hierarchy and oppression. 

I read an article years ago, in the NYT, about the increasing epidemic of homeless women in America. The statistic for the percentage of homeless women who are survivors of sexual trauma was between 80 and 90%. When I read that, I put the paper down, curled up into a ball and wept with grief and gratitude. The membrane between my life and the lives of women living on the streets felt so thin. I could feel how the ropey strands of that membrane were spun from education, class privilege, the world’s unfaltering expectation of my inevitable success.

I am not religious by any means, but the  phrase “There but for the grace of God go I” runs through my head multiple times a day. 

My mother was, at the time, “unstably housed.” She lived in different friends’ spare rooms, making herself so scarce that she could avoid conversations about her plans to move out for months at a time. Once, she cried to me on the phone recounting an article she read about a growing trend of divorced, middle-aged women who would rent mid-sized u-hauls, back them up to their storage units and unload some of their things to create a microcosm of their old lives inside the four walls of the truck. Then they’d live there for just a couple of nights, before they put it back into storage and found their next place to sleep.

“Have you done that, Mom?” I asked her, holding my breath. I listened to her cry, then blow her nose, before she said, “well, onto brighter topics,” after which she spent 45 minutes telling me how ill-mannered her friend’s children were, and whether I should bother to paint my dorm room. 

This belief, that some people are strong and some people are not supplants the deep feeling of camaraderie and belonging we could have with one another. It implies that someone who is deemed “strong” has done more than simply be human. This elevates acts of basic, decent humanity to feats that are out of reach to the rest of us. It lets us off the hook if we can say, “Wow, you’re so strong. I could never do what you did.” Then we don’t have to plumb the depths of our own humanity to see if we could actually stand up and speak up. When we “other” strength, it makes us all falter in our humanity. 

I think the better question is, where is our humanity? Where do each of us choose, every day, to put our love and our attention? When did we forget that, in the answer to those questions lies the secret of our collective strength? 

If we ask ourselves, how did I stand up that eighth time? –that is when we are closest to our own humanity, our greatest strength. Look around at those who have lost their humanity–their search for strength outside themselves has made us all less stable, more vulnerable, more divided, lonelier. So where, in this moment, do you choose to put your love?

I am not stronger than my humanity. I simply am.