The Hard Stuff

I’m one of those people who lives somewhere in the middle. If you’re one too, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is how it goes: I grew up in an impoverished city. We were middle class, for an impoverished city (you do the math). Then I went to NYU, which was like being thrown in the social class deep end, not knowing how to swim. Next I spent a lot of time in the Artist Class (aka, perpetually broke). And now the world around me is decidedly upper middle class. Somewhere along the way, I learned to pass. And people who do this are bridging two worlds, being two people at the same time. So this post from Heather hit me like a ton of bricks. For starters? I married someone from my hometown, and that was no accident. This one’s for my sisters in duplicity. Cheers.

—Meg

With me, it’s always complicated. I have to bridge various identities that don’t seem to connect and that frustrate the people that occupy the spaces within those identities. One of those people is my fiancé. We’ve known each other since junior high, when he was a wise-cracking cool kid and I was the freakish smart girl in a failing, extremely poor neighborhood. We always talked, but I went off to Stanford for college and he stayed home and finished school there. I was an outlier in my community, the first in my family to go to college, and while he and I share that in common, Stanford and the elite institutions were a whole different world that I had to become accustomed too. When a very small percentage of the place you live has people who look, talk, act, and think like you, and a majority of the campus comes from a world that seems foreign, even if it is only three hours away from your parent’s house, it’s a little weird. None of my friends from back home understood what it was like, and when they visited they were so horrified that many of them wept through the visit, including my now-fiancé. My Stanford friends respected where I came from but didn’t understand it either, and I often found myself acting as the poster child for people in poverty everywhere. When the two meet each other, it usually ends poorly, with hurt feelings on all sides. My friends from home think my Stanford friends are pretentious at best and bigoted at worse, and of course, in their way they are right. They are playing out the cultural scripts laid out for them, although all of my friends are good people who attempt to go beyond that; it’s the primary criteria for being my friend. My Stanford friends think my friends from back home are strange and edgy. We have a nasty wit streak that they should expect by now, but apparently it hits them in the face when there is more than one of us in an area. Also, they don’t understand the dialect I speak when in the presence of my own kind.

Dating in this environment was complicated. And further complicated by the fact I was raised by crazy progressive, rocker cool parents who are secular and white. I had no stated community, I could belong nowhere, but on the bright side my mom’s final statement to me on graduation was that I had accomplished everything she wanted: I had gotten the best education possible and I also hated yuppies. Thanks Mom. Because I am white, people assume that I come from a privileged background and this usually makes for awkward party interactions wherein someone says something bigoted in front of me and I—being the ghetto B girl that I am—tear them a new asshole. You’d think that they would learn that bigotry isn’t a way into a lady’s heart, but this was shockingly common. I took up drinking in college to tolerate the social scene. But I did date in college. I dated douchebags from privileged backgrounds who thought I was exotic and confirmation of why capitalism works. I dated working-class boys whose accent would come out when they drank, and drank often they did. I dated granola loving hippies who thought they were the most brilliant thing on the planet and who wore flannel, but who became annoyed and couldn’t deal with my family, who besides being brilliant and beautiful and loud also have all the trappings of poverty, which means early pregnancy, drug use, early death, violence, and military service. I wasn’t ashamed of where I came from, I wore it like a badge of honor and didn’t try to hide it, in fact, if anything I was louder about it than necessary. But I think some men saw this as a fun and exotic challenge. And I think a few of them were being honest about loving me, but were incapable of being strong enough to fully embody what that meant. Continue reading On Being Multiple People