Feminism – Elizabeth DeOrnellas

30 Things I Learned by 30

In lieu of New Year’s Resolutions, I offer this piece I wrote in honor of my birthday last spring:

30 Things I Learned by 30

If you tell Creative Writing students they can write about nonhuman characters, one of them will write a tragedy about the doomed love between a pencil and an eraser, and it will be worlds sadder than anything Shakespeare ever dreamed of.

2. When you go to write down what you’ve learned, you will always gravitate toward what your students taught you.

3. For someone obsessed with other people’s stories, you will grow to find your own family history more and more fascinating.

4. You will always be more comfortable on one side of an interview than the other.

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We have allowed our country to descend into tribalism, and that us vs. them attitude is infecting the way our young people view the world. The toxic bigotry of online life, in which anonymous hatred has become a reflex muscle, is seeping into our offline world. Meanwhile, our 70-year-old boy king tweets in the manor while the empire burns. He is the emperor of the trolls. He sees high ratings in the flames.

There are two Onion headlines that define for me the transition from Obama’s America to Trump’s.

On Nov. 4, 2008, the Onion’s main story was “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” I remember reading it and thinking, “That’s the most accurate description of presidential politics I’ve seen in a long time.” There was a knowingness to it – the cynicism that comes from watching a young go-getter go get something and then thinking, “Let’s see what happens when he actually tries to change something.”

Eight years later, the Onion ran this headline: “Study: Depression Up Among Teenage Girls Able to Perceive Any Part of the World Around Them.” It was after the election, and it said nothing about Hillary, but it perfectly captured the world weariness that comes from watching an absurdly well-qualified woman lose to an absurdly ill-qualified clown and having the conversation revolve, inevitably, around her “likeability” rather than his proudly ignorant bully of a persona.

Next weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, and the most shocking thing about looking back on those two headlines is how thoroughly Trump has managed to redefine the job he so obviously never wanted. With Obama, there was an understanding that the presidency is a job – a difficult one, one that requires patience, hard work, diplomacy, and knowledge of both domestic and international policy. With Trump, there is no understanding. Trevor Noah said watching the Trump presidency is akin to having a nationwide civics lesson in real-time. We’re all learning. The question is which lessons are sinking in.

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What’s Hidden from Hidden Figures

As we get set for the Oscars tomorrow, remember this: Movies are big, shiny things. Everyday reality is small and messy. No one gets a big, shiny victory without fighting the small, messy, everyday battles.

I can’t say I in any way watched a full slate of Oscar films this year; I almost never do. I am excited to go see I Am Not Your Negro tomorrow. Anything I’ve ever read by James Baldwin has struck me as incredibly poetic and profound, and I know I haven’t seen enough film of him to understand what he was like in his own voice, so I look forward to starting to rectify that.

I have already made time for La La Land (I have a soft spot for both musicals and romantic comedies, and I was pleasantly surprised to see this one deviate a bit from the normal boy-meets-girl tropes); Moonlight (A friend one described Rachel McKibbens’ poem “The Widower” as an emotional bitch slap; there’s a reason I use that poem to teach figurative language. If I taught film study, I would teach this film for the same reason; it’s that powerful); and Hidden Figures.

I suppose I could have started with that. I could have started with “I just came home from watching Hidden Figures…” but that opening doesn’t make sense to me for several reasons. One, I didn’t read exhaustively about the film before I went to see it because I wanted to experience it as a movie before I decided to pick it apart, but I did do enough pre-reading to know that “based on true events” is, as always, an admission that liberties have been taken with the narrative. The resulting omissions and edits left me feeling decidedly bittersweet about this particular success story.

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The election I lost

I have tried and tried to figure out what it must feel like to be Hillary Clinton, waiting for the dawn of this Inauguration Day. I will never fully be able to understand what it feels like to come that close to our highest, hardest glass ceiling and be viscerally reminded that our nation is not ready. I am trying to remind myself that our kids are ready. They do not understand why their leaders do not see that the world has already changed.

On the eve of Inauguration Day 2017, I want to tell the story of the election I lost.

This is not a story I tell very often.

It is long, and it is complicated, and it is fiercely personal in the way that only a campaign can be. An election campaign turns a candidate from a private figure into a public figure. For a first timer, the loss of privacy is jarring. For a first timer who had always chosen to remain on the press side of the press / government divide, the idea that my name, photo, and platform were to appear on the newspaper’s front page seemed like an absurdity.

I had always conceptualized the press as a behind-the-scenes role. One of my best friends, a fellow Tar Heel who I met in a seminar course on chaos theory our freshman year, had taken the opposite track. She served on Honor Court for years and then ran for Student Body President as an outsider, staffing her campaign with fellow intellectuals, most of whom had more or less avoided the Student Government scene while at Carolina, preferring to spend their time working for student-run nonprofits or think tanks rather than serving in Student Congress or the Executive Branch. She had to attend endless campaign forums, hosted by any student group with enough clout to demand an appearance from presidential candidates. I had to do one press conference (for the aforementioned front page printing of my platform). I remember it as one of the most awkward experiences of my life.

The Daily Tar Heel limited its Editor-in-Chief candidates to an 800-word platform. I remember this word limit because I stuck to it. My opponent did not.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About War

Some days I think all I have to do as a teacher is just get out of the way. Shine enough light into the darkness that kids can see their own brilliance. Or maybe tell enough truth about the world that students can see the darkness, and that’s when they discover their own inner light.

I’ve been struggling with this pervasive sense – on social media, in the mainstream media, in pop culture, in everyday discussions – that our country is at war with itself. Trump’s election win seems to be the culmination of a host of unsettling, depressing trends that have stoked fear, anger and anxiety. Those trends include (but are certainly not limited to):

-Hyperpolarization fueled by filtered news feeds and the rise of fake news

-Increasingly antagonistic partisan politics and the collapse of bipartisan political efforts (which fuels a collapse in our collective faith in the effectiveness of government institutions)

-Identity politics that sow divisiveness and reject unity / identity politics that raise issues Americans aren’t ready or willing to accept as reality and honestly discuss (the perception of that issue pretty much breaks down along party lines)

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In Honor of My Favorite Nasty Woman

To the highest, hardest glass ceiling – and those who cracked it

The poem below is an experiment in persona poetry. I love reading persona poetry (and using it to teach students about point of view), but sometimes I find writing persona poetry to be problematic. I think that’s because I’ve put so much time into reminding myself that we all have our own filters and therefore it’s nearly impossible to truly know another’s mind; writing in someone else’s voice can feel presumptuous. However, it is an excellent way to build empathy. Consider the following a paean crossed with an elegy (although I’m reluctant to use that latter word, knowing her work is far from over).

Chelsea Clinton, on my mother

Remember that

She sheltered me

And so did my father

When I was a kid

And they wanted me to be free

To be a kid,

Regardless of the color of my house

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Dear Michelle Obama

You said, “When they go low, we go high.”

I’ve been trying.

It’s just really hard for me to stay neutral in this election.

I could teach an entire class on understatement with just that sentence.

This year, the politics are personal.

I can’t listen to a presidential candidate call for a ban on all Muslims, knowing I went to Prom with a Muslim from Pakistan.

I can’t listen to a candidate call Mexicans rapists, knowing all the times my students have been ecstatic to go home to visit Mexico.

I can’t listen to a candidate call immigrants criminals, knowing how many times I’ve seen a student break down because they can’t afford college without papers.

I can’t listen to a candidate call sexual assault “locker room talk,” when I know 1 in 4 college-age women in this country have been sexually assaulted. I teach high school. Sometimes I can hear that clock ticking. Sometimes it feels like a bomb is about to go off.

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No, I’m not surprised. I am angry.

I have been trying all day not to write a rant.

I tried to channel my inner “Whoa. OK” Hillary shoulder shimmy. That just made me angry that Hillary has to make her well-earned exasperation cute in order to appear “likeable.”

I listened to Hillary quote Michelle and thought, “When they go low, we go high.” That seems like valid life advice – after all, if there’s one person whose steely grace I’d like to epitomize, it’s Michelle.

Then I listened to the debate.

I listened to a journalist clearly define sexual assault and a presidential candidate dismiss it as “locker room talk.”

I thought about what “locker room talk” means to me. I grew up with Title IX. For me, a locker room is where I learned from female teammates how to be strong. Where I learned what being a captain means. Where I learned the line between celebration and consolation is perilously thin.

Locker rooms were a safe place for me. The talk that happened there felt empowering.

That’s not the kind of “locker room talk” Trump meant.

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Advice

Tomorrow’s the first day of school – a new year, a new team, and new courses are all in store for me. In preparation, I’ve been thinking about one of the questions we used during our team building exercises: What advice do you wish you’d been given as teenager? Here’s my attempt at an answer:

I wish someone had told me that I’d always feel I have something to prove. That having a chip on your shoulder makes it even more important to seek balance. That sometimes the world throws you off-kilter, and that chip is the only effective counterweight.

I wish someone had told me that I’d never be comfortable being on top. That restlessness is both a blessing and a curse.

I wish I’d been told that life isn’t linear. That the danger of singular pursuit of goals is that your goals become singular. The higher you climb, the steeper the ground beneath you becomes – until you find yourself at a precipice, with only a binary choice: Jump or Back Down.

I wish someone had told me that it’s OK to retreat and lick your wounds. That sometimes that’s the only way to get clean.

I wish I’d been told that you don’t have to like yourself to love yourself. That it’s possible to acknowledge your own weaknesses, to recognize the ways in which you’ve engendered hurt – and still approach yourself with forgiveness and compassion.

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Lessons

This is the year I learned that listening and hearing are two different things.

The year I realized how difficult it is to decide when context matters.

The year I learned there can be value in a one-way conversation, provided it’s honest enough.

This is the year I learned that not wanting to hurt people means swallowing a lot of truth.

Truth gives you heartburn.

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