Badge of Honour

It’s been some time since I posted anything. What with COVID-19 and everything that has left us with even more disorientation than the ordinary...

I am on my 12th year teaching now, and the age gap between my 18 year old students and I is growing wider. Quite factually.

Every year, my new students ask if I knew what I wanted to do for a living since I was their age (18 yo)?

Every year, my last year students ask if I am happy with my job.

The answer to both, is no.

I was clueless and lost when I was 18, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was 21. I fit nowhere.

And we will always fit nowhere, if what we seek is a semblance of social bonds in our labouring.

The economy is structured in such a way that any human being, doing what they do best in the happiest point they are, will not be paid or is paid poorly. It is called capitalism. It will reap you for all you are worth, and them some, and ruin any meaningful relationship you have with your loved ones. It’s just how it’s been operating in the past three centuries. We are minuscule compared to how complex and advance it’s structured.

All we have, are those fleeting moments when we can see the best us in our social relationships. It can be in music, poems, film, a lab experiment, a garden... When we labour, we can realise the most worthy part of us in our social relationships. And I—becomes us.

If this is what you relate to, you won’t be paid much by the capitalist economy. You would have to let go of your aspirations for upward mobility, and the social acknowledgements that come with it. You would have to accept social stigmas. “Failure”, “outcasts”, “a shame”. You would need to grow a thicker skin.

But I promise you, if you can feel self-empathy in ways that are in line with your social empathy, other options seem unnecessary. Being a social outcast, slowly, becomes a badge of honour.

Know that you are not alone in feeling that way. In a dog-eat-dog social world, not being successful might mean you never had the heart to step on someone else’s to toes to get ahead. And you begin to see those who can, in a very different way.

100 words

This post was written as part of the “Foundations to Writing” Class; and if I cannot do what I teach, I do neither.  

I am a 38 year old mother of one, whose sense of self is less and less shaped by expectations—be it from myself or other people. Decades of mistakes and messiness have allowed me the space to be comfortable in my own skin, with all the scars and blemishes. 

Increasingly, it is much easier to carry myself as I am, rather than cover some parts and announce others. I am myself wherever I am. On the toilet, in class, and in an any time span!

On Being Alone Together

Research has shown that there is an increase in loneliness in the 21^st century. This systemic problem is the socio-psychological effect of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation which has shaped hyper-competitive individuals. However, human beings, as most mammals, are social beings. We are evolutionarily ingrained to live socially while our society, in the past two centuries, has developed in a way that forces us to live individually.

This is why, I think, any study regarding social media and loneliness need to place it within broader social changes in post-Fordist societies. It is less about social media’s effect in individualising human behaviour, than it is about social media exacerbating an already economically-driven social disconnect between neighbours, co-workers, and family members. It is a fact that must be accepted as our social reality before any serious try to find an antidote. Perhaps, it can only come in the form of a simple “hello” to the stranger next to us on the train.

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