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Taking responsibility
I've been thinking over the last few days about victimization and taking responsibility. In a number of my courses we talked about personal traumas such as abuse or loss, and collective traumas such as colonization, and modern racism and prejudice. Through the course of my MAIS program, I learned quite a bit about the larger ramifications of all of these issues, and my own role in them, and that's been an amazing, albeit a sometimes uncomfortable journey.
But my point here is that, while acknowledging traumas is important, it can be easy to get stuck there, wallow in victimization and lamenting the trauma, instead of taking responsibility for it. That's not to say that I'm blaming any victim here - in our collective quest to acknowledge and identify traumas and victimization, we've come to often confuse blame with taking responsibility.
What needs to be said more often, I think is something like "Yes, you've been victimized. It wasn't your fault, it shouldn't have happened, it sucks. But it did happen, and nothing and nobody can make it un-happen again. What are you going to do about it, and how are you going to make yourself no longer a victim?" That's what I mean by taking responsibility.
A great deal of why I've been thinking about this is that I'm in a not-very-good-place right now in some aspects of my life, and I've been catching myself feeling (wallowing in?) self-pity about it. Which kind of pisses me off, because I really hate whining and self-pity coming from anybody - my kids know that the quickest way to get a complete lack of sympathy from me is to whine about something...and I find I have to remind myself about the distinction between blame and responsibility. I'm not to blame for where I am. But I do have responsibility for it
What am I going to do about it? That's the tricky part...
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Hi Heather,
There is a beautiful place of rest and wonder between "wallowing" and "taking action." I want to applaud you for blogging it (I think people deserve lots of applauding when they admit to being uncertain about life). These macho neoliberal times of ours scream "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "if at first you don't succeed; try, try again" at us from every direction: media, education, government, culture.
Jack Halberstam did a lovely presentation on "the Queer art of failure" in my town this year. I think Halberstam's got a book coming out on it and was advertising it to us... The premise was that a culture of "failing" at capitalist and heteronormative prescriptions to keep up with the rest of the world had been quite successful, and had created an anti-assimilationist space (for Queer folks in this case, but I think it's widely transferrable) of uncertainty, wonder, rest, pleasure, redefinition of "good" and "normal." And it didn't involve the exhausting requirement to be positive about everything ever. ; )
Self-pity sounds like no fun, but I hope you won't beat yourself up too much either.. And that you'll get the rest and time you need to "take responsibility." :D s
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for that - you're right, I was overlooking the "place" in between of reflection, and that's not a bad place to be. I'll have to look Halberstam up, he sounds interesting...
As for failing and keeping up with the rest of the world, I could rant for quite some time about the capitalist myths that are constantly perpetuated - my least favorite being the highly cherished myth that anyone can succeed at anything in our society, as long as they work hard enough. Which means then, that if they don't succeed, it's their own d**n fault...That probably needs its own blog post...
I think it does. It'd be lovely to read. :)