Re: Knowing Your Worth

A week or so before I left Australia for the year, I encountered a person who seemed interested in being my friend. We met through a mutual friend, three former selective school members hanging out, well-travelled and keen to engage with the world on an intellectual level. 

But the red flags were there from the beginning. Upon sighting me, this person opened with: “Are you Polish?” If they had asked me, “Where are you from?” I may have been able to say, “Australia, like you,” but I felt pressured to account for myself, as it were - all the while feeling boxed in.

A conversation was formed nevertheless, between the three of us, with me doing most of the listening. Eventually I piped up about my experiences at universities, including the study of anthropology. I expressed contrition about the white, male bias of cultural anthropology, but felt affronted when the new person turned around and expressed thanks for the white anthropologists who studied Indigenous languages and recorded them in writing. (Indigenous Australians kept their knowledge and wisdom alive orally.) She claimed they were able to prevent them from dying out. I thought this was hypocritical, because the cause of those languages dying out was the white settlers in the first place - Indigenous people were killed en masse through both direct and indirect manifestations of colonisation. 

Given this unfortunate development, perhaps it was not surprising that when I floated the idea that where white people used violence in response to the people of colour they encountered on their conquests, they could have found different, more harmonious ways to relate, it was dismissed as ‘unrealistic’.

Somehow I became Facebook friends with this person by the end of the night, unable to decline politely, and perhaps hoping that things would get better from here. 

But when, by manner of continuing the conversation, I described having eclectic interests which spanned from ‘childfree women in contemporary society’ to ‘international travel trends’, the new ‘friend’ chose to reduce my lovely and far-ranging experiences into me having a possible (undiagnosed) mental health disorder. I knew for sure it was only a matter of time before I unfriended them, and, seeking to crystallise my reasons for doing so, I made a post about a matter of racial discrimination that had been on my mind.

Well, the person told me that my thoughts were ‘not worth thinking about’, which I viewed with incredulity. I value every thought that passes through my mind, because my experience is precious! In addition to acknowledging my deep worthiness, I could clearly see that I was in fact contributing to a conversation on racism which has a long history and is deeply relevant to an understanding the challenges of modern Australian society. My thoughts (and the boldness with which they challenged Anglo-Saxon white supremacy) should have been celebrated!

I will not accept people who treat me like this into my life. I unfriended the person with haste. 

I am happy now that I have the room for new friends who will appreciate the fabulous workings of my mind… because I appreciate myself on a fundamental level, and the lofty heights I am capable of.