a rant. If you stayed till the end, untriggered, know that i appreciate you.
i’ll only speak for myself. about being privileged.
no matter how privileged someone is, the pain of being dismissed and not listened to is real. privilege doesn’t erase it. it just makes it illegible.
growing up, i was told i was too different to matter.
what are you saying again?
we don’t get it.
go back to your fancy home and complain there.
you’re sad? call mommy and daddy.
little bitch with champagne problems.
when you’re seen as capable, resourced, doing fine, your pain stops qualifying as pain. it becomes something people explain away, minimize, mock, or quietly enjoy. competence is mistaken for immunity.
this is where the rhetoric breaks.
we’re all in this together.
leave no one behind.
support women.
it holds until it’s you.
until you’re the one people put on a pedestal you never asked for and wait for you to fall. because watching someone “above” bleed feels like balance.
“why would you be confused about life anyway?”
” your parents’ money got you here. you don’t get to complain about emotional distance when you never had to complain about material lack.”
every time i tried to say i needed more than just money, it was treated as offensive. ungrateful. absurd.
my parents did spoil me. they gave me comfort, access, things. and sometimes, in the same breath, they tore me down. called me a burden. compared me to other kids with “humbler” lives. as if gratitude should cancel hurt.
i grew up split between worlds. too privileged to be allowed pain. too emotionally hungry to feel at home in comfort. no place really contained me.
later, i understood more about where some of this came from. my parents grew up in poverty. survival came first. study hard. work hard. stay afloat. feelings weren’t something you sat with. they were something you outran. they worked relentlessly to get me here. i see that now. i also see how destabilizing it must have been to raise a child who wanted emotional presence when you were taught to suppress your own just to survive.
then i thought to myself, maybe if i offer help to others, everyone will feel better. it’s the one way for me to help ease people’s pain, to escape being painted as a bitch. that’s when i learn that wanting to help someone was never neutral either.
if i offered support, i was a bitch who thought she was better than others.
if i stepped back and stopped engaging, i was still a bitch who thought she was better than others.
when it became clear it was never about what i did. it was about where i was placed in people’s imaginations. once you’re cast there, everything becomes evidence.
so you decided that i’m a bitch. yes, oui, i’ll be a bitch just for you. better yet, i’m the bitch who knows she’s better than you. so listen up: you don’t get to project your pain onto me because you think i’m not suffering enough, then cover your ears when i assert boundaries. u say u hate bitches at the top looking down on u, then show up to their face with classless, embarrassing behavior. you don’t get to arrive with daggers of prejudice and spite, then accuse me of being uncooperative or condescending. you’re causing the problem you keep crying about. nothing worse than a broke bitch with an inferiority complex.
here, is my performance Oscar worthy?
P.S. : i think about marie antoinette sometimes — not the cake meme, just a girl who loved her simplicity dresses, loved her kids, and still got blamed for being visible and “fine” when the room decided she wasn’t allowed to hurt. yeah. i’m with you.
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