As promised, I am taking a moment to discuss the issue of safety, security, trust and race/socio-economic class. I think this is sort of an intersection of sorts for a lot of things, and thus, it is very complex and I won’t really be able to address a lot. But the confluence of visiting a foreign “developing” country by myself as a women who is white and able-bodied and the Newtown/Sandy Hook shooting, with follow-up writings about white masculinity, definitely got me thinking. I was upset that I didn’t get to plan this trip as being by myself, but once it was, I knew that as long as I trusted my gut and listened, asked questions, etc, I’d be as safe as I normally am. Which is, to say, none of us is ever truly “safe.” Safety is an illusion. What does that mean? What does it mean to be safe? It means you have control over your circumstances. At its core, it means people do not violate you, physically, mentally, financially, emotionally, right? The reality is, we are more vulnerable than we’d like to be. But our awareness of this is particularly heightened when we are in an unusual circumstance, because we look for patterns, and if everything looks “normal,” we don’t worry. Even though something could happen in my everyday life. Someone I trust could violate that trust, and any of those levels. But in a place where we’re not familiar, we don’t have those patterns to fall back on. I was a bit surprised by some of my family/friends’ reactions to my going to DR by myself–they were more worried than I necessarily expected. And I can’t say for certain that it’s because Dominican Republic is a developing country, with a different culture, etc, but I’m sure that plays into it, because we all are more comfortable with what we’re familiar with. The thing is, I am familiar with Dominican culture (some of my best friends are Dominican….jk, but really). I lived in a neighborhood in NYC that was primarily Dominican and I guarantee you far more dangerous than any place I was in DR based on my statistical chance of getting caught in the middle of some kind of drug-related violence, because the area is a massive area for drug trafficking. And yet, while I’m sure some people were somewhat concerned when I lived in that area, they didn’t necessarily know that. Where I live now, I could get hit by a car. Or fall down the stairs, or on the subway tracks. There is no end to the random things that could happen.
A lot of my thought on this subject actually I think comes from my learning about statistics and reading things like The Black Swan–recognizing that our brains and emotions were optimized to look for danger in ways that are hardly useful today, because the most dangerous things are things we can’t possibly even be aware of, and therefore things we can’t possibly prevent, no matter what we do. I made a decision while in college that I just wouldn’t live in fear. That it wasn’t worth it. I try to implement that in my daily life, not being anxious, etc, which is in some ways much more difficult, but I think it’s important to take calculated risks, realizing that everything we do has some risk associated with it, and that, as I say, much of that risk is something that we don’t even know about. When Eve Carson was murdered in March, 2008, I realized that you can ask why, but sometimes that doesn’t help, and often there isn’t really an answer. Life if not fair, and horrific things happen all the time. My being paranoid about them, and in a sense, trying to take responsibility for preventing them, will not, in fact, prevent them from happening. And so while I was moving to NYC, I became much more aware of this idea, and recognized how much I didn’t want fear to inform my decisions. For a long time I’ve qualified that by saying, “that doesn’t mean I’m going to be stupid,” but I’ve realized over the years through thinking about, reading about, etc, rape culture and victim-shaming that is often involved in that that I think maintaining that way of thinking is, in a sense, accepting and okaying that. And that for me, doing what the fuck I want is a way to be subversive, both personally and in my culture and society, and that I want to do that, that that is a part of my intent. I will pay attention to my gut in the moment. But I will trust that I can handle any situation I’m in, and that I will create the world I want to live in because I want a world where we can trust each other. I absolutely refuse to fit into the world’s idea of what a woman is. And if someone chooses to violate me? Well, they have chosen to violate me. And no matter what I’m doing, if someone else violates me, whatever that looks like, then I am not at fault. I’m done with shouldn’t this or shouldn’t that because it would put me at risk of being violated in some way. Their choice to commit that violation is their own, I refuse to own it, or take any sort of responsibility for it.
I am not saying that I will do things I have some sort of belief are “dangerous”–precisely not that. I am working to get rid of my sense of danger as anything other than an in-the-moment part of my decision-making process. Because if I feel uncomfortable, then something is affecting me and it makes sense to consider another choice. But when considering the future, or what kind of “risk” I’m putting myself in when I do something that I want to do, I will intend to remove the risk framework about that situation in my decision-making thought process because it is false. It is created, and not real, because in the end, we could be dragged out of our apartment randomly and murdered. There is no safety. And that can be freeing.
“Learn from every single being, experience and moment. What joy it is to search for lessons and goodness and enthusiasm in others.”
–Eve Carson
