How is it that some people are viewed as lesser because of where they were born? How is it that some people think they have the right to dictate who is and who isn't deserving of respect and civility? I can't imagine the fear and desperation that must lead to trying to cross miles of water on an overcrowded dingy. I can't imagine the state of terror a county's people must be in when miles of derelict train track are seen as sanctuary.
We are all human. Regardless of where and under what nationality we were born. Money shouldn't matter. Status shouldn't matter. Power, citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, religion shouldn't matter. We share this planet as equals. And it shouldn't take a photo of a drowned little boy to remind us of that. There shouldn't be articles demonizing migrants, or saying that the little boy drowning was sad, but "not our fault" (thank the Daily Mail). Opening borders to people shouldn't be a political statement. Our humanity towards each other should be constant and unyielding. Being born on a specific side of the Mediterranean does not make you more deserving of a better life. Being born to a "civil" society makes you nothing more than lucky. People who advocate for the exclusion of migrants and refugees and asylum seekers are only able to do so because they happened to plop out in a country without civil war, political upheaval, or occupying terrorist groups. I cannot imagine having to leave behind everything I know and everyone I care about. I can't imagine having to raise £1,200 for a place under the deck of a boat and be starved and suffocated for hours on end. I can't imagine having to take my child in my arms and take off in the night, not knowing if we would make the journey. I can't imagine being torn from the country I was born in and thrown into a world where I was thought of as little more than a leech and regarded as a number in a headline. I can't imagine the feeling of rejection and humiliation, the burning injustice of it all. I can't imagine sleeping on the deck of a boat or on a railway or in a fenced off camp and genuinely not know if it was going to get better. The passport we have should not determine our worth as a human being. Our spirit should. Our kindness, our generosity, our empathy, our compassion, our humanity. Nobody on this earth should have to risk death for a chance to live.
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Love yourself.
Love yourself. Love yourself. For everything you are: every imperfection, every flaw, every extra kilo, every roll, every inch of cellulite, every hair, scar, spot, and stretch mark. Nobody should be made to feel like they are not worth anything because of what they look like. You are worth something. You ARE worthy. YOU are worthy. You are WORTHY. And if you make the decision to change how you look, then do it for you. NOT for the magazine with the model on the front. NOT for the guy who looked at your friend instead of you. NOT for the girl who preferred the guy behind you, NOT for the people who tell you you'd be so much prettier if you were thin; you'd be so much hotter if you just lost some weight; that life would be easier if you looked different. Don't do it for the people you pass on the street, or the guys in the club, or the girls at the bar. Don't do it for the girl trying on a smaller top, or the guy lifting heavier weights, or the shop that doesn't carry your size. Don't do it for those pictures on Instagram, or the girl of Facebook, or the guy on TV. Do it for you. Because you are worth it. You are glorious, and beautiful, and fantastic. Do it for you. There is a blog on Tumblr called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which posts definitions to words that don't exist, but definitely should. There is a particular word that perfectly defines something I've often felt in public places:
sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk. This has always hit home for me in airports. There's something about airports. Maybe it's the prime people-watching location they provide, but I always find myself becoming acutely aware of how independent other people are to me. Everyone I pass, everyone I passively notice - the mum struggling with her crying child, the lady eating a muffin in Costa, the suited man shopping in Hugo Boss - has a life filled with relatives and friends, ambitions and regrets, moments and memories that have nothing to do with me. Life is pretty incredible. I'm talking about the phenomenon of it. The fact of it. How all-encompassing it is, how wholly overwhelming. How yours is the only one that matters, how you are the centre of you own universe and everything else just happens around you. Right now, the minute I write this, I'm sitting in Heathrow Airport, waiting for my gate to be announced so I can get on my plane and go home to my family. I'm not alone in that; there are hundreds of people around me, each with their own gate and their own flight and their own destination. There is a woman sitting opposite me wearing all black with silver nail polish. She has short hair and glasses, and that is all I will ever know of her. I don't know her name, her age, wear she's going, what language she speaks, or anything beyond the fact that her suitcase is coordinated with her outfit. She could be going anywhere, to see people that I will never meet, who will live entire lives unaware of my existence. In my life, this woman is a background character. In hers, I am the same. Just someone in an airport, a face to forget. Right this second, right now, I am listening to Bohemian Rhapsody on Spotify. And nobody, literally no-one in this entire airport, knows that. Nobody here knows that I caught a bus from Brighton to Heathrow at 5.30 this morning and that since then I have listened to Wanna Be by the Spice Girls three times. No-one knows that at this second Bohemian Rhapsody has ended and Your Song has begun, and that I'm now imagining singing this song with Elton John on an all-white set accompanied by a full orchestra and backed by a child choir. These aren't exactly huge secrets, I grant you, but they are a part of my life that none of the people around me are aware of. And they never will be. The woman opposite me has now left (she is going to Pisa, I checked. I didn't follow her or anything, the gate is behind me), and that's it. She has left my life. I will never see her again, and she will spend the rest of her days in blissful ignorance of the stranger at the airport in whom's life she played a small, if strange, part. There's a kind of beauty in it, I think. There are billions of lives on this planet, some completely intertwined , some barely touching, some destined to come together. There's a beauty in the thought that every decision you make creates encounters with people who made the same decisions, that your lives have come careening together, even if it's just for a second. There's a sort of magic in life, in the sheer variety of it, that fact that no two are or can ever be the same. Mine is just one. Just one life among an infinite number of others. Billions of people won't know who I am, or who I was, or who I will be. I'm a face on the street, a customer in a shop, a voice in the background. In a minute, I will pack up my laptop and move to my gate, and all these lives around me will continue, unaffected. I'm not upset about this. There's a kind of romance, really, in the thought that - unless there is some kind of cataclysmic apocalyptic event - life will continue, everywhere, forever. It may be kind of strange, but knowing They were like you.
They worried, they hoped, they dreamed, they wished. They cried, they laughed, they loved, they lusted. They joked, they prayed, they studied, and they skived. They were like me. They had insecurities, they had fears. They had weekly family phone calls and inside jokes. They had thighs that were too big and boobs that were too small and muscles that seemed non-existent. They had loved ones and acquaintances and enemies and best friends. They were lonely, they were loved, they were happy, they weren't. They were like us. They were bright, they were passionate. They were lazy, they were ambitious. They had futures, and possibilities and expectations. They had names, and birthdays, and anniversaries, and scars and stretchmarks and bitten nails and dark skin. They were young, and they were beautiful. They are the wail of their mothers, the anger of their fathers, the weakness of their grandmothers legs. They are the emptiness in the hearts of their lovers, the frozen memories in the minds of their friends. They are a break in this country, a gap in its future, a piece missing from its foundation. They are each worth more than a passing statistic in a headline. They are worth a vigil, worth a movement, worth a riot, worth a war. They should be here. Every last one of them. And they will be remembered. "Yes, we want justice. We want safety. We want to be able to walk on the streets and not be harassed, and violated, and stripped, and raped. We want to be safe. We want to be treated like citizens." Why should women have to demand these things? Why should they have to picket the streets, organise protests, yell and scream until they are heard? Why was this shit ever an issue in the first place?
Recently in Kenya there have been incidents of women being forcibly stripped on the streets. This was done by men who professed that the women's attire was "offensive" and "morally wrong". I don't really want to get into the mind-numbing idiocy of stripping a woman naked and leaving her battered and humiliated to prove a point about morality. What I do want to get into is the fact that no-one, man or woman, should be subjected to violence because of what they choose to put on their body. Everyone should be able to make the conscious decision to wear a fucking tight top or a short skirt and feel safe in the knowledge that they can walk the streets that day and not be harassed because of it. A woman should not feel unsafe waiting for a bus in a skirt that doesn't cover her knees, or a top that doesn't cover her shoulders. A woman should not be told to cover up and wear more clothing in order to feel safe around men. That isn't right. Girls are taught from the off, in homes, in schools, and in public, that they should tone themselves down, stay covered, keep a low profile in order not to antagonise or provoke men. "Your short skirts are making the male teachers uncomfortable." is something I heard a lot in secondary school. Which is fair enough. Men don't want to be in a situation where they may be tempted by the female body, especially if the owner of the body in underage. But why is this even an issue? I understand that biologically men are attracted to women. It's nature, a primal, animalistic, basic part of humanity. But humanity was also blessed with the ability to reason. Why does everyone have this idea that men are these beings that should be catered to, tiptoed around, pacified so that they don't feel uncomfortable? It's the same thing that comes to mind when people justify rape by saying the girl was "asking for it" because of what she was wearing. Justifying men taking advantage of women because they were "tempted" by the "provocative clothing" just implies that men have a startling low level of will power and likens them to animals. Put a piece of meat in front of a dog, it will eat it. It's nature. Put a piece of meat in front of a dog and tell it "NO" and the dog, if well behaved, will not eat it. The dog will learn to wait for consent or approval before it eats the meat. The dog will learn self control, no matter how close the meat is or how low it's top is or how much of it's fucking legs are showing. Why are girls being taught that men a creatures of whim and impulse? Why aren't boys being taught that women are creatures of worth and substance? Instead of teaching girls how to be wary and modest, why don't we teach boys to be respectful? These men in Kenya, these testosterone-fueled vigilantes of public morality, have not one fucking iota of authority over any single woman who wants to get her legs out because maybe she thinks they're nice, or who wants to show her chest because maybe she thinks she had a great set of boobs. She does not owe a single thing to the men who catcall her, who eye her up, who think that she is proud and arrogant because she doesn't blush and swoon at their compliments. She does not have to answer to anyone for what she chose to wear that morning, and she should not be subjected to any kind of abuse because her clothes make her too enticing to a group of men who apparently haven't grown past the childhood stage of grabbing a toy and screaming "Mine!" I watched a video that showed hundreds of Kenyan women and men marching in the streets wearing mini skirts and low-cut tops and shouting for justice to be brought upon the men who took it upon themselves to dictate the boundaries or morality. They marched not just for the women abused recently, but for women in the past who had the courage to come forward but were just met with more horrific violence. They marched for themselves, for their sisters, mothers and daughters. They marched for me. They marched in anger and solidarity and defiance, and they rose as one to make damn sure that everybody knew that this kind of shit would no longer be tolerated. Nobody is in charge of another person's decisions. It is their body, and therefore, it is their choice what they dress it with. If you don't like what someone else is wearing, don't wear it. If a woman's legs are offending you, don't look. Turn around. Get another bus. It seems pretty fucking simple to me. "Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?"
The other day I went on a spoken-word binge on Youtube, and I came across a poem called 'Pretty' by Katie Makkai. Since seeing it, I've pretty much become obsessed with the idea of image, and how some people determine their self-worth by how much other people value them. In the poem, Makkai talks about how her mother spent thousands of dollars on braces, plastic surgery, and skin treatments, all so she could "fix" what was wrong with her daughter's appearance. As someone who grew up with a mother who constantly made comments about their weight (I'm fat, you see), I can relate. I can relate to the idea that after years of being told that if you fixed certain things - your hair, your teeth, your waist size - you would be "pretty". I searched the tag 'pretty' on Tumblr, and didn't get that much apart from cats and flowers and that. So I searched 'ugly'. And I discovered a black hole of self-hatred; posts about depression, self-harm, and, especially, weight. The words 'fat' and 'ugly' seem to be synonymous, along with the word 'disgusting'. It really saddens me, the thought that people become trapped in themselves, imagining their bodies as prisons. It saddens me how concerned people are with other people's perceptions of them, how people think that they won't be wanted until they change. People today, and especially girls, are bombarded with images of what they 'should' be: cute, fun, girly, thin. Pretty. Image after image of girls with white teeth, glossy hair and that infuriating 'thigh gap' in the arms of boys that are chiseled to perfection. Every day I will see at least one picture that makes me feel bad about myself and my appearance. In a perfect world, there would be no Photoshop in magazines, no mannequins too disproportionate to survive if they were a person, and no Cosmopolitan telling women to "watch out for those problem areas!" or "get that bikini bod in time for summer!". In a perfect world, there would be no mentality that you have to be pretty to be worth something. This is not a perfect world, by any standards. It is brutal and unkind, judgmental and critical. And if it is allowed to, it can chew you up and spit you out. If it is allowed to. I want to say that I don't let the images get to me. I want to say that I don't empathise at all with the 'ugly' side of Tumblr. I want to say that I look in the mirror every day and am happy with what I see. The best I can do here is say that 'pretty' is not synonymous with 'worthy'. Pretty is not synonymous with worthy. I understand that. "This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “No! The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you will never be merely 'pretty'.” - 'Pretty', Katie Makkai |
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September 2015
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