Taking action: With and without empowerment

I’m going to level with you. The last couple of years have been really, really tough. Even if you aren’t very close to me personally, you’ve probably noticed, if you somehow managed to keep reading my blog.

I will say this for myself. I kept posting. But it was rough and I know a lot of my posts have been less than uplifting recently. That’s how it goes when life is throwing heavy crap at you and you’re the honest type.

a hand reaching for an illusive light - Creative commons image by gabriel rojas hruska

But I now have the possibility to come back to writing more than just a blog. And for me that means light is coming back into my life. I can’t guarantee it will stay. My newly stabilized situation is held together by metaphorical spit and duct-tape, but I’ll take any chance I can get.

In fact, I have already resurrected one of my old book-length writing projects, blown the cyber dust off of it and sent it out to a couple of beta readers.

Yikes! That was invigorating! (Along the lines of how jumping into an icy winter lake is invigorating.)

I didn’t previously know either of these beta readers and I got a lot of hot and heavy criticism, which I fully appreciate and intend to use for improvement. My friends are often too nice about this kind of thing.

Friends, I do understand. Not only is it easier to critique a stranger—who you are unlikely to have to comfort through the resulting existential writer’s depression—but most of my friends also share a good deal of my background and worldview. In short, we have a lot of the same assumptions and even prejudices.

The story in question is a memoir about how I got into international journalism as a 20-something and lived and worked in more than 30 countries. And it necessarily (from my perspective) starts with the fact that I grew up in a shack that lacked an indoor toilet in rural eastern Oregon.

I mean, this is essential character development for the rest of the story, isn’t it? If I had been an adventurous young person from a wealthy, back-east family of intellectuals with connections to the newspaper business and high society, the basic events might have been marginally similar, but the story would have been utterly different.

And for that very reason, it appears that I have a great deal of trouble describing my background in a way that is both palatable and believable to people of the middle-to-upper class American persuasion. My critique partners both found these sections baffling and unsatisfying, despite the fact that I actually thought I was being “funny” with self-deprecating humor.

The most basic example from one of the beta readers came in the section where I described meeting a group of American exchange students bound for Germany. We were all around sixteen years of age and all Americans and all white. But my difference in background was obvious.

They were all from wealthy families and from big cities. Their luggage matched. Their clothes matched. They all shared social norms and communication styles that I didn’t. They were also all sighted and I couldn’t see their faces.

But these are not differences our society emphasizes. The exchange agency, my fellow students and my beta readers were all bewildered as to why I didn’t fit in.

When I described the confused and cold reactions of the other students to my presence in the group, one beta reader kept text-yelling “But what was YOUR behavior that led to this?!?” Surely, I had to have been behaving oddly to be excluded by this group of nice, upwardly mobile young people.

And I have to hand it to that beta reader for brutal honesty and attention to detail. From my perspective then as well as while writing thirty years on, I did not see anything remarkable about my behavior. But on closer inspection there was.

I didn’t make eye contact. It is physically impossible for me. I didn’t smile hesitantly when others made eye contact. I didn’t give a little smile of recognition to the person who sat next to me at lunch when we later met in passing. When another student went out of her way to hand me a hard-to-reach book, I thanked her, but I didn’t respond to her with the extra warmth that context would imply when I met her later, BECAUSE I couldn’t see her face and thus didn’t recognize her.

And those are just a few of the vision impairment related “behaviors” I no doubt displayed. Honestly, I was stung by the beta reader’s insistent comments that the issue had to be my behavior. On first reading the comments, I felt sure this was unjust.

I had been kind and friendly to my fellow students. I had greeted them cheerily and continued to do so, even as their attitude toward me soured. I had passed books to others. I had helped a fellow student pick up her things when her hands were full and her purse spilled. I went out of my way to try to ask them about themselves and respond with acceptance and positivity. Shouldn’t that be enough?

Maybe it should. But that is irrelevant to a beta reader. A beta reader looks for the believability and relatability in a text narrative. She does not represent some ideal of justice and fairness. She represents a regular reader who doesn’t know about vision impairments and who also happened to come from a background much more similar to that of those other students than to mine. My perspective is foreign and incomprehensible to her without a great deal of context.

If I want readers like her to be able to believe and empathize with me as a sixteen-year-old trying to win acceptance among a group of exchange students from wealthy and privileged backgrounds, I really do have to show how my behavior was different. I would have to break it down with a lot of words and description.

I’m not necessarily saying I will do that when I edit my story. But I am taking it into account as a factor in how some readers will be able to understand my story on a deep, empathetic level. I may choose to sacrifice some of that for the sake of brevity, but thanks to that beta reader, I’ll do so consciously, rather than obliviously.

This beta reader also expressed that I “should have taken action” to improve my situation at the time. And here context comes up again. How exactly could the visually impaired and socially underrepresented student in this story take action to become less excluded?

I couldn’t magically see other people’s faces. I didn’t even realize at the time that that was a big part of my social problems, so I couldn’t explain it to them in hopes that they’d be understanding. Likewise, I couldn’t magically gain knowledge about the social norms of urban elites. I was also largely unconscious of those issues, as were my fellow students.

Thinking about this has led me to an understanding of how empowerment or lack there of affects an individual’s ability to “take action.”

My second beta reader wondered why I didn’t “take action” to get into the newspaper industry more effectively later in the story. I was doing literally everything in “the book.” The book is Writer’s Market, an annual listing of how and to whom writers can market their work. It’s the outsider’s guide to getting into the publishing and print media industries. Everything an outsider can do—from query letters to conference stalking and from agent hunting to exposure swapping—is in that book. And I did all that.

What I didn’t do was the Hollywood type things. I didn’t get a job as a waitress at the place where a top newspaper editor eats lunch and then strike up a friendship with him. I also didn’t do the realistic things that most people in the business did to get in the door. I didn’t call up my uncle or my uncle’s friend in the business and get an entry level job, because I didn’t have any relatives or friends in the business.

Empowerment makes for action. If you have the basic materials or conditions, action isn’t inevitable but it is feasible. In other words, you still have to work for success, even when you’re privileged, but taking action follows empowerment.

We don’t always realize how empowered we are, of course. Much of my life in rural eastern Oregon today revolves around trying to get rides or set up rides for my kids. After years living in a country with a dense public transportation system, I find this limiting and frustrating. Not being able to drive is a much bigger deal here, and other than the online world, most actions I might want to take to improve my own life or that of my children require transportation in a vehicle.

And yet, I sometimes do find ways around it. I find ways to work with medical transportation services. I network. I offer what I have in exchange.

To modify a phrase, knowledge is often empowerment. Had I known more about social class and vision when I was sixteen, it is possible that I could have navigated groups of teenagers better. Certainly, if I had known the right people or even just the internal structures of newspapers, when I was trying to get into the newspaper business, that would have been a lot easier.

But knowledge still isn’t the same thing as just being in an empowered position. I wouldn’t have needed that knowledge, if I had been part of the in-group already. And I now wouldn’t need detailed knowledge of every type of transportation system, if I could access transportation in the societally supported way—i.e. by driving.

When you look at your own or another person’s situation in terms of whether or not they take action at the right moment, these are key considerations. Are they empowered to take action by the situation, their own limitations or the society they are in? Are they informed?

We often can’t fix these things, but being aware means that we are moving through life consciously, rather than being oblivious.

What's wrong with neighbors these days?

Do you know your neighbor’s names? Do you speak to them? Would you know if they were dying? Would you care enough to call someone?

If your answer is “no, no, no and okay, maybe,” you are just plain normal today.

We hear their sound systems playing, their cars starting and their domestic disputes, if we live in crowded areas. We catch glimpses of them getting out of cars or taking out the trash, but little more. If we live in a “friendly” neighborhood, we might occasionally lift a hand in a silent wave.

Creative commons image by Chiot’s run of flickr.com

I’m no different. I have always felt connected to the land, plants and animals around wherever I’m living, including to my human neighbors. But in the past few years, my connection to human neighbors has grown thin and distant. As spring opens up the world, I find myself saddened that I don’t know my neighbors.

There is the neighbor across the street who starts their clunky car every day at precisely at 7:00 am. There is the neighbor who always drives in the back and never appears in front of their house, despite having a carefully manicured front fence and raised flower garden. There is the neighbor who grows a fantastic back garden crowded with vegetables and flowers so thick that it reminds me of children’s stories about secret gardens that shut out the world.

I’ve never spoken to any of these neighbors, though I’ve lived here for nearly two years. I’m legally blind, so it’s hard for me to catch them on the street and strike up a not-so-casual conversation, as others who desire neighborly contact might. I wish I had more connections with my neighbors beyond the snippets of their routines that filter out, but my life has been beyond overwhelming with children’s medical crises, so I have made no bold moves.

I feel a certain kinship with the punctual neighbor across the street. I’m sure he or she is working hard, heading out early in that car with the labored engine every morning. But I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t think of me as someone they’d want to know. They don’t have a high front wall or fence, so they have no doubt seen me with my white cane and my kids with intense emotional issues.

The neighbor with the perfect front flowerbeds maintains them by proxy. I have met their fix-it man/gardener. All last summer, he greeted me every evening and we’d exchange a few words while we tended our respective plots. He wasn’t really a neighbor but we both acted like we were.

The only actual neighbor I’ve talked to is one with plenty of trouble of their own. That house has all the signs that someone there struggles with addiction. It is beaten down and in need of repair. There are loud arguments and broken dishes. There is sometimes noxious plastic trash burned in the yard. But there’s also a woman there who occasionally greets me. I once went to that house to give warning in the middle of the night because I could hear water spurting from their side faucet, which had broken. Ever since, we aren’t exactly friends, but we are on—if not speaking term, then at least greeting terms..

A bit further away in the neighborhood, I have encountered only tragedy--loud domestic violence in one house, then the silence after the woman and children fled, and death by overdose at another house. This is all I know of neighbors two years after returning to my small home town in Eastern Oregon.

Rewind thirty years and I was a teenager here desperate to get away. There were many reasons why I originally left, including the scent of opportunity, right-wing local politics, no public transportation and romantic notions about the rest of the world. But back then, it was normal to know you neighbors. I met my future niece’s mother and aunt across the back fence. Even socially awkward and outcast as I was at school, I knew some near neighbors.

Today, I find the contrast disturbing, not just for myself but for society at large. The only person, besides the neighbor’s gardener who has approached me intent upon making connections was a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who occasionally prowl the neighborhood. Neighborly relations have become mechanistic at best—something only minded when you can get something out of it.

When I go for walks around the neighborhood, I’ll often wave to someone out working on a lawn. I don’t make a big production out of it, just a little finger wave and a smile. So far, they give back only silence. I don’t hear neighbors greet one another either. So, it isn’t just that they’re leery of the “blind lady.” There is a feeling of being on edge, of both distrust and apathy.

Back when I was a conflict correspondent for newspapers, I often had to walk through neighborhoods where I didn’t even understand the local language and “gauge the mood” for my editors on the other side of the world. If my job was to report on American small town life today, I would have to describe the atmosphere as one of “discontent and distrust” or “deceptive calm covering simmering resentments.”

I fear that the problem with neighbors in America goes far deeper than just neighborly relations. Increasingly, when I meet other parents at the Little League field or at a school function, a sense of guardedness and exhaustion pervades. I try to reach out with the same friendly gestures that worked years ago, only to be rebuffed with silence or sideways hedging to get some distance.

Is this about the politics? We’re in a deep red zone in an otherwise blue state after all. Maybe my neighbors feel marginalized or maybe there’s something about me—wild red braids? colorfully patterned clothes?—that gives my politics away as controversial. But I suspect that it is more than that. Even when I visit the big blue city, people are professional but there’s often strain in their precisely polite voices and precious little warmth.

What can be done to bring back a sense of community and neighborliness? I have tried the tactic of simply being ultra friendly. I’ve been the one to bring cookies to new neighbors to welcome them to the neighborhood. And I might do something like that again, once my life is less of a rolling crisis. But even when I was doing that a few years ago, the reception was distinctly cold and suspicious.

I don’t believe the solution is simply individuals putting themselves out there and being warm and friendly. That doesn’t hurt, but it won’t change the core of the matter. I’ve seen other nations in times of hopelessness and this is what despair on a large scale feels like. I’ve also seen nations that have recently thrown off tyranny, filled with hope and optimism. And those are the places where I have seen strangers play cards while waiting for busses or neighbors lend a helping hand to the elderly. The level of hope in society is closely tied to neighborliness.

I don’t know how to restore hope to a giant country like the United States. It used to be that people in America believed they were lucky and blessed. Even when our systems were messed up, we seemed to believe they were at least the best that could be had. Now, I hear Americans disparage the services and authorities that hold our communities together, just as Russians or Eastern Europeans do with theirs. It’s a symptom rather than a cause. The systems are not actually any worse than they once were. It’s the optimism that has frayed.

I do know that hope is fostered by connections to nature, by finding small moments of beauty in life, by authentic connections to other humans who are doing something beyond themselves. These are the things I seek for hope and I only know how to keep looking.

And meanwhile, I’ll be the friendly neighborhood oddball who sometimes eats meals on the front porch, waves at people she can’t see, talks to gardeners and listens for anyone in need.