The Pain of Privilege

I cannot deny that I was born of privilege. I was raised in a large house and went to private schools. I grew up traveling the world, and went to Hawaii every year. We had money. As anyone will say that has money, we did not have as much as some. We traveled standby and had cheep tickets because my mom was a flight attendant. My mother worked very hard at her job. My dad did too. He was a realtor and became a broker and started his own real estate company. But they did well. Though they both came from blue collar families, and though their parents knew poverty, they were a result of a booming economy in the eighties and nineties, and they fixed up houses. They did this with their own sweat and tears, but it paid off. When I was thirteen we moved to a smaller house and my parents joined a simplicity movement. I myself began to question my privilege. I befriended the paper boy, and sought out the kids in the neighborhood that went to public schools. I asked to go to a public high school where I knew there would be more diversity, but my mom didn’t let me. So I went to a prep school and later a private arts school. The Seattle that I knew was very white as were my classrooms. We were liberal, but still sheltered.

Sometimes I wonder if I started acting out as a teenager because I did not respond well to my privileged sheltered life. I had the educational experience of visiting third world countries, and I knew there were other realities than my own. I developed anger as well as mental illness. I had a hard time getting along with my family as a teenager. I became a hippie and dabbled in drugs. At nineteen, I got together with my partner who had very little, and was almost eighteen years older than me. I was sucked in by this man who seemed to only have a dog and a job. He became my mentor and my savior. We moved to South Seattle, where there was a black community as well as many other minority communities. We did our best to get by, him a cook and me a daycare worker. I became entrenched in another reality. This reality was one of survival, but also joy. It became evident that I did not want my privilege. I felt trapped by it and it had made me a very unhappy individual in my teens. I had been searching and doing whatever I could to escape, and I was happy with my new life and new partner. There were so many things that I began to see and experience that came from living an unprivileged life. It became a new sort of education, one that my private schooling could not offer.

Now that I am in my forties, and I have been disabled my entire adult life with very little money, but always enough, I have had to come to terms with the reality that where I came from, my education and upbringing, is a sort of privilege that will never leave me. The color of my skin, my family, and my education, all become a privilege that will never go away. I have done my best to educate myself and relate to low income, poverty, disability, and minority culture, but I still remain a well educated white girl from upper middle class Seattle. I may not have chosen the life of privilege that many of my peers from that time chose, and I am proud of that, but there is a white stain that will never truly become clean. I am who and what I am. I have to accept and acknowledge this, and recognize the privilege I have experienced in my life, if I want to educate myself further on economic justice and equality. I was never hungry as a kid. I always had nice clothes and a safe environment. Humility and my program of recovery, help turn my gaze to those I can help who have less than me. I marvel at celebrities, and I follow some on social media. But I believe in karma and checks and balances in the universe. I believe that riches and privilege do not come without pain. Unknowingly we experience the pain of those on which we stand. When I gave that all up as a young adult, I felt a new freedom and a new happiness. When I traveled to poor countries as a youth, I marveled at the smiles I saw on the faces of the people that had so little. It was a small clue that guided the decisions of my life.