idk

i’m not like. i don’t know everything here obviously. i try to make spaces for like, other womens voices and nonwhite voices. i try not to speak over them. i was raised in a sorta white middle-class way around almost exclusively white boys. it gave me a shit ton of like, ocd or anxiety or something about anyone who was a woman, nonwhite, etc. i felt like a monster. i felt like i would say the wrong thing. i felt like an alien to them. in a way i was.

i’m able-passing, i guess. i’m white. i can pretend to be a boy pretty well. i have a safety net stopping me from being homeless. in a lot of senses, i’m quite privileged. i probably do things that alienate people, because i literally have not had the chance to socialize around these people without feeling like a monster. i try to work past it and try to be normal but sometimes that ocd makes me scared of interaction in case i fuck up. in case i hurt their feelings. in case i do something so awful that i get ostracised. it stops me from reaching out in a way that is quite problematic, really. it kind of exacerbates it. i’ve never had that sort of long-term friendship to reassure me that i can in fact talk to these people like a normal person and not mess it up.

if you get ‘other’ed for your entire life it does kind of hurt. it makes you feel irrational things and makes you other yourself. i think being ostensibly a white boy as a child made the othering feel like a choice i had made? on the outside nothing had changed but on the inside everything changed. something was different with me in a way that people could not point to, could not see unless they cared about me, which nobody did.

i don’t want the reader (you) to take this the wrong way. i’m not saying like, any minority individual did anything wrong. the people who did wrong to me were white. the people who did wrong to me were doing it out of negligence. i only hold hate for these people. i am just scared. so scared. i have not seen anyone else say they’ve experienced something like this before, but i’m putting this out there just in case it needs to be said, i guess. i’m not saying it’s like, a black person’s duty to be friends with me, or anything. the solution lies between me and a therapist.

thanks for reading