Pride | An Illustrated Column By Ezra W Smith

Pride month is over. And what a month it was!

So many times I heard people saying that this 2020 pride is the most authentic one we’ve had in a while. I cannot agree more. I liked it, I liked it a lot. It felt authentic. Centering pride around people of color is the way to go, in my opinion. Intersectionality is the key to understanding human experiences. Let’s do it more from now on, let’s center people with disabilities, let’s center children, who often are not allowed to speak for themselves and basically denied their queer experiences and identities!

But let me tell you one thing: pride was always a riot for me. And for (too) many other people on this planet. I happened to be born to a place where pride was never allowed. I happened to live in a place where up to this day pride is met with violence and hate.

It’s easy to be comfortable in a relatively small New York or San-Francisco bubble, or Amsterdam bubble… we have some good bubbles on this planet, and we should be grateful for them. But that’s not all there is.

Here are just some numbers to reflect on:

Only in 29 countries (out of 195) can same-sex couples get married.

Only 26 countries allow same-sex couples to adopt children.

Only 9 countries in the world have constitutional protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In 70 countries around the world, consensual same-sex sexual activity is criminalized.

In 13 countries people are still facing the death penalty for same-sex acts.

Even in the countries where LGBTQ+ folks’ rights are protected by law, social stigma means that it can be dangerous to live openly. I don’t know anyone from my hometown who would be queer and not live in constant fear.

I wished I could attend a safe, non-violent pride march. I wished I could celebrate who I am without facing others yelling homophobic insults from the porches of the churches that happened to be on the march way. For a few years I really wanted to travel somewhere during pride month, like to the Netherlands, and actually see what “real Pride” looks like. I wanted to experience it at least once for myself.

I didn’t. And lately I don’t feel like doing that at all. Maybe I don’t need this. Maybe my harmful experiences are my strength. Maybe those experiences are the only thing that prevents me from forgetting how many of my queer siblings are suffering, how many are still unsafe. I am not sure if I want to enjoy who I am unless EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US can too.  

On the other hand, how many hours per day can a queer human individual think of all of the harm and violence done to queer folks around the globe and still stay sane? Does anyone have any tips on how to not take every hateful statement on queerness personally and actually sleep at night instead of drowning in fear and anxiety?

I was thinking a lot about queer representation in pop culture lately and how that makes me feel unsafe too. A few decades ago there was almost no representation whatsoever. I am glad that changed. But also, it changed to mostly one type of representation – queer struggle. I am glad to see experiences I can relate to in movies and series, but it also retraumatizes me every time. I can’t help it.

Growing up as a queer in the majority of places on this planet is tough. To a lot of us it means abuse, violence, the inability of being ourselves and, in some cases, legal troubles. Going through all of this and then watching it again and again on a screen is a lot to swallow. As much as I find these stories valid and important to tell, I feel like when these stories are The Only ones that are out there it makes me feel incredibly unsafe.

I feel like pop culture desperately needs more stories of queer people’s success. Or just a normal life with problems not connected to our identity.

The show “Politician” felt like a breath of fresh air to me. What a pleasure to see people of different queer identities running a political campaign without being abused, neglected, and finally killed. But that is a rather rare exception.

I think at the end of the day I (and every one of us) have to find a balance between staying angry and staying calm, between fighting and taking care of ourselves. Between educating ourselves about the struggle of other queers, especially queers of color and trans people, and preventing burnout.

Human Life as a Crappy Book | An Illustrated Column By Ezra W Smith

One of my favorite things to do is reading. I love good books. In the past year I discovered a few great authors and enjoyed quite a few great books. However, last year I also decided once and for all – I don’t like the majority of biographies.

I think biographies, as we write them right now, make us question whether our own lives have any purpose or meaning. Which for many people might lead to deep dissatisfaction. Controversial? Hear me out.

Very often (definitely too often) biographies are written by the rules of fiction books. Authors use all of the same devices, the same sudden turns and plot twists. The author, whether or not they are also a main character of the story, takes imperfect, flawed, raw material, such as someone’s life, and forces it into The Story.  A story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And that, I think, is wrong. There is no “end” of the story, even if the person whose biography is being written is dead. People usually don’t plan their death. And they don’t summarize their life right before. Even old people don’t finish all the things they were planning to do. Even if the literal end of someone’s life has already occurred, it wasn’t The End in the sense that we usually expect from the book. There is no closure, no satisfaction at the end of a human life. And making it look like there is on paper is a mistake.

The other day one young woman I happen to text sometimes on Instagram (let’s call her Clare) started to tell me the story of how she moved to another country. She met a foreign boy, she said, and fell in love instantly. She was so sure he was the one, she sold her apartment and all the stuff she had and moved to a country she had only visited once before. I thought: “Wow, amazing story to tell her grandchildren”. I happened to know that Clare was in a relationship, so I assumed that was the guy. So I congratulated her on such a clean, fairy-tale-like love story.

But it was not. Apparently, after a year in a new country, after spending most of her money and after burning all her bridges, Clare met someone else. There is no explanation for it. The first guy didn’t treat her badly, he also wasn’t completely different than she thought, there was no major conflict or unexpected evil twist. And still, Clare met someone else and left that first guy. Try to make a nice story out of it. Well, you can, but you would need to adjust it quite a bit.

Which means – change it. Which means – lie, or at the very least significantly manipulate reality.

Clare wrote to me that she still feels incredible shame and doesn’t like to tell this story to anyone. Because… she can’t really justify her decisions and can’t anyhow explain why things happened the way they did. But does she really need to feel shame? She didn’t lie to anyone. People break up. I don’t think we actually need a reason to do so, other than an unwillingness to be in the current relationship for any longer.

My theory is that a typical human life doesn’t make a good story. There are too many shades, too many random events, too many detours that take us off the main storyline. And there is also no Main Storyline. Or any storylines that you can take out of your life and tell as a nice, smooth narrative with a moral and structure.

And that is another thing I wanted to say. In the beginning I wrote that biographies make us question whether our own lives have any purpose or meaning. We are right to question it. Because I don’t think our lives have purpose or meaning. And neither are they supposed to.

Have you ever felt like you know what you want to do in life and then, a few years later realized that it is absolutely not what you want to do in life? Almost anyone has. Very few people find that One Thing (or That One Person) and stick with it forever. But that isn’t bad. Life is in constant movement, constant change - chaotic, very often random motion in time. Events of our lives don’t have to be a part of One Perfect Story; they don’t have to contribute to the Grand Purpose; they don’t even have to teach us anything.

We live our lives like they are meant to be written about later. I don’t think this is healthy for the majority of us.

The only absolute purpose of life is life itself - no additional meaning needed. If you stop looking at your life as a Story that someone has to write after your death, a lot of pressure will get released.

You no longer have to justify random detours and “wasted years”. Your every step no longer has to be a step in the right direction. And maybe you can just finally relax and be in the moment. 

How Are You Handling It? | An Illustrated Column By Ezra W Smith

What a month, huh?

As a person who is overwhelmed easily, I tried to stay offline as much as I could. I was never really reading the news that much, but eventually I stopped going to my usual information sources as well, because… guess what! Even blogs about art and crafts eventually started to only talk about COVID-19. Even lesbian podcasts, even sustainable fashion brands… I couldn’t take it anymore. So I replaced podcasts with audiobooks, and decided to only check the official recommendations of the country of my residence once per two days to know what is going on.

Another hard thing was that the majority of people (at least on social media) seemed to mostly be dealing with boredom and isolation. While I was still working as usual from home plus trying to homeschool my seven-year-old. For the last 3 weeks I was doing two full time jobs at the same time, keeping my home clean and preparing food, and taking care of 2 pets (one with chronic health issues). I wasn’t bored. I was scared and overwhelmed and stressed and under so much pressure. I wanted to yell at people— “what is wrong with you! How can you be tired of doing nothing! What the hell! Your only job is keeping yourselves entertained! This is not a real struggle!”

However I didn’t yell at anyone, even on the internet. In fact I didn’t even complain to any of my friends or anyone else about my situation. I decided that devaluing other people’s struggle in these difficult times is cruel and unproductive. Also I happened to have a child reasonably early in life, so now I find myself in a situation where I have a primary-schooler, but none of my friends have any kids at all and are maybe just starting to think about it now. So I knew nobody would relate. People would feel bad for me, but would not know what to say. Awkward. So I didn’t talk to anyone. Instead I stopped checking my Instagram, stopped listening to podcasts, stopped texting people and focused on actually doing my 2 jobs. Long story short, I survived. And this weekend spring break started so I no longer have to homeschool my child. For the whole week! What a lucky girl I am.

After this quick update on my life, let me finally get to the point. In this column I meant to talk not about myself (for once), but about a friend of mine. Let’s call her Magda.

Magda is the head of an animal shelter. She collects cats and dogs from the streets, takes care of their health, spays or neuters them at the vet clinic, and finds lovely new homes for these animals. The shelter can only function because of the volunteers - people who choose to spend their free time helping this animals, feeding them, socializing with them, giving them the love and attention they need. However, in this difficult situation we all found ourselves in, the government has decided to forbid for now any volunteering that is not connected to COVID-19. And so the shelter had to be closed for the time being. This is how Magda ended up with 6 dogs in a two-bedroom apartment.

But taking care of the animals, managing volunteers, buying supplies for the shelter, is not all of Magda’s job. She also needs to get money for the shelter. Somehow.

In order to do so, Magda has a very beautiful Instagram account where she shares professionally done photos of animals, tells their stories, and encourages people to donate money for the shelter and adopt a pet. And she has to continue to do that now as well. Because even though the shelter is shut down, the rent for it has to be paid, and medications for sick pets have to be purchased.

Three weeks into quarantine, Magda posted to the shelter’s Instagram account a beautiful picture of her, sitting on the couch, surrounded by five sleeping dogs. Her stylish apartment looked amazing, there was a beautiful antique lamp next to the couch. It looked like a cover of a magazine. She and the dogs looked so peaceful and relaxed.

I commented “beautiful”. A second later I got a message from Magda saying “call me.”

I dialed her number. She was crying, several dogs were barking in the background. And then she told me what kind of hell she had been in for the last couple of weeks. So the shelter was closed. She had 6 dogs at home who didn’t really like each other. Well, not all of them.

More than once a day there was a fight. More than once a day she would fail to take a certain dog out on time and they would poop or pee in the apartment. More than once a day an aggressive dog that is basically living in her bathroom was having a nervous breakdown, throwing itself against the bathroom door, and growling for 15-25 minutes straight. They peed on the couch, they made holes in her blanket, and they destroyed her absent boyfriend’s favorite shoes. So now she thinks he’ll break up with her when he comes back (the guy is quarantining with his parents in the countryside). And meanwhile, Magda is not mad at the dogs at all; she is exhausted.

She ran out of photos to post on Instagram from before, and so she is trying to photograph those 6 dogs that she currently has in the house. She basically cleans one little area of the house at a time, then tricks some dog to go there with tasty food and takes a picture. She doesn’t want people to see the chaos in her house. Because… well it is humiliating. She is ashamed of what her cute apartment has become.

She doesn’t want to discourage people from adopting animals from the shelter by showing them how hard it can be.

That conversation made me think of a certain chapter of the book about minimalism I am currently reading. It’s called “The More of Less” by Joshua Becker. The chapter was basically about how comparing ourselves to others makes us feel embarrassed by all the wrong things. Joshua basically writes about how people feel bad about not having as “nice” (meaning expensive) things as people around them. Not looking successful. Not looking respectable.

We get embarrassed that our clothes are not from the right brands (whether it’s luxury brands or sustainable ones), that our vehicles cost less then our neighbors’, or that our houses are smaller than our guests’.

I will be the first to confess feeling bad about all of these things. My daughter is going to a private school. It is a priority for me to give her a healthy and stress-free environment to study with fewer people in class, professional staff who are well-paid and love kids, and a psychologist available to her at all times. My school experience was a horrifying nightmare with hardcore bullying and exhausted teachers who worked long hours and got very little money for their jobs, who had miserable lives and were incapable of liking children at that point. My gentle, shy daughter cannot go throw this, I decided once and for all. But omg! How difficult it is for me to afford it. All of the other parents are 10-15 years older than me - I assume they were making money in their 20s and 30s and then had kids. I feel ashamed of my tiny apartment when other parents bring their children for playdates. I feel weird saying I don’t have a car so I can’t drive my daughter to their three-floor house outside of the city. I feel bad about my worn carpet and the fact that I don’t have a dryer. I am so not like them.

Joshua writes about how our current culture normalizes the pursuit of appearances, possessions, and selfish gain. I would just add that we are basically forced to live up to this universal idea of success: a nice clean (big enough) house, stylish clothes, productivity, financial security. We don’t think our lives are worth showing to others if we don’t at least look like we have achieved that mythical “success”. I think it is very much applicable to Magda’s or, for that matter, my situation.

Joshua writes, “…this feeling of embarrassment stems from our baseline understanding of normal. Nobody feels embarrassed for just being normal. Yet our understanding of normal is entirely subjective, based on the measurements most often defined by the social groups with which we surround ourselves.”

Magda is not feeling normal at the moment because she took foster dogs in, something she is always asking other people to do, but she can’t handle it. She is failing at  being happy with these dogs. And of course she was never advocating adopting 6 incompatible dogs at the same time to a small apartment. But I can see how that might feel like a failure to her.

I don’t feel normal at the moment because I am supposed to be bored, and I am supposed to turn this boredom into productivity. That’s what everyone else, it seems, has been doing. I am supposed to be writing a book or drawing a graphic novel that will make me famous. And instead I am so tired I don’t remember who I am anymore, and wearing the same sweatpants for 16 days in a row.

And on a bigger scale, I don’t feel normal because I find myself among people who actually can afford private school without major sacrifices, who maybe had a better start in life or just more time to build a career and make money before they had kids than I did.

I feel unrelatable. I feel like I'm a failure.

However Joshua continues in the book: “What if we are getting embarrassed over all the wrong things? What if instead of being embarrassed because our house seems too small, we became embarrassed over the amount of unused space.” Just think of all the electricity we spend to heat those huge houses we don’t need, and how that impacts our planet.

What if instead of being embarrassed over no car, we would be embarrassed by the amount of pollution our cars produce?

What if instead of being embarrassed by not being capable of buying a third LOL doll this year, we would be embarrassed by the amount of plastic we collect in our houses and its impact on our planet?

What if instead of being embarrassed by not having a clean house with six foster dogs that had no other place to go, we would be embarrassed by breeding even more dogs, buying them for their looks and kicking them out when they fail to fulfill our expectations of a perfect pet, then let people like Magda take care of the rest?

 “What if excess became the cause of embarrassment? And responsible living that championed generosity became the norm?” – Joshua concludes.

I am certain that both Magda and I suffer significantly more because we need to be handling everything perfectly and also are expected to let everyone else know how perfectly we are handling it. The reality is that we are not handling it perfectly.

And that’s okay. It’s a difficult, unusual, weird stressful time. And not all of us have to handle it with grace. Some of us are just going to be exhausted and have a messy house. And I think it’s okay. It’s not our jobs to fulfill other people’s expectations of how we are supposed to be handling it. 

Our only job is to survive.

More Time & Less Stuff | An Illustrated Column By Ezra W Smith

By no means am I this fancy person who loves shopping. Until recently when thinking of the person who might have too many things, I was imagining Cher from the movie “Clueless”. I love Cher dearly, but she is not someone I can easily identify with. She is young, I am 30. She has money, I have rent that eats 60% of everything I make every month. I shop in vintage and secondhand stores (mostly due to lack of funds), I watched “True Cost” four times, I live in a small apartment with two other people, and I don’t have a separate room for my clothes like Carrie Bradshaw.

Ezra W Smith

And still, somehow, I have too many things. Not just clothes. But also clothes.

I have moved four times to another country in the last decade, and every time there were a few boxes of clothes I donated or threw away. Clothes accumulate wherever I live. Just like dust, appearing slowly but undeniably until you can’t breathe anymore.

And 80% of the clothes are that annoying “not quite right” type. Pants that are comfortable but only if you don’t sit in them for two hours. A blouse that is just slightly too small, so it unbuttons itself right where my breasts are. Not often. But often enough that you are anxious the whole time you are wearing it. Shoes that leave your feet bleeding, but only if you walk for more than 2 bus stops. And you know that. But somehow you still end up walking for quite a bit.

I believe that the problem is not the amount of clothes, but the amount of those “not quite right” clothes. This is what makes you wonder what to wear for more than a few seconds and blankly stare at the open wardrobe.

Granted, I didn’t really spend that much money on those clothes but even (let’s say) a few dollars per item is a fair amount, considering that during my intense moving around I got rid of about 35 boxes of stuff. Would I want to have that money now? Absolutely.

But even if I was going to spend it… How many hours of therapy could I pay for with this money? Even if just a few, that could make my life much better. Maybe if I hadn’t spent that money on clothes, I could afford a pet, another living soul, whose company would significantly improve my mental health.

And another perspective on this: as Henry David Thoreau once said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” How many hours did I need to work to make that money? Quite a few. Was losing that precious time worth those clothes I don’t even remember now? We don’t buy things with money; we buy them with hours from our lives.

How many hours could I have not worked in the past if I hadn’t spent all of the money I was making on stuff I didn’t really need?

And the last thing. Did wearing or owning all those clothes make me happier? Uhm… I do not recall that.

Honestly, I don’t think there are people who are getting happier by buying stuff – no research ever supported that. It may result in temporary joy for some, but the happiness found in buying a new item rarely lasts longer than a few days. In my case, rather a few hours.

And every time I saw something I liked at the store, I was imagining the time and the place I would wear it. One time last year I was thinking for a couple of days how cool it would be to actually finally enroll in Ph.D. studies. I always wanted to be a doctor. Not a real doctor, just a “Dr.” before my name. Ross Geller type of doctor. And then I saw that brown jacket. I swear to god, just like in a movie, I saw that really nice, serious-looking brown suit jacket and I immediately imagined myself in a big auditorium teaching 1st-year university students.

I bought the jacket. And it’s a “not quite right” jacket (imagine that!). The sleeves are too long. I told myself I will take it to the tailor, but I probably won’t. 

This is a very toxic concept. Brands sell you your dreams, not the actual clothes. And I arrogantly thought I was not like that. They can’t sell me cheap fast-fashion crap by hiring a supermodel to advertise it. I don’t want to be a supermodel. I don’t want to walk on the streets of Paris, light as a butterfly and all men looking at me. I have been to Paris – it’s not my thing. I like my very not-model-like body, and I have no interest in attracting men.

I don’t even shop in mass market. But I am a product of the society I grew up in, I watch commercials, and I have dreams. The thing is, in very limited situations will a huge amount of clothes help us achieve those dreams.

I bought the jacket. Which might or might not be a big deal. I bought it in a secondhand store for relatively little money. Certainly nothing to beat myself up over. A better question is: did I enroll in Ph.D. studies? Nope, I did not.  

So my latest insight about shopping is not that it is preventing me from studying. I figured, the reason I didn’t try to buy less and move toward having a more minimalist wardrobe is the fact that always, for as long as I can remember, I have been rewarding myself with stuff.

And the opposite: deciding to not buy clothes always sounded like a restriction, a punishment. I never wanted the clothes; I wanted that immediate boost of joy and the feeling that I was moving toward my dreams.

And I was never thinking about how much space that stuff will take up in my home and in my life.

Recommendations:

“The Beauty Myth” Naomi Wolf, book.

BeMoreWithLess.com, site and newsletter.  

Episode “Minimalism” of the “Be Uncluttered” podcast.