We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.
Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.
Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.
You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.
At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.
A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.
The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.
At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.
There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.
A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.
The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.
They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.
Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.
Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.
Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).
The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.
Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.
The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.
Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:
Provo, Utah
Bismarck, North Dakota
Owensboro, Kentucky
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Rutland, Vermont
Southlake, Texas
Findlay, Ohio
Florence, Alabama
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Medford, Oregon
Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:
Dearborn, Michigan
Flushing, Queens, New York
Lowell, Massachusetts
Anchorage, Alaska
Houston, Texas
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
Oakland, California
Clarkston, Georgia
Garden City, Kansas
Miami, Florida
Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.
This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.
The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.
Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?
In the early 90s (in my mid 20s), I was studying guitar at Musicians Institute in L.A. Our improvisation class was taught by a fusion guy with the obligatory curly mullet—nice enough, but also kind of a doofus. Our assignment was to bring in a recording of a guitar improvisation to listen to and analyze.
I was trying to understand free improvisation at the time, and I brought in this track by eastbay stalwarts (this was before I moved to the eastbay) Henry Kaiser, Hilary & John Hanes, with John Abercrombie. I thought it was ‘fusiony’ enough that the instructor would find some way to talk about the logic of the thing.
He cued up the CD and the sound came over the speakers. I could see his face trying to figure out what to make of it.
About halfway through, he turned the volume down, gave kind of a dopey smile to let us know he was kind of kidding, but mostly not, and said,
“You call that music?”
My (unknown to me at the time) autistic brain went into analysis-and-resolution mode, which can chew through a moment like this in milliseconds. Without missing a beat, my unconsidered response was,
“You call that a haircut?”
By which I meant no ill will whatsoever. I was just pointing out that one’s musical choices are not unlike one’s tonsorial decisions. But, of course, there wasn’t time to give the backstory of the decision-making process that caused my response.
There was a long pause. Then suddenly, the tension was broken as everyone in the room, besides the instructor and myself, erupted into laughter. The instructor and I just looked at one another with curiosity, awe, and a sense that we would be laughing as well if we were just witnesses, and not protagonists.
After that, thankfully, there were no hard feelings, at least that I was aware of. There was a quiet peace between us, even when I would ask overly complex (unknown to me at the time) autistic questions.
Actually, now that I’m remembering, he told me once after that that he had a dream where I was reaching my arms out to him, and pleading, “Daddy! Daddy!” I remember masking heavily (before I knew that was a thing), and trying to hear his dream in a neutral way, and not hear it as creepy, but to respect his experience, and not react.
Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of that episode of that story.
Some of you have made music with me over the years. You know what being in the room with me is like. Since my birthday is coming up, I’m hoping you’ll take a moment to hear what I’m asking for.
This past year, I decided to start something new. I wanted to nurture spaces that are explicitly neurodiversity-affirming. I wanted to make music that reflects the histories and cultures of the communities I’m in—not a fixed repertoire, but a living one. I wanted more instruments, wider age ranges, and a room that doesn’t sort people by developmental milestone or tax bracket. I wanted people to be able to attend as often as they like without paying more.
And I wanted to charge less than it costs to run the program, on purpose, knowing I’d be fundraising constantly to fill the gap. For years I taught in programs I couldn’t have afforded myself. That felt like a problem worth solving.
Enter imeetswe. We’re in our first year, and this is our Spring fundraising appeal. It would be a bait-and-switch to offer sliding scale classes and then only appeal at fundraising time to folks that are enrolled, so I’m reaching out to you. If any of this resonates—as a donor, a sharer, or just someone who wants to know more—I’d love for you to take a look, and share widely. Thank you!
Three conversations happen regularly in our community.
A colleague texts: “what are you charging for lessons?”
Another sends an email: “a school offered me this schedule and this salary—is that reasonable?”
A third says, in person, something harder to articulate: “I feel like I need to charge more for a private gig, but I don’t know how to explain why.”
These are not three different questions. They are the same conversation, framed in different contexts—and the reason it keeps coming up is that most of us learned to price our work by looking sideways at what others were charging, or by accepting what we were offered, rather than starting from what we actually need to live.
Our starting point needs to be what an artist (or other part-time gig workers) needs to live—not what any particular institution, context, or tradition has decided an artist’s time is worth.
Start with the number
A living wage in the Bay Area—meaning housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and modest participation in ordinary life—runs roughly $100,000 per year for a single adult. That number will be uncomfortable for some. Sit with the discomfort for a moment before moving on, because the discomfort itself is information.
The numbers bear this out. A one-bedroom apartment in Oakland or Berkeley—the most affordable corners of the inner East Bay—currently runs between $2,000 and $2,300 per month, with Berkeley averaging around $2,270 and Oakland around $1,980 for a one-bedroom. That is before utilities, renters insurance, or the reality that many working artists need a dedicated space for practice or instrument storage that a standard one-bedroom does not accommodate. In San Francisco proper, a one-bedroom averages $3,790—a number that effectively removes the city from consideration for an artist building a career from scratch.
Food for a single adult cooking most meals runs $450 to $600 per month in groceries, with monthly grocery bills for a single adult ranging from $400 to $600 depending on shopping habits and dietary preferences—and that figure assumes discipline and time, two things a fractured freelance schedule does not reliably provide. Add modest dining out and the occasional meal grabbed between gigs, and a realistic food budget lands closer to $650.
Healthcare is where the arithmetic becomes genuinely alarming for independent workers. The enhanced federal subsidies that had made Covered California plans affordable for freelancers expired at the end of 2025 and were not renewed. For those earning above 400% of the federal poverty level—roughly $58,320 for a single adult—the full unsubsidized premium now applies, which in many Bay Area metro plans exceeds $700 to $900 per month for a single adult on a mid-tier plan. An artist earning $100,000 gross is above that threshold. Health insurance alone, at the lower end of that range, costs $8,400 per year before a single co-pay or prescription.
Transportation compounds everything. An artist who carries instruments—a cello, a keyboard, percussion equipment, a sound system—cannot reliably depend on BART and a bicycle. A car means insurance, registration, gas, and maintenance: conservatively $400 to $500 per month. Going car-free is possible, but transit gaps are real—and the rideshare charges that fill them have a way of arriving all at once, on the weeks you can least afford them.
Then there is the tax structure of self-employment itself. A freelance artist earning $100,000 gross pays self-employment tax of approximately $14,130—the employer and employee share of Social Security and Medicare combined—before federal and California income taxes. Total tax liability at that income level runs roughly $30,000 to $34,000 annually depending on deductions. Take-home is closer to $66,000 to $70,000.
Run the budget: $2,200 rent, $650 food, $800 healthcare, $450 transportation, $200 utilities and phone, $150 in professional expenses—instrument maintenance, strings, reeds, music, scores—and $25 in renters insurance. That is $4,475 per month, or $53,700 per year, before a dollar of savings, before an emergency, before a plane ticket to see family, before anything goes wrong. At $66,000 take-home, what remains is $12,300—just over $1,000 per month—for everything else a life requires.
$100,000 gross is not wealth in the Bay Area. It is the arithmetic floor of a life that does not require choosing between healthcare and rent.
We are going to work backward from $100,000.
A sustainable working year for an artist looks something like this: forty working weeks, thirty hours of paid work per week. That is 1,200 billable hours annually—not the hours you spend preparing, maintaining your instruments, traveling between gigs, managing your schedule, or recovering from an intensive week. Just the hours a client is present and paying.
$100,000 divided by 1,200 hours is $83.33.
We’ll call it $85. The extra $1.67 per hour is not generosity—it is a small buffer against the gap between a clean calculation and a life that does not run on clean calculations. Instruments need repair. Gigs fall through. A student cancels the week you needed them not to. The $85 baseline assumes that a working artist’s year will be, in some measure, imperfect—and builds that assumption into the rate rather than leaving the artist to absorb it after the fact.
That is your baseline hourly rate. Not your asking price for everything—as we will see, some work warrants more—but the floor below which a straight hourly arrangement stops supporting a dignified life.
Not all hours are equal
Here is what the baseline assumes: that you work a relatively clean thirty hours per week during working weeks, with predictable scheduling, minimal dead time between commitments, and enough calendar continuity that you can plan your life.
Most of us do not work under those conditions. And the gap between the baseline assumption and the actual texture of freelance arts work is where the money disappears.
Consider three types of client relationships, and what each one actually costs you.
The single-hour client wants one hour, at a time that works for them, possibly in a location that requires travel, possibly with an instrument you have to transport. That hour does not exist in isolation. It brackets dead time on either side. It may strand you somewhere between other commitments. It requires the same preparation as a longer session. And if it falls in the middle of your day, it fractures the working block that might otherwise have generated two or three additional hours of income. A single-hour commitment carries a real cost beyond the hour itself, and your rate should reflect that. A reasonable premium is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty percent above your baseline—not punitive, but honest.
The contiguous block client offers two or more consecutive hours in the same location, without travel between. This is the condition under which the baseline rate makes sense. The overhead is amortized across the block. Your preparation serves multiple hours. Your day remains legible. This client is not doing you a favor—they are simply meeting the basic condition that makes the baseline viable. The baseline rate is appropriate here. It is also the floor. Volume alone is not a reason to discount.
The multi-block client—a school, a program, a recurring institutional relationship—offers the most, and should be asked for the most in one specific sense: not a lower rate, but a more useful schedule. An institution that can offer you Tuesday and Thursday mornings, consistently, across a full session, is giving you something more valuable than money alone. They are giving you a scaffold on which to build the rest of your calendar. Adjacent blocks from other clients can attach to that scaffold. Your week becomes a coherent structure rather than a collection of isolated obligations. When negotiating with institutions, the scheduling ask is as important as the rate conversation.
One of the most powerful things an artist can do for their own calendar is to stop building it around individual client availability and start building it around their own working architecture. This means choosing your times first—the blocks that fit your energy, your transit patterns, your instrument load, your recovery needs—and then inviting clients into those times, rather than the reverse. A client who asks “when are you available?” is asking a reasonable question. The answer that serves you is not a list of every open hour in your week. It is an offer: I teach Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in this location, at these times. Here is what is open. That framing is not inflexibility. It is the structure that makes a sustainable practice possible.
Group instruction fits naturally into this architecture, and it is worth saying plainly to prospective clients why. A group lesson is not a compromised version of a private lesson—it is a different and in many respects richer learning environment. Students in a shared setting learn not just from the instructor but from one another. A beginner watching an intermediate student work through a passage learns something about the path ahead. An advanced student asked to demonstrate or explain consolidates their own understanding. Mixed-age and mixed-skill groupings, far from being logistically inconvenient, replicate the way musical knowledge has always actually traveled—through communities, through listening, through proximity to people at different stages of the same journey. Peer-to-peer learning is not a pedagogical concession. It is a feature.
For the artist, the case is also straightforwardly economic. Three students in a ninety-minute block, each paying a group rate, generate more income per hour than one student in the same time—while requiring a single preparation, a single location, and a single slot in the calendar. The efficiencies are real and they compound across a well-structured week. When you share this with prospective clients, you are not upselling them or managing them. You are inviting them into a model that works better for everyone: for the artist who needs a coherent schedule, for the student who benefits from a learning community, and for the parent or patron who is, whether they know it yet or not, investing in something more durable than a transaction between two people in a room.
This framing belongs in your intake language from the beginning. Before the first lesson, before the first invoice, a prospective client should understand how you work—not as a disclaimer, but as part of what makes working with you worth it. Something as simple as: My teaching is organized around group and paired sessions, which I find produce better outcomes for students and allow me to maintain a sustainable practice. I’d love to talk about how that might work for your situation. That sentence does several things at once. It positions group learning as a pedagogical choice, not a scheduling workaround. It signals that you have a practice with a structure, not a collection of available hours. And it opens a conversation rather than closing one.
The Bay Area layer
Everything above assumes a relatively frictionless working life. The Bay Area adds friction at every point.
Housing costs are the most visible part. At $100,000 gross, after taxes, a Bay Area artist is navigating one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. The living wage figure is not generous—it is the minimum required to remain housed and functional.
Transportation compounds this. Getting from one gig to another takes longer here, costs more, and frequently involves carrying instruments or materials that make transit difficult. A lesson in someone’s home in the hills is not the same as a lesson in a studio two blocks from your house. The travel is real work, and it belongs in your rate calculation.
Space is the hidden variable most artists underestimate. When a client invites you into their home or their school, they are providing infrastructure—a room, a piano, a floor. When they do not, and you are expected to provide or rent space, the math changes dramatically. Studio rental in the Bay Area can run $40-60 per hour or more. That cost does not disappear because it is inconvenient to discuss. An hourly rate that does not account for space rental is subsidizing the client’s infrastructure out of your own pocket.
Finally, schedule density. The Bay Area’s geography and the complexity of people’s lives means that filling a room—building a class, a cohort, a consistent group—is genuinely hard. When you find a time and place where people can reliably show up, that configuration has real value. Protecting it is not rigidity. It is asset management.
A note on scheduling as access
Many artists in our community are neurodivergent—autistic, ADHD, or both. The overlap between neurodivergence and a life in the arts is not coincidental. The same pattern-recognition, intensity of focus, and sensitivity that makes the work possible also shapes what sustainable working conditions look like.
For autistic artists, regular schedules and replicable routines are not preferences—they are the infrastructure of functional work. Unpredictable scheduling is not merely inconvenient; it carries a cognitive load that accumulates across the week and affects the quality of the work itself.
For artists with ADHD, intense focus periods need protection on both ends. A schedule that allows for deep immersion followed by genuine recovery is not indulgence—it is the condition under which the best work happens. A scattered calendar of single-hour commitments spread across the week is, in this light, not just financially inefficient. It is architecturally hostile to the work.
This is worth naming not as a disclosure but as a design principle. A schedule built around predictable blocks, protected recovery time, and calendar adjacency is better for neurodivergent artists. It is also, it turns out, better for everyone. The neurodivergent case just makes the logic visible.
Bringing it back to the three conversations
Your colleague who texted asking what you charge: now you have a number to start from, and a way to explain it. $85 is the floor for a contiguous block. Single-hour work, travel, space, and schedule friction each adjust it upward.
Your colleague evaluating a school’s offer: the salary question cannot be answered without knowing the schedule. How many hours per week? Are they contiguous? Is travel involved? Does the schedule allow for adjacent income? A number that looks reasonable in isolation may not survive contact with those questions.
Your colleague who felt she needed to charge more for a private gig but couldn’t explain why: she was right. She was absorbing travel, instrument transport, space provision, and schedule fragmentation—and pricing none of it. The discomfort was her knowledge of the real cost, looking for language.
The discomfort was understandable. The words just needed to catch up. What follows is the language our community has been reaching for—a framework built not from what the market offers, but from what we actually need to live, work, and keep showing up.
Let’s take a moment to say something out loud: there’s a lot of terrible writing in the world; and a lot of terrible writing is one of the reasons many of our kids are not excited
to sit and squint and parse, under fluorescent lighting, at desks that wreck their bodies, in rows of kids, not allowed to wiggle or whisper or pat a beat to read along to. Somewhere,
someone decided that rhythm and rhyme were not important enough to take the time to craft. Here’s what that someone wasn’t paying attention to: Rhythm and rhyme unlock the neurotransmitters;
Dyspraxics, aphants, dysgrahics, and dyslexics are often able to entrain to a rhythm, or find a rhyme, if they know that one is coming: (you’ve hopefully had that experience, haven’t you?, when
the person reading leaves out the last word of the poem, and the word pops in your mind?) (If you haven’t, you should try it with a friend). When you recognize that the Odyssey and the Iliad
were part of an oral tradition, encoded in rhythms and rhymes, and familiar phrases, that invited memory to do the work of storytelling, passed from tongue to tongue for about as long
as Europeans have occupied the Americas– you might start to wonder which skills we should be focusing on, when passing information along to our kids, that we hope will be memorable.
You can do the human math–(I’ve done it, and with confidence can say what I’m going to say)–I guarantee you: many, if not most of the poets and writers of ages past were people
who would have, today, been branded as neurodivergent; for whom encoding a human event in a rhythm was just the way they knew their brain would remember it; and in doing so, made the event accessible
to shared, collective memory. ’cause if you listen, you’ll hear the way these bite-sized pieces flow; the calming force of human expectation, and satisfaction of expectation, over,
and over, and over, and over, and over again, like a crocheted blanket, wrapped around your shoulders, that your grandmother made in a ridiculously short amount of time. (who has time for that, these days?)
When a child grows up in an environment where there is only one source of support, and that source of support is unpredictable, unstable, and capable of harm, the child’s identity becomes tied to that of the person they rely on. They may learn that if they go along with their caregiver, their needs will not be met. In this case, it can actually be a successful adaptation to learn to counter the caregiver, if that means getting their needs met.
The problem arises when this child never gets the experience of being supported by a field–by the wider community. They lose their ability to form bonds with a variety of people who might meet their needs in more healthy ways. Their whole identity calcifies into a constant state of opposition to the only person they recognize–their unstable, unpredictable, possibly abusive caregiver.
Sound familiar? We see this type of dynamic within families all the time. We also see it in our national politics, and more and more on the international stage as well. Leaders and governments are galvanized around opposition to some party, population, or set of policies. In doing so, they lose their ability to live in the world of phenomena: the only thing that exists is that to which they are opposed. It’s toxic, maddening, heartbreaking – overwhelming to anyone paying attention.
So what do we do, when this state of affairs arises? Providing coherence, context, nuance only gives more information to be pushed against. In psychology, there is the idea of triangulation: ceasing to engage in dyadic entrapments and focusing instead on a shared field of engagement.
We have had many opportunities to form cross-cognitive bonds with those who are oppositional by constitution: nuclear proliferation, climate change, Covid 19: these all appear to be the kinds of existential threats that we can unite around. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive bias, not a rational train of thought. None of these threats are fast-moving enough that we can recognize the danger before forming an opinion about it. This opinion gets formed by the same framework that locks us into oppositional mode in the first place.
I’m more and more convinced that only a fast-moving apex predator like Godzilla will be recognized as a force of triangulation that we can unite around opposing. In fact, the original Godzilla film from 1954 had a humanist, anti-nuclear subtext, which, of course, was stripped out when the film entered the US market.
Perusing reddit today, I noticed someone posted about wanting to start a men’s group and asking for fun ideas. Many of the comments were followed by an enthusiastic “yes!” or other signifiers of feeling seen. Nothing in the post spoke to my identity or special interests.
I don’t point this out to knock anyone’s interests. On the contrary, seeing people feeling inspired to get together and create community is one of my special interests, so I shared in the joy, even though I recognized that this particular group would not be a group where I would feel seen.
And I recognize that even though I present as a man, if I were to advertise and start a men’s group, both the people who showed up and myself would likely end up feeling awkward. I would likely have to do a lot of masking to appear as if I was feeling in my element, which pretty much defeats the purpose of a support group based on gender presentation.
On a whim, I did a search for [women’s group] in the same subreddit. There were several different threads, and, unsurprisingly to me, the activities and issues being described felt much more akin to my nature. I didn’t get that feeling of “yes!,” though, or if I started to it was tempered by the understanding that regardless of how I feel on the inside, or the activities I enjoy, or the topics I like to talk about, I likely would not be regarded as a part of the community were I to attend unannounced. I get it, but again, I’m left feeling unseen.
In my life, one of the most-asked questions I’ve received about my identity is “are you gay?” Remember, gender and sexual preference are not the same. I think what people might be picking up on is that while I present as a man, I don’t feel that I inhabit a male identity that resembles the men I see around me. Does that make me a trans person. I don’t know, honestly.
Because gender is a social construct, the rules of gender presentation are created (mostly without awareness) by the community. For example, there might be a group for trans adults who would hear my description of myself and feel that I am like them – we see one another and feel seen – we are relationally similar. Another group of trans people might have a different sense of what it means to be trans – they might recognize me more were I to feel a strong need to present on the outside in ways that align with my feminine insides. They might tell me, “you’re not trans: you’re bigender.” I might take their word for it.
Because gender is a social construct, my autistic mind generally either doesn’t see the structure that people around me see (because I just see information, and coherence comes later), or, seeing it, immediately tries to deconstruct it and question it’s validity. When people ask me things like “are you gay?,” I take it kind of like people asking “how are you?” From years of trial-and-error, I’ve recognized that in most cases, people don’t really want to know the answer. They want to feel safe. They want to get just enough information so that they know how to be and not offend anyone. They want to be able to place me, within the list of categories they have devised for people to fit into.
More and more, I’m comfortable being unplaced. I recognize that it’s a valid and valuable state of being. (Maybe that makes me nonbinary. You’d have to decide: I’ll totally come to your nonbinary social group, if you recognize me as such and invite me). I suspect that if more people were comfortable being unplaced, being who they are, then there would not be as much controversy around what to me is a thoroughly uncontroversial reality. Some people take their social constructs very seriously, and conformity is a life-or-death affair. When I notice someone like this, from my unplaced state (these are often the people who ask if I’m gay, as if they would be totally unphased if I walked up to them and asked them if they are straight), I find myself relying on my white, male, large-bearded-man privilege (regardless of feeling like a terrified little girl inside), and, when the question comes, I often will ask them, “what makes you ask?,” or, “what does gay mean?” This is a much more efficient way of shutting down an awkward conversation than just not engaging. Were I smaller, and more feminine, and non-white, I might not feel as safe to be that direct.
And that’s been the case for most of my life: my big giant man disguise helps keep the frail, frightened girl inside safe, protected from the harsh realities that girls face in our society. It’s kind of a remarkable arrangement, actually. Sometimes I do feel like it would be amazing to have a body manifest that appears the way my insides feel. And on the flip side, I think it would be amazing to feel what it was like on the inside for a person who thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world to show the fish they just caught on their dating profile – my body is well-suited for that mindset.
But mostly, I just think it’s a good idea to let people be who they see themselves to be – on the inside, on the outside, relationally, emotionally, all the ways. And to allow ourselves to be a little unplaced, ourselves.
Who am I? That’s up to us. Let’s try to make it a pleasant arrangement.
