Privilege and Perspective
- Addison Sadler
- May 27, 2020
- 4 min read
I had a therapy session today.
For 60 minutes, I discussed my current struggles. In fact, at the beginning of my session, my therapist said, “I find it interesting, Addie, that you have said the word ‘struggle’ three times in the past two minutes." That should tell you what my current state of mind has been.
I have been miserable throughout COVID season. As the most extroverted extrovert I know, it has been painful to be shut inside my house. By pain, I mean like a paper cut—with a piece of cardboard—between my toes. Multiple times over the past three months, I have felt lower than ever before. And that means something considering I survived my parents’ brutal divorce, years of estrangement from my family, and postpartum depression. Life is not all sunshine and rainbows, my friends, and I am living proof of that.
As I spoke to my therapist today, though, while frantically chipping old nail polish off my thumbnails, she asked me, “Why do you think you’re unhappy?”
For people who look at my life from the outside, it looks pretty great. I have an attractive, successful husband who is altogether respectful and a wonderful father. I have three energetic, intelligent, healthy children. I have a large house in the secluded countryside with views that would probably be described as “perfect to drink a cup of morning coffee and watch deer on the hillside” in a realty listing. I have a decent job with friendly coworkers at a revered institution which has kept me employed throughout the pandemic. So why am I so unhappy?
I don’t really know.
But as I spoke to my therapist, as I heard the things that emerged from my mouth, I connected the dots. I feel out of control, and I NEED control.
“Many people are suffering right now with this pandemic,” she explained. “It has uprooted so many things in our lives—and quickly! It’s not at all surprising that you’re feeling depressed and anxious.”
I talked to her about the tightening in my chest that occurs when I begin thinking about what to make for supper. I explained how the incessant screeching from my kids—sometimes simultaneously—makes me want to scream into a pillow. I spoke about my fight to get exercise in daily and how as my weight slowly increases, so do my moods. “And there is nowhere to go! Nobody to see!” It feels like life is no longer free. We’re all stuck in this limbo, and there is no end in sight.
How thoroughly heartbreaking, amirite?
Later this afternoon, after expressing my work frustrations with a few coworkers and feeling like I am going to just live out the rest of this pandemic as a modern-day summer Scrooge, I peeled myself off the sofa and decided to pause Dr. Phil for a much-needed walk.
I started my walk listening to a true crime podcast, Sword and Scale (my usual go-to), but decided to switch to something more lighthearted (per my therapist’s instructions). I listened to a podcast entitled Mobituaries, hosted by Mo Rocca. In this series, Rocca offers lengthy obituaries of people, ideas, and things that have died—literally and figuratively—using excerpts of old audio and interviews with survivors. For today’s walk, I tuned into an episode about Anna May Wong.
Admittedly, I had never heard of Anna May Wong and her contribution to American cinema. She was a Chinese-American who was born in the United States in 1905. By age 17, she began her career starring in silent films, but she was almost always cast as an Asian woman who could not obtain a romantic relationship with a white man, and her characters typically died.
With other experts on the topic, Rocca discussed how amazing it was that Anna May Wong, a woman who was not allowed to kiss white actors on camera, who was scrutinized and badgered every time she left the United States, who actually lost the role of a Chinese woman to a WHITE WOMAN in the 1935 film The Good Earth because she looked TOO CHINESE, was still motivated and talented enough to become one of America’s leading ladies at a time when Asian-American discrimination was at an all-time high in the United States.
So that got me thinking.
Her whole life, Wong dealt with white people telling her NO. She couldn’t control her background. She couldn’t control the movies that were popularized in the United States. She couldn’t control World War II or anti-Asian sentiments or typecasting or laws that violated her rights. She couldn’t control how she looked, her skin color, or the shape of her eyes.
But for many Asian-Americans, she was a ray of hope. She was a face of an ethnic group that had been mistreated. Little Chinese American girls looked up to her and saw that she worked hard and rose above the odds, and she went down in the history books.
It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?
Then, I considered some recent events. An international student staying with me who dealt with nasty racist threats only a mile from my driveway. The white woman in New York who called the police as a weapon against a black man doing absolutely nothing wrong. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of two white cops.
I think, “What the hell am I complaining about anyway?”
It’s sobering to think how different life could be for each of us if we were born with just one change to our identities. What if I had been born in a different country? What if I had been an orphan? What if I had a birth defect? What if my skin color wasn’t white?
No, really. WHAT IF?
For so many people today, safety, health, respect, and prosperity are not granted. For Anna May Wong, George Floyd, Matthew Shepard, Emmett Till, and countless others, they struggle in ways I will never struggle. While I feel “out of control” of my life because of this pandemic (I know, it seems so petty now), there are millions—BILLIONS of people in the world who ARE, in fact, out of control. And not because of a pandemic, but because of ridiculous social constructions (RACISM) which mean nothing and do nothing but cause hate and evil and violence.
And I think it’s time people who are now aware of our privilege (like me) do something about it and stop whining about our “struggles”.
We are in control of our awareness and education.
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