ACCOZZAGLIA

photo: ©© Robert Bejil

My grandmother, rest her soul, was fond of saying, “If you don’t have something nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.” I used to think her refrain was just folksy nagging, but I came to know what she meant. I’d be inclined to swap “nice” for “useful”, “productive”, “wise”, “informative”, “supportive” and so on, but her core message was a plea for civility.

Depression is a neurochemical response to dysfunctional circumstances, especially ones which aren’t mending themselves on their own. It’s often a response to systemic social dysfunctions beyond one’s control. Helplessness facilitates stress. And if your body rolls that way, then stress ignites depression.

I’ve lived with depression since I was nine, so nothing about this is new. It trained me to adapt to situations which are largely beyond my control. I always look for workarounds whenever wherever it is I want to go is being obstructed. Finding the workarounds is what prevents the depression, but the workarounds can really get you to fall behind as other people around you don’t face such obstructions.

The path I travelled to settle here, for instance, spanned eight years of incredible obstructions and flung me out to places I’d never have anticipated. Even so, I made the most of temporary locales like Minneapolis and Seattle. I finally got to Toronto and am still glad of it, but along the way, some of the obstructions which redirected me to those cities felled me with crushing depression. I had to wait for something — anything — to yield just enough to let me find new workarounds. I often sought outside help.

Missing since January

Having to adapt to social obstructions isn’t novel. When so much of the systemic stuff around me isn’t, however, bothering to mend into something better so that more people are welcome to fully participate, then something is clearly wrong. When where I’m trying to go is being obstructed by other parties, and when I know that people who casually say they have my back are demonstrably standing in the way, I get overwhelmed and frustrated. It’s a compulsory Twister game of one when I don’t even enjoy playing Twister.

This is where I’ve been since January. A major social event that month showed me, quite plainly, how the situational obstructions I’ve tried to work around in Toronto aren’t improving. It was an evening when the hobnobbing revealed so much of what’s socially broken around here.

Since these obstructions haven’t budged at all, bending and twisting as a precondition just to be present has gotten to be too much.

I’ll be frank: I’m still broken and not really healing very well. I know anecdotally how very little has changed. It’s only been a few weeks, so I know not to expect a miracle. I continue to feel mistrustful of these social circumstances. It has definitely involved a few of the personalities who are regulars on Twitter and elsewhere amidst the so-called Torontorati.

Since January, I’ve felt stunningly helpless and, at times, incredibly angry. It took me weeks just to find words to articulate what I’ve been feeling.

Conditions like bald-faced misogyny; the maintaining of a distinctly Toronto-styled conservatism (perhaps an Orange Order holdover of keeping things tidy, traditional, and conventional); and the collective apologias for toxic characters within our local community (no, not Mammoliti, the Fords, or Sue-Ann) continue to produce a social climate which makes it unsafe and, at times, inhospitable for me and for at least a few other people who’ve confided that they’re feeling several of the same social hostilities. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that there are many other people who feel similarly hog-tied.

But certainly we can do better, can’t we?

For a city which colloquially prides itself on being diverse, inclusive, imaginative, and even co-operative, we can do a lot better than this. We can, but we just aren’t. I’ve seen better. This hasn’t been it.

These past several weeks, I’ve spent time reading about topics like social intersectionality. As a queer woman, I must know that my peers are stepping to the plate responsively (and responsibly) — of their own volition — to make venues of participation and involvement less exclusive, less mono-cultured, and less hostile to individuals who experience the steepest of intersectional obstructions.

My peers must begin to understand what those obstructions mean functionally for someone who has no choice but to face them, and how this contrasts with those who benefit from being intersectionally unaffected by those obstructions. Like me, my peers have a responsibility to undermine from within the social intersections which have rewarded themselves but have penalized many others.

Why? Because this is a knowledge economy. When valuable knowledge is obstructed intersectionally, it impoverishes all of us.

It’s no longer acceptable to play oblivious or pretend that you don’t see this. It’s no longer okay to believe that just because you’ve seen someone in Toronto appear at a social event, come to City Council, or tweet on a subject, that their input is being taken as seriously by peers as your own — particularly when you enjoy a steep intersectional advantage they lack (like being white, a guy, straight, able-bodied, being cis, financially stable, a legal citizen, and so on — and especially all of these at once).

To be perfectly honest, if you’re someone who buys that some of your intersectional advantages don’t count or matter all that much, then you probably don’t think very highly of me anyway (much less take anything I’ve written with much sincerity, such as this very blog post). That’s okay with me. I wish you the best, but you’re still a huge part of this problem. This won’t be the last you’ll hear of it.

Shape up, you guys (no, really)

I’ll explain another way.

If you don’t feel that it’s a big deal to speak down to someone with indisputably more knowledge on a subject or discipline than you (but who faces intersectional obstructions you don’t); if you believe your grasp of “common sense” on a topic must outweigh their track record and commitment to advancing a subject or discipline; or if you feel you’re qualified to speak authoritatively on behalf of other people with whom you share a single intersectional experience (like, “all women”, “all queer people”, and so on), then yes, you probably do need to make some social adjustments.

At the very least, it’s not a good idea to behave as if you know more than you actually do. It’s bad social form. This can also hurt people, even when you don’t mean for it to.

You have a responsibility to acquiesce gracefully to every person whose intersectional obstructions keep their indispensable experiences from being recognized. You shouldn’t be motivated by some idealized altruism. Rather, you should be motivated by an awareness that leaving things as-is might preserve your own intersectional security but diminishes the collective wisdom from peers you’ve pushed aside (or helped to maintain the social obstructions they still face while you move forward).

That’s what doing social justice is.

Receiving the wisdom of others’ experiences is what will enrich your own comprehension of the world around you, but this only works if you go through with making social conditions less hazardous and insurmountable for your peers in the first place.

Knowledge is a ladder. When collective contributions and participation from your own peers takes a beating, gets suppressed, or is disregarded, then our social impoverishment first becomes a pit, then a crater. We move further from a sky where the wisdom is. It’s antithetical to the social economy of knowledge inside which we are all now willing, even compulsory participants.

When our peers, who endure greater intersectional intersectional barriers than we do, can’t safely convey their experiences without being seared for it, then we all suffer.

To turn over this new leaf is to cut through obstructions

Today, April 15th, is my birthday. I’m known for lamenting it, but this year comes with a mortal reckoning and reflectiveness unlike any I have known. I’m trying to be brave by confronting what this day signifies.

April 15th is associated with milestones when ominous events concluded: the Titanic sinking; Abraham Lincoln dying; the Black Blizzard of 1935 winding down. But this date also has its better moments. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s birthdate. It’s also the day when Pol Pot finally died.

The 15th is also, incidentally, the day when Kodachrome film went on sale in 1935.

I want to think I’m doing well for age forty. I’m torn between knowing that statistically, I shouldn’t be alive, and knowing that the world around me nudges how I should be midway through a fulfilling career path, motherhood, and being settled down with a life partner. I seem to defy all of this.

So today, as a gift to you, I’ve begun something new. Actually, it’s several new things: three web sites.

Accozzaglia.ca

As you might be noticing, this site, Accozzaglia.ca, has a completely new look. It’s now a wealth of traces which speak to my several life experiences. There’s a story behind all of this.

There’s also a store. You can buy stuff from me now — shirts, buttons, photographic prints, and even song remixes.

So please. Go hog-wild.

Torontolo.gy

More importantly, though, a young egg of a new web site I’ve dreamt of realizing for a long time, Torontology, begins today. It’s being developed as a site of serious research, civic monitoring, and intersectional engagement on all matters relating to the whole city of Toronto.

Torontology has no budget, and all the people who have volunteered to add to its content development are doing so because they want to see a platform like this come into being. You’ll probably be reading from people whose names might not be familiar to you just yet. Eventually, I think they will be.

Torontology is a response to social obstructions I described earlier. I’m gingerly optimistic that Torontology will redirect around some of those intersectional obstructions and enable several brilliant minds who don’t get much traction with the publishing media presently serving Toronto.

For now, Torontology is a hatchling. It must learn to crawl before it can fly.

Denizen.TO

Denizen.TO, the web store which began as an ad hoc endeavour in 2010, will have a home later this week. No longer will there be a necessity to wait and hope for other online shops to open their doors to these items.

All the urban-oriented products I’ve quietly designed and honed since 2007 are now collected in one place.

Yes, I wish

My grandmother, who would be 88 now, passed away 15 years ago. She raised me during my final half of high school. She was not faultless, but she made up for some of her shortcomings during her final years.

She co-parented three children with a husband. Both were alcoholic. He died when I was little. She went into recovery when I was ten, but not before she brought out the worst in her alcoholic daughter — a mother who would later abuse, brainwash, and institutionalize me for being queer. Such was the plight of being in Texas during the 1980s, you see.

Considering the estrangement for coming out formally to my family once I reached adulthood, it explains why I learnt of her passing some eight months after the fact. Still, some two years before she died, she spoke with me on the phone and had something nice to say. So she said it:

She accepted me and she loved me. As someone who came closer to being my mum than any other member of my family, this meant more to me than she probably realized. This came from a woman who grew up during the Great Depression on a peanut farm in east Texas — one of the most conservative parts of a conservative state. Despite her many shortcomings, I wish she was still here to see me today.

I’ll be returning to Twitter. I’ll attend selected social events during the coming weeks and months, but I’m being more selective about my participation and involvement. This is because I’ll be preoccupied with my new projects. I’m also gun-shy about the social dysfunctions which made my participation an exercise in futility. Things must change within many of us, or there will be no place for a lot of people, myself included.