Update 08/28/16: added a reference to the term ‘microaggression‘.

I’m just a woman who publishes blog posts inconsistently, but if someone were to look into it I bet Toronto would win the title of ‘Most Low-Key Racist City in the World’.

This is your cue: I’m going to use the ’n’ word in this post and if that bugs you, click away. Also, in case it’s not obvious, I am not a doctor. I’m just describing what I’ve observed and what’s worked for me. What’s working for me.

What Racism is Like in Toronto

Just because we’re all living here from our different parts of the world, doesn’t mean we’re holding hands singing about love and peace. Some people here don’t want to touch certain other people. In this city, people are racist in subtle ways, not so subtle ways, very subtle and very, very subtle ways.

None of this is new if you’re a person of colour (POC), or if you’re paying attention. As much as we’re hyper-aware of how other people behave, we have to be aware of what’s going on in our own minds. It’s too easy to spiral here, imagining you’re being treated differently because of the colour of your skin. Especially if you’re not taking care, or if you’re keeping these thoughts to yourself.

It’s too easy to spiral here, imagining you’re being treated differently because of the colour of your skin. Especially if you’re not taking care, or if you’re keeping these thoughts to yourself.

Most of the time it’s like this: we’re in one of Toronto’s bar / club venues that plays music so loud you can’t order your fancy special drink without losing your voice.

The waiter or barkeep will give us service that seems slightly different than those other tables, or other people got.

It’s noticed.

Or someone will make a comment that seems directed at us, but we can’t be sure. Or the bouncer will move the line ahead until they get to us.

And then afterwards, when we’re out of earshot, a caucus will happen about what may, or may not have been, the offending behaviour.

Did they do what they did, say what they said or treat us differently in any way because we were “the coloured section”?

Were we charged more?

Were they rude to just us?

Did we get bad service?

Did they or didn’t they?

The person at the bar could have been in a bad mood, completely unaware of what they were doing (or what they weren’t doing), or the person could have just been a loud talker.

Or it could be racism, most likely in the form of microaggressions.

But we can’t ask. Oh God, no. Because “OF COURSE NOT” would be the response. We’d get that “OMG, You’re crazy for even thinking that!”-*look* and told “absolutely not!”. There’s shock, horror, repeated apologies and clutched pearls.

Then there’s just out right racism. This year I was called a ‘nigger’ at least once. Maybe twice, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I imagine I’m being called a ‘nigger’, especially if I’m in mall or crowd. That imagining is worse than actually being called a nigger. Thinking I’m hearing it means my mind is already threatened, scared, on edge.

A person could go months, maybe years in this city without outright racism like that, most often it comes out of nowhere. This city may be the “most multicultural in the world”, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying the CN Tower is a tall building.

Regardless of where it falls on the spectrum, things like this can stay in the mind, maybe for an hour, maybe for the rest of the night.

What the Obama’s Would Do

Even typing these words, I want to go out and buy all the Tim Horton’s chocolate chunk cookies (which proves the point).

Some people can see behaviour like this and move beyond it. Not everyone is like that. Others internalize it. It feeds into their perception of the world as an angry, potentially dangerous place.

The people who can keep it moving, who don’t imagine they’re being called the ‘n’-word in a crowd, I see them like Michelle Obama-types.

The behaviour, if it happens, is noticed but that’s it. If it needs to be addressed, it’s addressed. But beyond that, it’s not discussed, it’s not analyzed and it’s definitely not shared.

I’ll let her say it:

Are you going to get angry or lash out? Or are you going to take a deep breath, straighten your shoulders, lift up your head, and do what Barack Obama has always done — as he says, ‘When they go low, I go high.’ That’s the choice Barack and I have made. That’s what has kept us sane over the years. We simply do not allow space in our hearts, minds, or souls for darkness.

— Michelle Obama

This is not easy. I know being called a ‘nigger’ is not about me, but that doesn’t mean I understand all the time, that I don’t still have an initial reaction. I’m just willing to work on it.

It doesn’t matter if someone really is treating us differently because of our race, or the colour of our skin. That’s their problem. We need not make that our problem. If the behaviour needs to be checked, it’s checked. But I’m working on not having space in my mind for anything beyond that.

The Self-Care Connection

In my experience, reactions to racism can go from being like the Obama’s, to completely getting unwound. Being stressed, angry or hurt makes it even more important to take care so I don’t lose myself, regardless of what level of racism I’m looking at.

If I’m in upset, I’m more likely to turn whatever anger and hurt I’m feeling about something else completely, and imagine things. Or I’m more likely to think I’ve noticed something off.

I’ve learned this is one of the hundreds — maybe even thousands — of reasons why self-care is so important.

What Practicing Self-Care Looks Like

It’s not just about meditating and yoga. It’s practicing awareness: paying attention to how I feel and what I’m thinking, especially when I’m not good.

Sometimes (often) it’s acknowledging something simple like being hungry. Or my bladder. Sometimes it’s being hurt or upset. Knowing that I’m hurting about something is automatically a signal that I need to watch my thoughts even more carefully, be more determined about taking care of myself.

My self-care looks like this:

• yoga (I’m a beginner)
• laughing at myself when I realize I’m being ridiculous
• ?? keeping ?? a ?? sense ?? of ?? humour
• going vegan or vegetarian for a few days or weeks (taking baby steps)
• only drinking socially
• taking long walks
• journaling
• praying / talking to God
• finding reasons to laugh (part of the reason why I’m on IG a lot)
• drinking lots of water
• positive self-talk
• being aware of how I feel
• being aware of what I’m thinking

And other stuff I might tell you about later / prefer to keep to myself. My rule when it comes to self-care is: do what you want. Be the only black person in the yoga class if you need to (or whatever your equivalent of that is). Put you and your health above feeling out of place, or feeling like you’re being watched, or feeling like you might say or do the wrong thing. Please and thank you.

Resources

4 Self-Care Resources for Days When the World is Terrible

Self Care For People of Color After Psychological Trauma (the infographic in this post inspired my own)

Check out the chapter ‘Building A Self-Care Guide’ from CAMH.

An infographic I created based on the info from CAMH. Feel free to save / download and share if you want:

*Sometimes it’s not just a matter of taking care of yourself. Sometimes you need more than to eat or use the bathroom. Talking to someone is self-care too, though. So talk to someone if you need more support. Be unapologetic and determined about doing what you need to do.

It’s weird that this and this happened in the time I was working on this post… *pregnant pause* Hopefully calling out this behaviour will both embarrass the people who do this kind of shit, and help get us all to a point where curly, kinky, braided, textured, etc. hair isn’t considered “exotic”, “unprofessional” or “different”.

Yep, happened to me.

Not once, not twice, but thrice.

There was some irony there, in that the first person to do it was black. It was at a company activity / event (axe throwing), and we were kind of surrounded by people. Maybe others noticed, maybe they didn’t.

I ducked and swatted his hand away (probably good that I didn’t have an axe). Mumbled something like ‘Don’t touch my hair’ with my eyes to the ground and my face hot.

I didn’t know if other people saw, but I didn’t want any eyes on me regardless. The place was tiny – 50 or so people squeezed in a room that was probably more suited to 15. And I was still on probation at the job, so even though we hadn’t even started throwing axes I was already sweating.

He started to apologize, but I just wanted the thing over as quickly as possible.

The second and third time it happened was at another company outing (I eventually stopped going to those), the Christmas party. Number two was a member of the sales team. Number three was the company’s CEO / co-founder.

As much as I wished I had the chance to slap hands away, I didn’t see either coming. And for months afterwards, I was in a fog of “WAHT THE FUCK” as I started to think about the many stinky onion-like layers of privilege and power at play in the situation.

If I had seen either hand coming at me, would I have had a chance to duck and swat? Looking at the circumstances, I could play devil’s advocate and think “ok, we’ve all been drinking and are getting chatty…”

But no.

I had been very careful about keeping a thick, heavy professional distance between myself and co-workers, and I was proud of that distance.

In short, if any of these men (I’ll get back to this) had asked me: “Hey! Can I touch your hair?” I would have said “Hell No, not now not never. You absolutely – in bold and italics – cannot touch my hair. It bears repeating…”, etc etc.

But these men thought this was okay. And the truth was (here it is, it came to me and I felt like throwing up) drunk or not, this idea that it would be ok to touch my hair was probably because I’m a woman, and because I was ‘underneath’: a worker, an employee, junior.

Then you’ve got the other things you need if you’re going to touch a co-workers hair: lack of respect. Lack of broughtupsey. Being overfamiliar and undereducated.

Also being black. Pretty sure they wouldn’t have touched my hair if I was white.

So what was I supposed to do with all this?

I could look through the university political science books I kept and find all the words to describe intersections of privilege, power and race, but where would that leave me?

Not in a position to leave the company, I had to come to some decisions about how to deal with these situations, at least in my mind if I couldn’t quit on the spot, because thinking about this was crazy-making behaviour.

Instead of doing more thinking about how wrong this shit was, I came up with some steps to move forward. I have not taken them, but based on advice from people / my experience, they make the most sense:

1. Separate what happened from what you do. Until you find the next place you’re going to work, you need to keep your head together by putting what happened in it’s place and moving forward. The last thing you want is to start going crazy and have issues start showing up in your life and at work.
2. Speak on it + write about it. Put it in your diary, tell your manager, vent with your friends, take it out in the gym. Explain to the people who touched your hair how you feel and what the issue is. Do whatever you can to get what’s going on in your mind out of your mind.
3. Forget it. Unless you plan on writing a blog post about what happened, promptly remove it from your mind. If shit like that continues to happen, you will have a record (see step two) of what happened before and can plan your next move.

The truth is, there’s a limit to how much this affects me: I’m still the person I was before these things happened, and I’m still me now that it’s happened. The same thing goes for this or anything else that happens in life, for any person. And the limit isn’t determined by anything other than choice. I can choose to get real upset and discombobulated, or not.

I’m not bleeding out, I don’t have any broken bones, I’m not in need of some milk.

And I’m much more than hair and skin and everything else.

We have these ideas floating around, one’s we’re all familiar with but don’t really talk about. That we’re all spiritual beings having human experiences. That nothing that happens to our physical bodies can hurt or damage who we really are on a spiritual level. And that life is a dream, a play, and in our physical bodies we’re bouncing around, experiencing what it’s like here in the physical to experience the dream – to create new experiences from our ideas – and to play our parts or pick different parts to play and play with others. Play the daughter, then play the mother, then play the grandmother. Play the employee, the freelancer, the owner of the company; switch roles only to start it all over again.

If that’s true, we’re playing at privilege and power. We’ve made up the idea that a CEO touching an employee’s hair means something. I had to remember that I was playing at being in a position of not having power, and that what I was playing at wasn’t the real me.

So there it is: getting your hair touched by a coworker is fucked up bullshit, but there’s a way to deal without losing your head. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

A big shoutout to @YawBo for creating the awesome gif I featured on Twitter!

This has been my pattern over the last five or six years: get a new job, move, move again, get a new job. And although some people would say this is normal (expected, even recommended), it didn’t feel normal. It felt like I was running from something.

When I thought about “WHY?!”, the answer wasn’t clear for a long time.

All I knew was that I felt like this:

In trying to Iyanla-myself, I thought maybe it was a little bit of believing I didn’t deserve stability. And a little being afraid of staying in one spot. Then some general not-knowing-how-to-live.

Each apartment I had looked like a hotel room. A room in one of those hotels where each room is designed differently, but a hotel room nonetheless.

There was no personal in the personality. To most people, it would be obvious to put up pictures of loved ones, but it was something I had never done until I saw a post by Gala Darling that caught my attention. I can’t find which exact post inspired me, but I probably misread her tagline to read ‘Adorn Yourself, Adorn Your Life’ and went from there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now I sit in my apartment surrounded by pictures of the family and friends who’ve made a difference in my life. I used Canva, Pixlr and free images I could find online to make posters that meant something to me. And I made an effort to really make the place mine.

My move to my parents house was an angry one: I had just started a business and it was a struggle to get rent together. I felt like I failed and all the stuff I had accumulated in years past now needed to be lifted and lugged. Reminding me of where I had gone wrong.

I didn’t know where I would land next (‘cause it wasn’t gonna be my parents place for long) and so I just got rid of everything. Threw the unusable stuff in garbage bags, gathered the stuff I still kind of wanted but couldn’t carry anymore, left it at the local Value Village and kept the essentials.

Fast forward to one weekend before the Christmas holidays. By this time I had a new, empty apartment and was eager with inspiration to make it a home, so I went to my local Ikea. Little did I know this trip would stir up a frustration that had never brewed within me before.

Queue the drama. It started when I realized I was surrounded by couples and families:

“You’re the only person here by yourself.”

“Why are you buying shit you already had?”

“Am I just going to have to get rid of this — or move it — in a couple months?”

“This is why I can’t move forward – I’m busy doing shit I’ve already done.”

That last realization was a tough one, but necessary. It forced me to look at my life and see the pattern for what it is. It forced me to acknowledge that I was afraid I’d never be able to move forward, that I’d be stuck in this perpetual pattern forever: single, constantly needing to find a job, searching for a new apartment or moving.

My first instinct was to destroy the pattern with fire.

But thinking about what it would mean to break the patterns made me even more uncomfortable. If my pattern is to quit my job and move every time things get mildly uncomfortable, what did I need to do to break that pattern?

Nothing. Or more specifically, “nothing”.

My only option here, I realized, was to straighten my back, plant my feet on the ground underneath and look at the world that’s open to me, instead of the one left behind. To look at what I’ve created instead of getting frustrated that the things I want in life aren’t here, in front of me.

When it came to where I lived, I had to plant my own roots. That’s why the pictures and memories I put up all over the place are so meaningful. They remind me that I create home where I am.

I like to think I don’t have a problem being honest with what works and what doesn’t. Especially when it comes to my job. Hell, every time I didn’t like something, I would go back to school so I had an excuse to leave… or just leave. And while I can honour myself for that honesty, the way I was going about making the changes I wanted needed to… change.

Work is a process of calibrating, testing out new things, trying different industries, learning new skills. But being honest with myself meant admitting that my ‘get up a quit’ reaction wasn’t working either.

The problem was the feral cat-energy I was bringing to the situation (see Pinky above).

Staying still gives me the chance to check that cat. Its meant being honest when I feel:

• fears I’m going backwards
• anxious about making a change
• lost, like I can just go back on “what I did before” and re-do old patterns

Now I know that unless I’m making a decision from a place of cool cat, it’s not the right one.

I love talking about this kind of stuff, so if you found this interesting or useful, please comment and / or share! Or tweet me. We’ll probably get into some kind of discussion about it ;).

First, let’s be clear. In no way am I trying to devalue someone’s experience, or make it seem like one person’s story is better than another for any reason. The point of this post is to say: we need to hear more stories from people who have been. through. shit. Good. Glad we got that out of the way.

When I hear a “success story”, my bullshit meter goes crazy. Mainly because I’ve come across so many stories that my eyes can’t take anymore serious rolling, so I have to filter.

Like a recent story I heard {by accident} on a podcast I won’t name.

The story pretty much went like this:

• person went to law school on their parents’ hard-earned (I’m assuming) dime {begin eye-roll}.
• decided before they left they wanted to be a writer.
• parents basically said “ok, great!” {ohhhh… kay?}.
• they had a sister who was already a writer.
• sister helped person become a writer.
• they write about “being happy” {eye-roll complete}.

No offense, don’t take this the wrong way, but fuck these success stories from people who don’t seem to have ever been through anything really tough.

I don’t want to hear shit from these successful people who’ve had parents that coddled and co-signed their lives from day one.

What about someone who had to make their own way through school and then realized they didn’t want to practice law, or medicine, or whatever?

Or a person who had to deal with a lot of really tough shit in their younger years, and were still able to overcome / find success?

Or someone whose life was going on, pretty happy (or maybe not), and then they get hit with some kind of disaster and they’re able to come out from it a better person?

That’s the story I want to hear.

But there are so many of these stories floating around from those *other* people who’ve basically been set up for success from a young age. It sends the wrong message.

For a while, I started to think that the ones like me, who have really struggled, we don’t get to be successful.

And then shit gets even more real when you look at those people who are talking, and you realize none of them are like you in some very specific ways: they’re all men, or they’re all white, or they’re all {enter other circumstance here}.

That sends another, very dangerous message.

There’s something about those people. The successful ones who’ve had nice, happy lives. They have a confidence that has never been challenged. I think if you’ve dealt with abuse of any kind, you sort of learn to shut yourself down.

The last thing you want to do is stand up and start sharing your story or talking to people. At least, this is how I see it.

If you’ve lived with someone who’s abusive, getting up and talking could get you hurt. So you’re more likely to live small.

Then if you have lived past it, got away, overcome, and had some success in your life, it might not occur to you that other people want to hear your story. That other people can draw strength from your strength, confidence from your confidence, learn from your lessons.

In my eye, the world is a scary place and I’m not sure if there’s someone else out there like the person I got away from. So if I get up and start sharing my story, my fear is that person will show up in my life again.

I started listening to Unmistakable Creative a couple weeks ago. It was by pure accident. I had subscribed, but never listened until I saw the title “How to Live Well and Die Well with Greg Hartle – Part 2“.

It shook my world. I cried, downloaded both episodes on two different computers, put it on my iPod so I could listen to it anytime, played, paused, took notes, googled what it meant to find the ‘temporary structures’ Greg talked about, shared it with anyone I thought would be interested.

It was exactly the type of story I was looking for. So I spent the rest of the weekend stalking Greg Hartle to find out everything I could about him and his story.

Even though in the podcast he said he wasn’t in the public eye anymore because of health issues, I figured I could find more from him. More about his experience, more about his journey, just more.

I’m not just looking for more from Greg Hartle, I’m looking for more of these stories. And the search is what motivated me to write this post.

We need to hear more from people who have actually been through tough shit.

For Part 1 and 2 of Greg Hartle’s interview with Srini Rao on The Unmistakable Creative podcast, click the images below.